Black Geographies and the Politics of Place

by Katherine McKittrick (Editor)

The history of black people in the Americas and the Caribbean cannot be told without addressing powerful geographical massive forced migrations, land dispossession, and legal as well as informal structures of segregation. From the Middle Passage to the “Whites Only” signposts of US apartheid, the black Diasporic experience is rooted firmly in the politics of place. Literature has long explored the cultural differences in the experience of blackness in different quarters of the Diaspora. But what are the real differences between being a maroon in the hills of Jamaica and a runaway in the swamps of Florida? How does location impact repression and resistance, both on the ground and in the terrain of political imagination? Enter Black Geographies. In this path-breaking collection, fourteen authors interrogate the intersection between space and race. For instance, confronted with the importance of space in black cultural creation and preservation, some activists have sought to protect or restore black historical sites such as Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” and the African Burial Ground in New York City. For the dispossessed, all markers of history and belonging, including cultural property, become paramount. Yet each of these sites has in common acts of racial hatred and state terrorism that have left few of the historical structures standing—making them unlikely candidates for preservation. This begs the Is it even possible that advocating for preserving historic locations can act as a vehicle for social justice and spur community redevelopment? Other contributors consider how Bob Marley’s music maps a path to freedom, whether Malcolm Little could have emerged as Malcolm X outside of a black urban center, and if “lost” communities can be recovered. Katherine McKittrick authored Demonic Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle. Clyde Woods authored Development Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Geography, History, Research, Urban Planning, Theory

264 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

Katherine McKittrick is a professor in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which social justice emerges in black creative texts (music, fiction, poetry, visual art). While many scholars have researched the areas of North American, European, Caribbean, and African black geographies, McKittrick was the first scholar to put forth the interdisciplinary possibilities of black and black feminist geography, with an emphasis on embodied, creative and intellectual spaces engendered in the diaspora.

McKittrick has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University; she received her degree in 2004.

Since 2005, she has been Professor in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, with joint appointments in Cultural Studies and Geography. She is currently Editor at Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.

McKittrick’s work has focused on black feminist thought and cultural geography, as explored in her book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006). The book has been reviewed in Gender, Place & Culture, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Religion, & Literature, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and American Literature. The book was followed by Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007), which she co-edited with Clyde Woods. The book has been reviewed in Canadian Woman Studies.

McKittrick’s research draws on the areas of black studies, anti-colonial studies, cultural geographies, and gender studies, and attends to the links between epistemological narratives and social justice. Creative texts she analyzed include music, music making, poetry, visual art, and literature, while specifically looking at the works of Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Robbie McCauley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Willie Bester, Nas, Octavia Butler, and Dionne Brand.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Bart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Black Geographies is very academic and frequently boring. However, I found four of the essays in the anthology very interesting.
"Henry Box Brown, an International Fugitive: Slavery, Resistance, and Imperialism" deconstructs representations of Henry Brown, a slave who left the south by being shipped in a box to Philadelphia. "Deportable or Admissible?: Black Women and the Space of 'Removal'" examines Canadian court cases of black women, who the government of Canada does not document as 'citizens.' "Homopoetics: Queer Space and the Black Queer Diaspora" looks at the black bodies in queer (predominately white) spaces and masculinity. Unfortunately, the author sometimes throws the word queer around to describe places that are certainly not queer but gay. Many of the arguments about gay places could still fit with queer ones.
"Urban Revolutions and the Spaces of Black Radicalism" was my favorite essay. The author examines space using Henri Lefebvre's concepts. Space exists as "representations of space and representational spaces. The first "can be materially demarcated, as in the erection of signs, walls, and fences" (218). The latter "are the spaces of resistance and protest."

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays on Black geography.