Black Geographies

Catalog description

An introduction to themes and discourses in Black Geographies: a field concerned with the spatial dynamics and dimensions interwoven with Black life and being. This seminar-style course operates from the premise of the social construction of race and racism as spatial phenomena. As Jovan Scott Lewis and Camilla Hawthorne put it in The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (2023), "the production of space is tied to the production of difference." We thus commence the course with a theoretical orientation to this interdisciplinary field and its intersection with Black Studies at large. Subsequent weeks focus on how the Black experience(s) manifests around the world through various spatially-oriented imaginaries (the Black metropolis vs. Black suburbia, Black America vs. Black Europe, the African Diaspora vs. the African continent, Afro-Asia vs. Afro-Orientalism, Jim Crow laws in the southern United States vs. the South African apartheid regime, etc.). The course concludes with a meditation on the construction of Black utopias - or dystopias? - whether real-world places (Tulsa, Oklahoma's "Black Wall Street") or fictions (Wakanda, the home of Marvel's Black Panther superhero). Throughout the quarter, we will endeavor to balance theorizing Blackness as a social construction and geographic phenomenon with the lived experiences of people of African descent who navigate, resist, and challenge structures of spatialized power. Through both cultural production and the historical archive, we will ask how Black people have navigated anti-Blackness to create affirming senses of place in hostile spaces and times.