This postgraduate course introduces students to work in critical race, colonial and postcolonial studies as applied to spatial control. We think across a set of events and situations – for instance, the encircling of the world with barbed wire, the relationship between the slave trade and the making of the modern capitalist world, the use of medical and hygienic discourses to segregate colonial cities, postcolonial struggles against segregation and fortification, and renewed geographies of walling, securitisation and incarceration, but also new spatial imaginations of anti-racism. In what ways might we understand these as problems of racial geography? How might we understand the contradictions through which race and space are intertwined and opposed? This course puts social theory to work, through grounded studies that seek to explain our divided world in order to change it. We juxtapose and integrate insights from anti-colonial and anti-racist thought with colonial and postcolonial studies, along with a critical geographer’s attention to spatial politics and change. In particular, we develop the tools to think of racism as more than just a matter of consciousness or ideology, but also of lived inequalities. We draw on traditions of thought that explore racism as integrally tied to capital, state and society, and which has survived, and indeed thrived by becoming part of our neighbourhoods, schools, transport networks, leisure activities, consumption spaces, military activities, international interests, and global networks: in short, the ways in which racism is part of our many geographies from the local to the global. The central question of the course is: How have racial geographies been made, reproduced, and opposed? We draw insights from a range of thinkers, and we read Toni Morisson’s Beloved to broaden our appreciation of the poetics of anti-racism. We approach racial geographies closely to understand how some people fought to demolish them, to universalise modernity’s capacity to promote the conditions of life for all.