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Abstract
Enthusiasm for Black geographies has grown significantly since it was formalized in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (McKittrick and Woods Citation2007). 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.
自从《黑人地理学与位置政治》(McKittrick and Woods, 2007)正式提出“黑人地理学”, 人们对黑人地理学的热情显著高涨。随着人们对这一框架越来越感兴趣, 其原本宗旨被滥用的可能性也越来越大。现在, 需要重申黑人地理学的目标。我们认为, 尽管黑人地理学属于种族地理学, 但黑人地理学能够提供种族地理学范畴之外的见解, 它依赖于特定的视角、评价、方法和解放式实践。
La recepción entusiasta de las geografías negras se ha incrementado de manera significativa desde cuando se las formalizó en las Geografías Negras y la Política del Lugar (McKittrick & Woods 2007). Con el aumento del interés en este marco, ha sobrevenido un potencial incremento de la posibilidad de que erróneamente se apliquen los fines definidos en su origen. Ha llegado el momento de reiterar los propósitos de las geografías negras. Sugerimos que, si bien están dentro del ámbito de las geografías de la raza, las geografías negras brindan unas perspectivas situadas más allá de esta unidad de estudio y que descansan sobre visiones, métodos de valoración y prácticas liberadoras particulares.
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Acknowledgments
We give thanks to our forebears. We also credit our colleagues and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Panelists included Aretina Hamilton, Priscilla McCutcheon, Rashad Shabazz, and Willie Jamaal Wright.
2 We are referring to individuals like Friedrich Ratzel, Ellen Semple, and Halford Mackinder, as well as institutionalized names such as Rand McNally.
3 For a more comprehensive list, see the work of Darden and Terra (Citation2003) and Jordan’s evolving catalog of Black geographers (AGS Citation2023).
4 A collective practice of Black study (see Kelley Citation2016).
5 Darden was the ninth Black student to earn a PhD in geography from a U.S. university.
6 For more on the scholarship of Bobby Wilson, see The Southeastern Geographer’s 2022 special issue.
7 NCCU’s Geography Department is now the Department of Geosciences.
8 Speigner commuted between NCCU and the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor to earn his doctorate in natural resources and environment.
9 Black women had yet to receive the kinds of recruitment efforts that are now paramount at Queens College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
10 At times, Speigner’s students—one of whom was Bobby Wilson—overlapped during their graduate education, an act of providence that aided their social inclusion within predominately White institutions.
11 Joseph S. Wood and Mark Barnes hope to resuscitate interinstitutional alliances. In 2020, they organized Advancing Geography and Geoscience at HBCUs and MSIs for the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference. This impulse is now a National Science Foundation–sponsored project dedicated to advancing participation in geography by students of color.
12 See Darden and Terra’s (Citation2003) list of Black geographers at institutions of higher learning.
13 Also in attendance were Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Bobby Wilson, and Déborah Berman Santana.
14 Imagine reading “Reflections on a White Discipline” as a first-year Black graduate student with no background in the field. This essay was a beacon of light, a sign that there was a place for us in this discipline, and better yet, that we could make this place our own.
15 The Bridges for Sociology: International and Interdisciplinary Conference held at the APA Annual Meeting, August 1997, in Toronto.
16 Weheliye (Citation2014) related Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault with Black writers who founded similar, if not more novel, analyses.
17 “This is not to say that Black subjects are free from espousing dominant modes of geographic thought, but rather that these sites, and those who inhabit them, can trouble those modes of thought and allow us to consider alternative ways of imagining the world” (McKittrick and Woods Citation2007, 5).
18 Elsewhere, Bledsoe (Citation2020) offered a methodological genealogy of Black geographers and “geographies of blackness” (1003). Although there is overlap, not all geographies of Blackness fold well into Black geographies.
19 At its formation, the objective of Black studies was to address limitations in canonical fields and to address the social ills affecting the Black diaspora (Hare Citation1972). Although exhibited in Black studies programs and departments, this objective is enacted beyond its disciplinary home through a fluid practice of Black study (see Kelley Citation2016).
20 The list of authors grows faster than one can cite.
21 Thought on black(ened) speculative patterns vary and are often informed by the arts (see hooks, 1992; Sharpe Citation2014, Citation2016; Campt Citation2023).
22 When Heynen speaks of his work on Sapelo Island, he often invokes the memory (and spirit) of the late Cornelia Bailey.
23 And, might we add, beyond the discipline of geography.
24 Black and non-Black viewers.
25 Elsewhere, Hartman (Citation2008) suggested that a grasp of this position requires “a willingness to look into the casket” (4). Wilderson III (Citation2008), on the other hand, believed an onto-abolitionist becoming requires restraint, to “stay in the hold of the ship” (500). In their own terms, McKittrick and Woods (Citation2007) coined this place “the underside” (4) and “the realm of the unknowable” (7). We understand that there are differences between the assumptive logics of those operating within these traditions of Black studies—namely regarding the Black subject (i.e., as slave/not as slave) and its embodied experience within civil society (i.e., social death vs. Black livingness). We believe each of these scholars begin from a similar position, however: that the transient logics of chattel slavery disrupt and inform global iterations of Black social life.
26 Badiou (Citation2012) rejected citizenship developed in opposition to the characteristics of those perceived as nonlocals (e.g., hijab, Black skin, language). Rather than an identarian clanship, he suggested those organizing around a politic build belonging through a reduction of “separating names” (77).
27 See Wilderson’s III (Citation2008) entry, “Summertime in June 1993,” in Incognegro: A Memoir of Apartheid and Exile.
28 One might also look to the lives of Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama for evidence of those who abandoned their inheritance as “junior partners of civil society” in the United States (Wilderson III Citation2015, 139). Boggs is known for theorizing the contradictions of capitalism and (r)evolutionary futures from the purview of postwar Detroit, Michigan (Boggs Citation1998). Kochiyama’s place in the Black freedom struggle was cemented 21 February 1965 at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Kochiyama’s dedication to the struggle for Black liberation was so sincere that the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa recognized her as its first non-Black citizen (Chimurenga 2014).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Willie Jamaal Wright
WILLIE JAMAAL WRIGHT is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. E-mail: [email protected]. His research includes the spatial and aesthetic practices of Black urban communities.
Adam Bledsoe
ADAM BLEDSOE is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-mail: [email protected]. His research focuses on the African diaspora and the forms of analysis, critique, and action of diasporic actors.
Priscilla Ferreira
PRISCILLA FERREIRA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography & Latinx and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08854. E-mail: [email protected]. Her co-elaborative research with Black women residents in Rio de Janeiro seeks to understand how they conceive of solidarity economics and enact grassroots, community-driven urban planning.
Kristen Maye
KRISTEN MAYE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA 01075. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research takes up questions of knowledge production, disciplinarity, and field formation, tracing how Black studies as a field of study exposes the limits and contradictions of disciplinary knowledge production.
Ellen Louis
ELLEN LOUIS is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African American Studies, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research concerns the psychoaffective structure of the world since the formation of modern slavery and colonialism.