Geographies of race and ethnicity 1: Black geographies

Abstract

This first of three progress reports gives a brief overview of the new field of Black Geographies. It elucidates Black Geographies as a field that not only critiques the erasure of Blackness within the whiteness and coloniality of geographical thought, but also centres Black spatial thought and agency. Thus, Black Geographies is an im/possible undertaking. Nonetheless, Black Geographies speaks not only about the spatialities of Black people but overwhelmingly speaks from the voices of Black geographers: Geography will need to recruit and retain enough Black geographers to make such an undertaking truly possible.

For a new weird geography

“…There is no global weirding without histories of racism and misogyny, just like there is no Anthropocene without histories of colonialism. We highlight contemporary iterations of the weird, like the Black Weird (Dunning, 2020), as modes that expose the horrors of whiteness in society, and suggest there are critical overlaps with Black Geographies (Hawthorne, 2019; Hirsch and Jones, 2021; Noxolo, 2022) that future work in literary geographies should explore. In this sense, global weirding renders the current epoch of socioenvironmental change inherently political, which the Anthropocene does not always do (Yusoff, 2017).…”

“…The geographical subdiscipline of Black Geographies (e.g. Allen et al, 2019; Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Eaves, 2017; Hawthorne, 2019; Hirsch and Jones, 2021; Moulton, 2022; Noxolo, 2022; Puttick and Murrey, 2020) is well-placed to examine this genre.…”

Youth and Decolonial Politics in a Relational Context

“…Sometimes this means migrant youth understanding the history of their new home through legacies of Black radicalism; other times the movement of youth between metropole and colony destabilises the roles of coloniser and colonised, but not in a linear or necessarily decolonising fashion. These engagements across contexts give us hope that we can understand paths toward decolonial futurities better by following the lead of young people who remix anticolonial thought across contexts, while we also caution that there is always the risk of tokenisation, simplification, and the evacuation of political intent if we allow theory to be completely unmoored from its relationality to land and grounded struggles (Cusicanqui 2012; McKittrick 2021; Noxolo 2022; Tuck and Yang 2012).…”

Interstitial and Abyssal geographies

“…While the relational subject and interstitial islands as facilitating entangled becomings is the focus of this special issue, we wish to highlight the emergence of an analytically distinct abyssal 'grammar' 2 or approach, which can be heuristically drawn out from recent literatures associated with critical Black studies, Caribbean islands and the Middle Passage. Thus, whilst there have recently been important surveys of the field of Black Geography (notably Noxolo, 2022), we wish to broaden our scope by drawing out a distinctive analytical approach that today cuts across many other disciplines and fields of research. We think that Geographers will take a great deal of interest in this analytical development due to its original take on antiblackness and colonialism, and for how it specifically turns to geographies, notably those of the Caribbean, as profoundly generative and enabling for its development.…”