The Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness

Abstract

et me start by ASKiNG You the prototypical question historically asked of Black people in Canada: Where are you from? That is, where are you from biographically and intellectually? Can you tell us something about your personal origins and give us a sense of the intellectual trajec tories, detours, or routes that led you to questions of geography, space, and place? I was born outside of Toronto, Ontario, and grew up in small Ontario towns-on Georgian Bay and near the Grand River and in and around the borders of the Niagara Escarpment. It wasn't until I moved to Toronto that I came to read these places as black. This is to say that while most of the areas and regions I grew up in were predominantly demographically white-I often proclaim that Michael Jackson and Prince brought black to me, musically, while I lived these places-when I began to study black diaspora cultures I realized that these very locations were also inflected with all sorts of mean ingful racialized archives: Negro Creek Road, the Sheffield Museum, the black slaves owned by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant/Thayendanegea. This was coupled with ongoing, but often unacknowledged, racialized labour: the migrant workers, mostly Jamaican men at the time I lived in these re gions, who fueled the local economies. So my biographical story has always been one that is in tension with blacklessness-a blacklessness that is and was always black, of course. My intellectual narratives emerge from these kinds of tensions. I have always been interested in the ways in which narra tives of the past-fictional, archival, historical, poetic, musical-emerge in,

Political Ontology and Race Research: A Response to “Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives”

“…Finally, scholars focusing on historical approaches tend to argue that slavery, specifically in the Americas, forms a distinct starting point for understanding contemporary racial politics. This argument is apparent in the works of several key thinkers, such as Hartman (2008), Vincent Brown (2009), Katherine McKittrick (Hudson and McKittrick 2014), and even Loïc Wacquant (2002) (Carico 2016). Their historical approach is matched with a parallel analysis of African colonialism.…”

Narratives of resistance and decolonial futures in the politics of the Bermudian Black Power movement

“…McKittrick 's (2013;Hudson, 2014) utilisation of the plantation analytic and its racial logics in explorations of Black Geographies in the New World is useful in assessing spatialities of white supremacy and black resistance in Bermuda.…”

There's Something in The Water

“…When referring to the writings of Edouard Glissant, Dionne Brand, and Toni Morrison, geographer Katherine McKittrick has suggested their collective works enact a "beautiful attention to space and place." [28] As McKittrick says in an interview, "by beautiful I mean pleasing and delicate and dazzling and brilliant even if it is putting forth a sense of place that is wrapped in awfulness." [29] Is it possible to construct an edge view that attends to both the beautiful and awful embedded within the geographies of over-extraction?…”