Black Geographies and the Meaning of Land Rights

Catalog description

This course will interweave issues of land dispossession and land rights, both in Africa and in the Americas, with endogenous concepts and practices of space and place. Specifically, this course will trace the the concept of property, as developed among Europeans and European descendants, and explore how this concept interacted with the formation of the concept of race in order to established forms of social control and domination. The first part of this course will focus on Africa generally using Kenya as a case study. The material will cover the impact of colonialism and its legacy on land rights after independence. This first part will also explore contemporary forms of land dispossession happening through international land investments, often termed land grabs. The second part of the course will turn to the experiences of African descendants in the Americas. Using a few case studies, this section will examine different countries, histories, and rural and urban areas to unravel how different types of control over land interact with social relationships and specifically with the formation of race and racism. In both sections, we will also look at forms of resistance and resilience as local populations demand not only access to and control over land, but also impose their own ideologies of what it means to occupy space. By the end of this course, students should be able to more fully articulate the significance of control over land as it impacts and effects social relationships and specifically how it relates to the formation and continuation of inequalities along racial lines. Students will apply the concepts learned throughout the course to their own independent research done on an area in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania.