Eduardo Mendieta

Seyla Benhabib’s The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002), is considered in terms of three main virtues: first, it moves the question of political justice beyond the debate on the priority of recognition over distribution; second, it contributes to the expansion of the notion of communicative freedom and how it relates to rights; and third, it lays down the foundation for a cosmopolitan, post-nationalistic, form of citizenship that would have as its core the rights of association and existence. Three areas of concern and potential disagreement are discussed: first, whether Benhabib could be accused of a type of culturalism that celebrates too quickly postethnic America at the expense of the agenda of racial justice still to be addressed in the United States; second, whether in this work Benhabib has given enough attention to the political claims of memory, especially when these claims are enunciated from colonial pasts; third, in conclusion, how cultural justice, or respect for cultural diversity, can contribute to biodiversity’s preservation in the age of the coming largest extinction of biodiversity

In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucault's work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucault's archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces‐institutions‐geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo‐history in terms of racializing spatialities.