Racializing space, spatializing “race”: racialization, its urban spatialization, and the making of “Northeastern” identity in “world class” Delhi

Abstract

Copyright © The Authors 2023. The neoliberal transformation of Delhi into a “world class city” has increasingly attracted migrants from India’s North-Eastern/Himalayan borderlands, who are racialized as “Northeasterns” and face racism in the city. This reflects an emergent form of racialization in the Global South and a facet of “new racism” often overlooked within existing theorizations of “race” and racism that stems from Global North contexts. Drawing from urban ethnographic research, this paper provides a spatial analysis of the racialization of “Northeastern” migrants in Delhi. First, it examines the structural racialization of “Northeasterns” induced by Delhi’s neoliberal urbanism that constructs them as the city’s “service providers”. Second, it explores their self-racialization through co-constitutive “race”-making and place-making practices in a distinct socio-spatial formation – the “urban village”. Finally, it argues that through racial-spatial processes, the “Northeastern” emerges as a new racialized urban identity; thereby linking racialization, spatialization, and identity formation in a postcolonial, globalizing, Global South city.