Available From UC Press

Racing the Street traces the history of how race was used as a technology for gathering, assembling, and networking the early cosmopolitan city. Drawing on an archive that ranges from engineering blueprints and parliamentary committee reports to sensationalistic pamphlets and periodical press accounts, Robert J. Topinka conducts an original genealogy of the nineteenth-century London street, demonstrating how race as a technology gathers, sorts, and assembles the teeming particularities of the street into a manageable network. This interdisciplinary study offers a novel approach to the intersections of race, rhetoric, media, technology, and urban government.

Robert J. Topinka is Lecturer in Transnational Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for the project, “Politics, Ideology, and Rhetoric in the 21st Century: The Case of the Alt-Right.”

"Robert J. Topinka convincingly demonstrates how tropes function in the service of organizing the excesses of urban life. On London's streets, race emerges as a technology of governmentality."—Kundai Chirindo, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies and Director of Ethnic Studies, Lewis & Clark College

"Racing the Street is a fascinating look at how the assemblage of race has been used as a tool to manage cities that threaten historical ideas of manageability. Topinka’s counterhistory is an important contribution to conversations about race and urban studies."—Jenny Rice, author of Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence