Finding and Mapping Black Women in the Interstices

The history of Black subjects in the diaspora is a geographic story that is, at least in part, a story of material and conceptual placements and displacements, segregations and integrations, margins and centers, and migrations and settlements.

—Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds.

What does it mean to be here as a Black subject? What does it mean to show up in the world in ways that are unapologetic and resist anti-Black oppression—to be visible?

—Stacie McCormick, communication with the author.

Why mapping? Maps are active, ongoing processes of documenting place and space because geographies, and the histories they carry, change over time. Terrains, boundaries, and communities shift. We map landscapes as they appear, and we map landscapes to plan for new spaces. We map to record, to preserve what is “here now” before “now” becomes the past. Maps can fix things in place, but they can also map out routes—the throughways and byways for people to traverse spaces. Maps, then, are archives of spaces from which we can storify all manner of human experience. They help us to see what was, what is, and what can be. Mapping how Black lives shape places and make spaces (through movement and fixity) spatializes Black experience; it documents Black geographies.

The essays within map Black women by tending to the recovery of their practice and theory. Each explores the work to be done when places like archives, museums, courthouses, and neighborhoods do not bear witness to the joys, horrors, quotidian experiences, and endurance of Black life. The authors probe and answer how Black women moved through and beyond systemic barriers and physical dangers while placing themselves at the center of change through their work and writing. Each essay maps a way to build archival and theoretical spaces to interrogate all the ways in which a Black woman might navigate, as Anna Julia Cooper said, “when and where”¹ she enters contested spaces.

Mapping Practices

Noting that the focus on “Black women’s archival traces has coincided with the rise of digital methods and archive-building,” P. Gabrielle Foreman underscores the necessity of unconventional and innovative methods to recover the lives of Black women. Defining what she terms the ethical or sankofa imperative to “go back and get it,” Foreman argues that we are tasked to develop methods of futurity to understand our past. “Sankofa Imperatives: Black Women, Digital Methods, and the Archival Turn” showcases a digital archive of nineteenth-century Black organizing: the Colored Conventions Project. An exemplar of Black feminist scholarship, the Colored Conventions Project centers the communal and collective work of recovering and making accessible the record of Black women’s labor that has long been erased, anonymized, diminished, misplaced, or discarded.

The contributing scholars of the Colored Conventions Project invite us to “pan out” from the official convention podiums to explore the rich sites of inquiry that reside in the boarding houses, neighborhood kitchens, church pews, travel routes, Muslim meetings, literary associations, and many other spaces in which Black folk communed and created. These are the places where we will find the essential yet obscured and hidden creativity and leadership of Black women, without whom this scale of national organizing could not have happened.

Placing African American newspapers at the center of nineteenth-century Black organizing, “Black Women Making Place in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” similarly reads the editorial letters of Black women as yet another communal activity of making place for their culture and their politics. The letters were purposeful missives, forcing their concerns into a larger public discourse that mostly ignored what Black women had to say and disputed their right to say it. Readers, Teresa Zackodnik argues, must understand each work not simply as one woman’s letter but rather as one letter from a collective discourse.

By using data visualization such as content-focused heat maps, circulation and distribution pathways, and tracking international reach through global mercantilism, we can appreciate the complex mobility of Black women’s ideas and politics across time and space in ways that are not possible by using only traditional literary analysis of the letters. Reading multiple layers of texts—written, visual, digitized, and computational—could help contemporary readers to comprehend fully, for instance, the dialectic of a Midwestern farmer’s wife’s concerns about the escalating price of feed alongside a northeast urban suffragist’s protesting that race-based chain gangs are capitalist exploitations masquerading as crime prevention—the origins of what we now know as the prison–industrial complex. Rather than privileging one methodology, Zackodnik advocates a both|and approach to mine large-scale, rich data sources such as newspapers more effectively. Her process—what she terms “interscale” reading—moves among various practices of detail-oriented close reading and more distant methods using algorithms, text|data-mining, and other computational means. In Zackodnik’s model of interscale reading, the data she mines clearly challenges “how we conceive of the early Black press, of Black readers and their engagement with newspapers as indexed by published correspondence, and of Black politics.”

Kelly Schmidt constructs the story of Matilda Hawkins Tyler and her family, providing another example of how to piece together histories with many gaps. “Matilda Hawkins Tyler: Mapping One Woman’s Geography of Kinship and Perseverance” brings to the forefront the violence exhibited in the archiving of the African diaspora. Schmidt reminds us that thorough recovery work is akin to having multiple puzzles—each depicting the same image but from different vantage points, each with its own unique coloring and textures. All the puzzles have many missing pieces and, thus, assembling one is dependent on assembling all of them in order to achieve a more complete but still incomplete picture.

Schmidt’s contextualization not only of Hawkins Tyler’s life but also of how she and her family and extended family were situated in and through communities tells a much larger story of Black life in Maryland and Missouri. Those stories are undergirded by a Jesuit order’s financial dependence on being enslavers and their moral decisions to circumvent the order’s rules against beating enslaved women. Mapping geographic and familial networks provides fruitful explorations of freedom suits, through which we learn about the lives and pursuits of the enslaved, formerly enslaved, and enslaver. Moreover, exploration of the freedom suits (and the communities from which they were waged) helps us to see the structural labors of Black communities striving for familial and economic stability during and after the antebellum period.

Of course, geography matters in recovery projects and can create difficulties for developing projects that attend to less populated interior regions of the US. How do we develop, fund, and sustain archive-building in areas that have far less resources but are no less rich in Black women’s history? Mollie Godfrey and Seán McCarthy’s “Race, Space, and Celebrating Simms: Mapping Strategies for Black Feminist Biographical Recovery” interrogates the structural barriers to recovery work in local Black communities that are not in large urban centers. They describe the work of building university and community partnerships to publicize and immortalize Lucy F. Simms, a successful and beloved educator.

After completing her degree at the Hampton Institute, the historically Black college from which Booker T. Washington had graduated just one year earlier, Simms returned to the Shenandoah Valley county where she was born enslaved. There, she committed her life to teaching the Black children of her community in the temporary and tenuous spaces allowable by segregation laws and limited financial support. Finally, in 1882, Simms was able to teach in the newly built school for Black students. Both the school where Simms taught for the rest of her career and the subsequent school built in 1938 to honor Simms were forced to thrive in and with their poor and under-resourced communities. Godfrey and McCarthy’s work on Simms “reveals the dedication with which local Black educators maneuvered around racialized and spatialized inequities in the aftermath of slavery and the rise of segregation.” Their essay documents the work of both communities—the reconstruction school and the pre-civil-rights school—and proposes sustainable methodologies for archiving local histories.

Mapping Prose

Autobiography, an archive of an expressive self, serves as an invaluable map of Black women’s movement and subjectivities. Indeed, Black women autobiographers are curators of untold histories that they are determined to tell. Moving through the memoirs of Nancy Prince (1841, 1850), June Jordan (1981), Jesmyn Ward (2013), and a contributing author to this journal issue, Tiera Tanksley, the next four essays explore the power of personal narrative to arbitrate what, how, and where Black women’s lives will be mapped.

Ali Tal-mason reads two of Prince’s chronicles, The West Indies: Being a Description of the Islands, Progress of Christianity, Education, and Liberty among the Colored Population Generally (1841) and A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1850), to explore what she calls “strategic remappings”—Prince’s experimentation with genres as methodologies for distributing her own theories about displacement, emigration, national belonging, and praxis for traveling while Black.

“Nancy Prince: Strategic (Re)mappings through Travel and Text” explores how Prince linguistically navigates the fraught terrains of publishing and audience to opine about racism, restricted mobility, economic exploitation, and citizenship rights. Reading “geographically,” Tal-mason highlights narration that is steeped in language of space and place, often cartographical in its cadence. “Probing [Prince’s] traveling and text in tandem,” Tal-mason advocates reading beyond genre for the multilayered complexities of Black antebellum lives, which were inextricably intertwined with, but not encapsulated by, the slave cultures of the 1800s.

Taking up the cultural civil wars of the 1900s, in “‘An Elegy of Place’: Affective Mapping in June Jordan’s Civil Wars,” Jennifer D. Williams uses affect theory, Black feminism, and queer theory to examine June Jordan (poet, essayist, urban planner, and activist). Williams situates Jordan as a spacial theorist for whom geography informed and shaped her literary aesthetic—an approach “rooted in ecological justice—the notion that the built environment and the human are inextricably linked.” Jordan’s self-study of architecture, encouraged by R. Buckminster Fuller’s philanthropic and sustainably focused design, convinced her that the imaginative and liberational function of community-focused design could be one way for an individual to make profound changes in the lives of many.

Williams’ essay reads Jordan’s Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), a collage of personal and professional writing, as an “architextual” autobiography. This wordplay, coined by Cheryl J. Fish, the literary scholar and poet, describes how the linguistics of architecture and the structural design of writing come together in Jordan’s aesthetic. In her writing, Jordan often mediates time and space, personal and public, using geographic structure to diagram relationality. Williams calls this affective mapping a method of narrating “a relational self by drawing on Black feelings that emerge within the intimacy of place and in the frequencies of Black sound.”

Indeed, the protected spaces of Black life in which pain and joy are given voice are often the subject of Black memoir. In “We Are Here: Jesmyn Ward’s Black Feminist Poethics of Place in Men We Reaped,” Stacie McCormick reads “reaping … as a world-making process whereby Ward acts as a Black feminist cartographer, mapping complex networks of Black community in ways that reimagine place and account for ‘unthinkable’ Black humanity when refracted through a white lens.” The memoir narrates “Black movement as a form of repositioning and a mode of survival.” To tell her own story, Ward must consistently shift and resituate her narration among the stories of her family and her family’s community. The stories are interdependent histories of Black geographies.

McCormick illustrates how narrative can provide access to Black spatialized histories that have been erased. Narrative can rebuild broken buildings, shattered neighborhoods, desecrated gravesites, and forgotten lives. Ward’s memoir is another model of how the same affective mapping (illustrated in Williams’ essay) can preserve culture and geographical memory.

In the final essay, Tiera Tanksley weaves together intergenerational memory to examine modes of mobility and resistance in the lives of three Black women. “Towards a Theory of Black Feminist Archival Bricolage: Memory-Keeping within, beneath, and beyond the Archive” is one answer to McCormick’s epigraph question: “What does it mean to be here as a Black Subject … in ways that are unapologetic and … visible?”

Tanksley’s project unapologetically records and archives the everyday lives of contemporary Black women. Her personal narrative centers Black women as the tellers, writers, curators, and archivists of their own histories. What kinds of reclamations can happen, she asks, when we privilege the record-keeping of Black women, valuing and safeguarding the stories they tell about their selves over those records kept and stories told about them? Tanksley resolves that “both the dangerous moves and the memory-keeping processes of Black women form the theoretical foundations for a Black feminist theory of archival research that is intersectional, multimodal, and historically anchored.”

University of Delaware

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kimberly Blockett

Kimberly Blockett, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware, is a nineteenth-century literary historian. She uses archives and cultural geography to examine Black women’s movement and subjectivities. Blockett has published in MELUS, Legacy, MLA Approaches to Teaching Hurston (2009), and The Cambridge History of African American Literature (2011). The archival work for her annotated edition of Zilpha Elaw’s Memoirs (2021) and a forthcoming monograph on Elaw was funded by fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Smithsonian, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Harvard Divinity School.

Notes

1 Cooper, A Voice from the South, 31.