Abstract
In the conclusion, Picker underlines the heuristic value of the six chapters. He does so by comprehensively showing the ways in which labour organization, class formation, and racialization are articulated in the making of the urban areas under scrutiny. In dialogue with the volume’s Introduction, Picker first shows that Racialized Labour in Romania is an essential contribution that fills an important gap in the literature by squarely centring the labour-class-race complex. Subsequently, the author zooms out of Romanian localities to detect heuristic similarities between racialized urban dynamics in Romania and in other parts of the world, within contemporary unequal global trends. Further venues of research on the urban dimensions of the labour-class-race complex are then identified, and these include foci on intersectionality, religion, and more analyses of Central and Eastern European contexts from global perspectives.
I wish to thank Enikő Vincze and Cristina Raț for their sharp insights into an earlier draft. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 661646
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Notes
- 1.
This moral subtext of normative understanding of human worth, and lack thereof, remains the core of race as a modern regulatory mechanism of social arrangements (Goldberg 2002). Being predicated upon a continuous oscillation between the biological (i.e., physical appearance) and the cultural (i.e., behaviour), race regulates the interplay of labour organization and class (and gender) formation within the framework of historically embedded processes of labour exploitation and spatial segregation.
- 2.
One last note concerns positionality. In designing lines and trajectories of commonalities between cities at the periphery of the world system, I may get exposed to one of Angotti’s (2006) criticisms of Planet of Slums, which he deems “a survey of cities in the South by a stranger from the North” (962). As a stranger to Romania, raised and formed in the European West, having only done recent research in Romania (Picker 2017, Chap. 3), I will, to the best of my capacity, adopt a “pragmatic reflexivity” (Herzfeld 2001).
- 3.
Moreover, from 1988 to 2000 inequality between countries has decreased, but within countries it has increased (Sassen 2014, 31). This accounts for the necessity of looking at specific local and regional territories and societies within countries and dissecting common trends and configurations.
- 4.
- 5.
On this point, Bahn (2009) echoes Angotti’s (2006) criticism of Davis (2006) that I have mentioned at the start of the chapter. Discursively assimilating the urban poor to slum dwellers, as Davis (2006) does, according to Bahn (2009), contributes to flatten the dominant view on the poor and prevents a detailed understanding of their various material and symbolic living conditions.
- 6.
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Picker, G. (2019). Conclusion: (Re)centring Labour, Class, and Race. In: Vincze, E., Petrovici, N., Raț, C., Picker, G. (eds) Racialized Labour in Romania. Neighborhoods, Communities, and Urban Marginality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76273-9_8
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