Black Spatial Humanities: Theories, Methods, and Praxis in Digital Humanities (A Follow-up NEH ODH Summer Institute Panel) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty-first century
Geography Compass, 2019
Katherine McKittrick famously wrote in Demonic Grounds that "black lives are necessarily geographic, but also struggle with discourses that erase and despatialize their sense of place" (McKittrick, 2006, p. xiii). From analyses of diaspora to the plantation, from studies of urban segregation to anti-colonial circuits of resistance, Black thought has long been concerned with questions of space, place, and power. Yet these interventions, which span centuries and continents, have not always been recognized as "properly" geographical and have thus been systematically excluded from the formal canon of disciplinary geography. Within the last five years, however, Black Geographies as a field of inquiry has gained increasing institutional recognition-thanks to the tireless labor of Black scholars to carve out spaces for their work within the discipline. This article reflects on the state of the field of Black Geographies, with an emphasis on the radically interdisciplinary interventions this body of scholarship has made into the mainstream of disciplinary geography. I review some of the most prominent thematic areas within Black Geographies, including space-making and the Black geographic imagination; racial capitalism; cities, policing, and carceral geographies; and racism and plantation futures. I conclude with a consideration of avenues for future research, including the need for more studies that provin-cialize North America and connect with Latinx and Native/ Indigenous geographies.
Introduction: Enacting Black Geographies
With this special issue, we give due to Black geographies scholarship and seminal geographies of race which helped bring about the formal creation of Black geographies as a subfield of the discipline of Geography. We curate a selection of articles from the past quarter century of the Southeastern Geographer, each providing distinct and vital insights into key geographic themes like the production of space, the importance of region, and questions of justice. In this introduction, we draw out some of the key themes and insights of the papers included here, situating the work in relation to the historical developments and scholarly antecedents which gave impetus to Black geographies. Finally, we reflect upon a few of the many generative routes of Black geographies as scholarship and practice.
A methodology for black geographies
2019
This methodology was created to investigate the relationship between Black spatial imaginaries and Black identities to explore the impact of these imaginaries on place-making in Atlanta, Georgia. I utilize a number of frameworks that center Blackness, humanness, and critical race studies in order to collect qualitative data that privileges space alongside the lived experiences of the participants. In this paper, I make a case for the consideration and development of new methodologies that center Blackness within the context of a Black geographic frameworks and study around cultivating empathy and vulnerability, emplacement, and understanding tensions and negotiations between Blackness and sense of place. The centering of Blackness in this methodology is emphasized in order to dismantle the white spatial gaze and white supremacist practices that often occur within research methodologies where the participants are not white. INDEX WORDS: Race, Blackness, Middle-classness, Intersection...
A seat at the table? Reflections on Black geographies and the limits of dialogue
This commentary uses the Black Geographies Symposium, held at UC Berkeley from October 11-12, 2017, as a point of departure to discuss the political and intellectual limits of calls for dialogue. We focus specifically on the historical exclusion of Black scholars and Black thought from human geography and understand the academy as a site for the reproduction of epistemic violence against women and people of color. Calls for dialogue within the academy that neglect to consider historically sedimented power rela-tions—including human geography's own entanglement with colonialism and racism—therefore commit the grave error of substituting equity for true justice. We argue instead for nonhierarchical and nonlinear modes of study that can attend to the complex geographical itineraries and interconnected struggles that continue to shape our understandings of the relations of capitalism, racism, and sexism structuring the modern world. Specifically, an intellectual praxis that begins from a place of Black humanness can enable us to tap into a wider epistemological network, one that refutes cursory lip service to Black scholarship and engages deeply with its consequences for our political and intellectual interactions.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2024
Enthusiasm for Black geographies has grown significantly since it was formalized in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (McKittrick and Woods 2007). With an increase in interest in this framework has come an increased potential for the misapplication of the aims defined in its origin. Now is the time to reiterate the purpose of Black geographies. We suggest that although within the purview of geographies of race, Black geographies provides insights beyond this unit of study that are reliant on particular sights, valuations, methods, and liberatory practices.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2024
This paper unfolds in three parts. In Part 1, I describe how I have contended with the fraught relationships among mapping, nationalism, and colonialism in my teaching and research. When writing my first book, Contesting Race and Citizenship, I had to reckon with the positivist impulse to enumerate and map Black Italianness—and, more broadly, with the politics of visibility at a time of increasingly virulent racial nationalisms, xenophobia, and outright anti-Black violence. In Part 2, I describe the ways my own thinking about mapping has been pushed in new directions by insights from Black geographies. Drawing on Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and Édouard Glissant—as well as essays from the edited volume The Black Geographic—I argue that Black geographic counter- cartographies foreground insurgent Black spatial knowledges and practices that have always exceeded racial-spatial violence, and approach mapping as both a material and poetic process. In Part 3, I conclude by advancing some tentative ideas about what it might mean to map new or alternative geographies of abolitionist struggle that attend to the interconnections between Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean histories of racial capitalism.
In seeking possible pathways for decolonization and dehegemonization, one must reckon with the apparent contradiction of the process: we are attempting to dismantle and deconstruct a system embedded in coloniality while being cognizant of the colonial mediations that frame our very understanding of the world. Does decolonization without re-inscribing to the imperial schema involve doing away with all colonial interferences? It is utopian to reimagine a world not influenced by colonialism and its attendant violence. As Brand remarks in A Map to the Door of No Return, one "cannot unhappen history" (203), but one could work to question and resist the structures that make the colonized peoples bear the burdens of history. The coloniality of modern history is undeniable, but by questioning what we know and how we came to know it, we can make modern-day neocolonial capitalist forces confront (anti/de/post)colonial resistance embedded within Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Subaltern Studies and many more. In Black Studies, working to replace dominant geographic thought with non-hierarchizing modes of envisioning place is an act of epistemic resistance that unsettles the synergetic relationship between scientific knowledge and colonial power 1. Moreover, Blackness is mostly understood in North America in terms of geographical dislocations and relocations, whether they are forced (slavery), induced (refugees) or voluntary (economic migrancy). Although scholars largely theorize global Blackness in relation to rootlessness and 'routelessness', I posit the need to reimagine land and space beyond geographical markers and categorizations to sidestep the geographical essentialism associated with such an understanding of Blackness.
On The Living Black Atlas: Learning Geospatial Ethics from the African American Freedom Struggle
The Living Black Atlas seeks to create space within geospatial classrooms and workplaces for curating, amplifying, and learning from the seldom-discussed cartographic practices undergirding the African American Freedom Struggle. Beyond a static collection of maps, the Atlas comprises dynamic understandings of the Black experience that challenge staid notions of what a map is and how and where mapping takes place. African American communities have long engaged in countermapping, restorative cartographies, radical geospatial intelligence, visual story-telling, and embodied productions of geographic knowledge that affirm the value of Black life and imagine more just futures. The Living Black Atlas can help create the inclusive education necessary for broadening participation in the geospatial field, acknowledging the social power relations and different spatial epistemologies circulating through maps, and inspiring us to conceive of mapping and its ethical possibilities in more creative and community-centred ways outside of industry standards, professionalized practices, and scientific conventions.
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:
Black Geographic Possibilities: On a Queer Black South (2017)
The American South has received considerable intellectual attention. Social and cultural geographers have called attention to its diversity and the relationships of power that construct its everyday operation. An addition to the way that power and relationships can be examined is through Black Geographies. This paper seeks to interject alternatives to traditional methods and theories of doing geography. Black Geographies centralizes a Black sense of place and disrupts the normative conceptualization and mere geographic containment of Black subjects. By focusing on the ways that Black subjects and places invoke agency and create space, Black Geographies contributes to a broadened geography that resists reductionary knowledge formation. This paper expands the study of the American South by positing Black Geographies as a modality for centering queer Black Southern life.