Black Geospatial Inquiry and Aesthetic Praxis Toward a Theory and Method (original) (raw)

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward. Endorsements "Christina Sharpe brings everything she has to bear on her consideration of the violation and commodification of Black life and the aesthetic responses to this ongoing state of emergency. Through her curatorial practice, Sharpe marshals the collective intellectual heft and aesthetic inheritance of the African diaspora to show us the world as it appears from her distinctive line of sight. A searing and brilliant work." — Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route "Christina Sharpe's deep engagement with the archive of Black knowledge production across theory, fiction, poetry, and other intellectual endeavors offers an avalanche of new insights on how to think about anti-Blackness as a significant and important structuring element of the modern scene. Cutting across theoretical genres, In the Wake will generate important intellectual debates and maybe even movements in Black studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, and beyond. This is where cultural studies should have gone a long time ago." — Rinaldo Walcott, author of Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada

Incontestable: Imagining possibilities through intimate Black geographies

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021

This editorial takes the form of a dialogue between the editors of this Themed Intervention on Black intimate geographies. It frames the voices of the Black geographers from the USA and the UK assembled here as speaking to both the incontournability of anti-blackness as a political reality and to Black ways of knowing, imagining, and dreaming our presents and our futures against and beyond resistance to anti-blackness. The editorial celebrates the diasporic collaboration on which this Intervention is grounded and points to the possibilities of Black life and knowledge production. Note: this is the editorial for the Themed Intervention by the same name, which includes several articles:

AFAM 380: Poetics of Blackness (SYLLABUS)

Blackness confounds meaning. At once the condition of possibility for the emergence of modernity and the limit-case for humanity as such, Black being is enshrouded in paradoxes and aporias, posing a number of problems for thought. This course aims to foster the development of conceptual tools and reading practices with which to engage the problematic of Blackness. Mobilizing “poetics” in the broadest sense of the term—i.e., as a mode of articulation and a system of meaning—this course brings together Black critical theory and contemporary black poetry in order to think through key sites of conflict in the theorization of Blackness. Rather than offer a history of Black poetry, this course is interested in approaching poetry as a crucial node of Black critical thought. This course will pay particular attention to questions of form, genre, the archive, queerness, gender, visuality, ontology and temporality as they approach and are undone by Blackness.

Geographies of a transnational urban black consciousness through artists and activists

2017

This thesis looks at the experiences and culture initiated by some Black artists and activists on an urban scale, as well as their individual microgeographies within their city of residence. However, cities—no matter how diverse they can be—are still amalgamations of national discourses, traditions, and politics as well as hyper-local realities. Often there is a dissonance between being both Black and American or Black and European or African in Europe, thus these activists and artists find "it easier to identify with a general sense of Europeanness, African identity, or a wider black diasporic consciousness" (Hawthorne, 159). It is this "Black diasporic consciousness," which is being mapped through the local realities of the respondents in this thesis.

Prologue: Black dream geographies

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021

(Final Published Version): In this reflective piece, I consider what the discourse surrounding Breonna Taylor's highly publicised killing during a police raid underscores about Black epistemologies of sleep, death, and dying. By using the phrase black dream geographies, I situate this piece in conversation with scholarship on black interiority. At the same time, I extend this conversation by explicitly considering the meanings of dream or sleep in Black/African American epistemologies. Note: While grounded in Black aliveness, this piece does include details about Breonna Taylor‘s murder. Written as creative prose, every space between paragraphs is an invitation to pause as/if needed.

Shifting Blackness: How the Arts Revolutionize Black Identity in the Postmodern West

The contemporary experiences of racially marginalized people in the West are affected deeply by the hegemonic capitalist Orthodox cultural codes, or episteme, in which blackness operates as the symbol of Chaos. As it relates to people of African descent, these affects are marked by a denial of the black person’s full status as an unproblematic subject, by ontological voids arising from the practice of enslavement over the past centuries, and by problems of representation within the West, where examples and points of reference for black identity are always tied up with conflicting interests. Utilizing Sylvia Wynter's model of the "ceremony" as one means of describing the ways in which blacks in the West maneuver the extant psychological and philosophical perils of race in the Western world, I argue that the history of black responses to the West's ontological violence is alive and well, particularly in art forms like spoken word, where the power to define/name oneself is of paramount importance. Focusing on how art shaped black responses to ontologically debilitating circumstances, I argue that there has always existed a model for liberation within African American culture and tradition. This work takes an approach that is philosophical and theoretical in nature in order to address the wide breadth of the black experience that lies beyond the realm of statistics. The goal of this approach is to continue the work of unraveling hidden or under-discussed aspects of the black experience in order to more clearly find possibilities for addressing problems in the construction of race and marginalized people within the Western episteme. This work attempts to redefine the struggle for a healthier ontology within the framework of a process of liberation that transcends Orthodox limitations on the marginalized subject.

At a Planetary Crossroads: Contemplative Wisdom of Black Geographies

Tarka, 2021

(Excerpt) from magazine piece on Black diaspora spiritual practices and Black geographies themselves as contemplative, with specific attention to the crossroads as a central metaphor for this planetary moment, death work, and ways of knowing. This piece includes text and ritual art. Full piece available at https://www.embodiedphilosophy.com/at-a-planetary-crossroads-contemplative-wisdom-of-black-geographies/#