Methodological reflections on geographies of blackness

Abstract

This article argues that work on geographies of Blackness and Black Geographies emphasizes different aspects of Black experiences and relies on different methodologies in making these emphases. I focus on the work of six prominent geographers who engage with questions of Blackness and examine the different data sources they draw on. I show that they all employ a multi-method, interdisciplinary approach in their scholarship and that all of them, regardless of emphasis or method, foreground the experiences of black populations. I argue that this collective multi-method approach pushes the conceptual boundaries of the wider discipline of Geography.

Amplifying the Archive: Methodological Plurality and Geographies of the Black Atlantic

“…The theoretical contours of new geographies of the Black Atlantic emerge from the social contexts of struggles for racial and social justice. The socio‐political upheavals of the 1960s, including the civil rights and feminist movements, helped to fuel academic interest in the lives of ordinary people, and encouraged a new generation of scholars to provide more inclusive histories of the past (Bledsoe 2021; McClerking and Philpot 2008). Various strands of critical scholarship including social history, (post)colonial studies, subaltern studies, political ecology, Indigenous geographies, and Black geographies have all sought to enlarge the map of knowledge by giving voice to the poor, the disenfranchised, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, women, peasants, and other marginalised communities (Blaut 1993; Bledsoe 2021; Jazeel and Legg 2019; Offen 2004; Said 1979; Trouillot 1995; Wolf 1982; Zinn 1980).…”

“…The socio‐political upheavals of the 1960s, including the civil rights and feminist movements, helped to fuel academic interest in the lives of ordinary people, and encouraged a new generation of scholars to provide more inclusive histories of the past (Bledsoe 2021; McClerking and Philpot 2008). Various strands of critical scholarship including social history, (post)colonial studies, subaltern studies, political ecology, Indigenous geographies, and Black geographies have all sought to enlarge the map of knowledge by giving voice to the poor, the disenfranchised, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, women, peasants, and other marginalised communities (Blaut 1993; Bledsoe 2021; Jazeel and Legg 2019; Offen 2004; Said 1979; Trouillot 1995; Wolf 1982; Zinn 1980). Relying on nontraditional evidentiary sources such as court records, wills and testaments, oral histories, diaries, family genealogies, various art forms, historical images, music, maps, remotely sensed imagery, and travellers’ accounts (often in complement to written archives), commitments to writing from the bottom up produced more complex and inclusive narratives and eventually influenced studies of the environment and agrarian transformations (e.g.…”

Toward healthier futures in post‐pandemic times: Political ecology, racial capitalism, and black feminist approaches to care

“…In geography, racial capitalism has emerged as an important analytical thread within the emerging subfield of Black geographies (Bledsoe, 2020). Black geographies developed in response to a discipline that has willfully excluded the lives and experiences—the epistemologies and ontologies—of Black people and Black spatial processes (Bledsoe, 2021). As Katherine McKittrick (2006) writes, Black geographies are “subaltern or alternative geographic patterns that work alongside and beyond traditional geographies and a site of terrain of struggle” (p. 7).…”

“…Black geographies as we think of the field today has antecedents stretching back to the middle of the last century (Pulido, 2017). In a recent Progress article, Bledsoe (2021) traces these antecedents to the work of Harold Rose and Bill Bunge, arguing that the focus on question of what we call racial capitalism today emerged in the 1990s with the work of Bobby Wilson, Clyde Woods, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. These scholars offer understandings of urban geography as predicated on segregation and racial capitalism (Wilson, 2019), the overriding plantation logics of the south and the life‐making processes of Black people (Lewis, 2020; Woods, 1998), and the prison‐industrial complex's need for cheap labor within an economic system stratified by a racial hierarchy (Gilmore, 2007).…”

An Arkansas Parable for the Anthropocene

“…It is the question of control over land, through a racialized hierarchy of human bodies, that binds disparate locales into a nexus of cultural and material relations (see Bhandar 2018). Clearly, the question of race has been undertheorized within critical landscape studies, marking part of a wider set of limitations in applying neo-Marxian theory to the novel socioecological formations that emerged in parallel with the existing plantation system (see McKittrick 2011;Wright 2020;Bledsoe 2021). The analytical significance of the plantation has recently been revisited via the introduction of the term Plantationocene in opposition to the implied epistemological universality of the Anthropocene.…”