ENGL 586 B1: Black Geographies and the Black Geographic

T. Zackodnik

Innovative and creative Black practices of survival and place-making have shaped the spaces from which white supremacist logics repeatedly attempt to erase Black life and presence. These practices or Black geographies also refuse a white supremacist ordering of space as “transparent” or “neutral.” Movement—whether enforced, violently denied, or chosen—is foundational to both Black geographies and the Black geographic as an analytic and practice that imagines otherwise and brings into being Black freedom dreams, Black political and social movements, and Black emplacement. From the concepts of “fugitivity” (Moten) and “Black geographies” (McKittrick), to “the Black outdoors” (Hartman and Moten), “the hold” (Hartman, Moten, Wilderson), “the ship,” “the wake” and “wake work” (Sharpe), the “plantation” (McKittrick) and “plantation zones” (Walcott), Black geographies and the Black geographic have become a mode of thinking critically about, and interrogating the conditions of, Black life. This course will explore the ways in which Black sociality and movement make place and rupture white supremacist logics that attempt to render Black life ungeographic.

Texts (or readings from them) that we may focus on include:

Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
Simone Browne, Dark Matters
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography”
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, “The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possession”
Judith Madera, Black Atlas
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds and “Plantation Futures”
Katherine McKittrick & Clyde Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean”
Neil Roberts, Freedom as Maroonage
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”
Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation