Black Geospatial Inquiry and Aesthetic Praxis: Toward a Theory and Method

Abstract

A growing and influential cohort of Black scholar–creatives are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness (Black being and living) in excess of a settled Western racial logic (nonbeing) that produced it. I set forth to advance a paradigm of Black study for thinking and theorizing the intersections of Black livingness and its inherent fugitivity within and beyond chattel enslavement. By expanding on the concepts of Black compositional thought and wake work, I illuminate an assembly of metaphors and materialities, working collectively to articulate the overall, ongoing condition and circumstance of Black life as a predictable and constitutive aspect of existing in the shadows of antiblack violence. Juxtaposing Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic practice in concert with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of reading metaphors of Black life in diaspora (the wake, the ship, the hold, the weather), I expose how creative production and Black consciousness serve as tools for refusing “death” and offer possibilities for living.

AcknowledgmentS

A writing such as this, although seemingly authored by one person, only comes into existence and fruition through years of intense being/reading/living/thinking/knowing with the ovaric workings of Black studies creatives. Their capacious work accompanies me, daily, and has carried me this distance, as of February 8, 2023. I am humbled. The following alphabetical list is incomplete:

Beloved; Ruha Benjamin; Black revelry: In honor of the sugar shack; Dionne Brand; Tina Campt; Derrais Carter; Amber C. Coleman; The Dark Laboratory; Julie Dash; Daughters of the Dust; Dear Science: And Other Stories; The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred; Torkwase Dyson; Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Tao Leigh Goffe; Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Saidiya Hartman; I Can Drink the Distance; In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; Listening to Images; Tiffany Lethabo-King; Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade; Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book; A Map to the Door of No Return; M Archive: After the End of the World; Katherine McKittrick; Toni Morrison; Origin of Others; M. NourbeSe Philip; Chanda Prescod-Weinstein; Scenes of Subjection; Christina Sharpe; Spill; Hortense Spillers; Theory; Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want; Sylvia Wynter; ZONG!

Notes

1 See Combahee River Collective.

2 See also the concept “appropriation.”

3 Adjective: (of a work, event, moment, or figure) strongly influencing later developments; of or relating to a reproductive organ.

4 I am currently on my sixth reading of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.

5 The following citations reference various talks and conversations, from which I culled Torkwase Dyson’s theories and methods of her named practice, Black compositional thought. GSAPP Conversations: Torkwase Dyson in conversation with Mabel Wilson, hosted by the Graduate School of Architecture and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University; Graham Foundation: Towrkwase Dyson in conversation with Christina Sharpe; SXSW: Torkwase Dyson in conversation with Mario Gooden (architect) and Andrés Jaque (curator).

6 Although a growing and influential cohort of Black studies scholars are choosing to think, theorize, aesthetically practice, and articulate blackness beyond “harming predilections of antiblackness” (Quashie, 2012, p. 1), to address their work comprehensively is beyond the scope of this article.

7 Including, but not limited to: fugitivity, care, liberation, Black geospatial history, ontological terror (see Wilderson [2010], Sexton [2015], Moten [2013]) otherwise world-making, Black method (McKittrick, 2021).

8 The stories of Black people liberating themselves, across time; tries to understand the condition of inventing under duress, inventing with materials around oneself, inventing while a systemic order of degradation is always happening; the simultaneity of knowing infrastructure, one’s body weight, material. Systems that exist in relation to navigating those systems; abstraction as a way (vehicle) to understanding to knowing an experience and ecosystems.

9 Screenshot from a Graham Foundation–sponsored YouTube conversation with Christina Sharpe.

10 Improvisation as a way of working (the artist, herself) as well as a way of self-emancipation of enslaved Africans.

11 See Afropessimism (Wilderson, 2020).

12 There’s long been a question of Black artists and abstraction and how one might form a language of abstraction while simultaneously imbuing it with radicality beyond the representational figure (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2021).

13 Harriet Jacobs was an African American writer whose autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is now considered an American classic. Born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, she was sexually harassed by her enslaver. When he threatened to sell her children if she did not submit to his desire, she hid in a tiny crawl space under the roof of her grandmother’s house that was so low she could not stand up in it. After staying there for 7 years, she finally managed to escape to the free North, where she was reunited with her children.

14 Henry “Box” Brown was a 19th-century Virginia slave who escaped to freedom at the age of 33 by arranging to have himself mailed in a wooden crate in 1849 to abolitionists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For a short time, Brown became a noted abolitionist speaker in the northeast United States.

15 Reflects on the murder of a Black teenager named Eugene Williams in Chicago on July 27, 1919; also referenced as the “Red Summer.”

16 Also, home “coming” celebrations at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are also known as occasions for celebrating Black life, revelry, and joy through various expressive tendencies (see, for instance, Jackson State University’s Sonic Boom of the South). This also poses questions regarding the circulation of and profit from images of Black life/death and joy/pain (see conversation with Christina Sharpe, “‘What Does It Mean to be Black and Look at This?’ A Scholar Reflects on the Dana Schutz Controversy”; Mitter, 2017).

17 She refers to the monastic when describing this work (The Graham Foundation, 2018, 00:13:45)

18 The asterisk speaks to a range of configurations of Black being that take the form of translation, transatlantic, transgression, transgender, transmogrification, transcontinental, transfixed, trans-Mediterranean, transubstantiation (by which process we might understand the making of bodies into flesh and then into fungible commodities while retaining the appearance of flesh and blood), transmigration, and more (Sharpe, 2016, p. 30).

19 Screenshot from the Graham Foundation–sponsored YouTube conversation with Christina Sharpe (2018).

20 The hold of a ship is an area beneath the deck that is used for storing cargo.

21 Partus sequitur ventrem (Latin—that which follows the womb) was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas that defined the legal status of children born there. The doctrine mandated that all children would inherit the legal status (enslavement) of their mothers (enslaved Black women).

22 Eyebeam (2016). Unkeeping surveys 2 years of Dyson’s research into minimal geometric abstraction as a system used to deepen our understanding of the built and natural environment. This ambitious work spans modular architecture, data visualization, and Black spatial matters under the rubric of environmentalism. For this exhibition she presents drawings, paintings, and sculpture that deconstruct sites such as auction blocks, garrets, lynchings, and sidewalks to reconstruct humanist narratives in their place.

23 See Wells (1895): http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=3&psid=3620.

24 This is not a comprehensive list: Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Sandra Bland, Miriam Carey, Atatiana Jefferson, Ma’Khia Bryant, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and infinitely more.

25 This exhibit took place at Columbia University’s GSAPP’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in 2019.

26 Here, Billie Holiday sings about the lynchings of Black bodies (1939); Dyson also has a series named after this song.

27 This tradition is also recognized as Africana Studies and African American Studies.

28 Soon after the civil rights and anticolonial movements in North America, Africa, the Caribbean; the field’s origins in the U.S. academy must be traced to insurgent activity among African-descended academics at HBCUs and likewise in universities in California, specifically San Francisco State in 1968.

29 This includes sexism, classism, nativism, homophobia, and transphobia.

30 A nod to McKittrick’s (2021) Black method: Thank you, Vanessa L., Amy K., K. Lynn R., and Michael S. for your care in reading previous versions of this article.

31 Note: The recent organizing of a conference for art educators of the Global Majority (AddingVoices, 2022) may serve as indication of a field in crisis (crea + e, 2020) and may signify a long-overdue reckoning. Black peoples and other racially and ethnically minoritized peoples in the field of art education have experienced unquantifiable instances of performative allyship, exclusion, and tokenism and are responding by invoking forms of radical ancestorship by creating spaces where they feel safe. Beverly Tatum’s text (1997/2003), “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?,” comes to mind here. An overwhelming atmosphere of normative whitestream art/education ideologies (Kraehe et al., 2018) uphold durable and enduring legacies of harm. Peoples of the Global Majority are writing, singing, dancing their own stories, affirming one another in the process—imagining otherwise livable futures.