Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Michael Hawkins, Kent State University

; ,

Description:

CFP AAG 2022: Paper Session
RACE, PLACE, MEMORY, COMMUNITY
Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), New York, New York, February 25 – March 1, 2022

Session organizers:
Michael Hawkins, Assistant Professor, Data Librarian, Kent State University, Kent, OH (mhawki11@kent.edu)

Sponsored by the Development Geographies, Political Geography, Socialist and Critical Geography, and Urban Geography Specialty Groups.

Description:
Race, community, and place are mutually constructed and intertwined. These interdependences are well-established, and many scholars have argued that memory plays an important role in constructing all three phenomena—via identity construction; communally shared practices of inheritance; and material, ecological, and experiential intertwinements with place (Barron, 2017; Boym, 2001; Cresswell, 1996; Halbwachs, 1992; McKittrick, 2006, 2014; Osterhoudt, 2016; Sharpe, 2016; Tolia-Kelley, 2004). This session complicates the usual stories told in this nexus of memory, community, race and place by asking how these relations function through absence, distance, and mobility in (post)colonial contexts of migration and white supremacy. Community and race function here through multiple, distant places—themselves communally and racially distinct—both stitched together and held apart through memory-work (Till 2012). Memory-work, in other words, facilitates “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” frighted by lines of race, ethnicity, class, and caste (Said, 1994: 50). How are colonial encounters reworked and commemorated not in the postcolony but in the postmetropole? How are racialized communities of immigrants formed around shared experiences of what was, at home, something foreign but familiar? How is real estate turned into “a community” via nostalgia for a racial other? How is soil an active, mobile participant in communal memory-work, rather than a metaphor for memory’s rootedness? What modes of racial belonging and unbelonging are formed from these efforts? These and other questions will drive our session’s interdisciplinary and trans-local explorations of race, community, place, and memory.

This session builds on a series of sessions at the Memory Studies Association (MSA) Annual Meeting in summer 2021. Those sessions aimed to bring geographic perspective to the MSA, and at AAG we are working toward strong engagement around memory. Therefore this session is one of six linked AAG sessions: Territorializing Memory 1; Territorializing Memory 2; Memory and Home; Race, Place, Community, Memory; [name of Jacque’s session]; and a roundtable discussion. While these sessions do not comprise a formal series, they were organized in tandem and are thematically linked around the broad idea of bringing together political geography’s relational perspective on territory (Brighenti, 2006; Elden, 2013; Sack, 1986) with cultural geography’s literature on geographies of memory (Alderman and Inwood, 2013; Duncan and Duncan, 2010; Foote, 2003).

References:

Alderman, Derek H., and Joshua FJ Inwood. "Landscapes of Memory and Socially Just
Futures." In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, edited by Nuala C.
Johnson, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders, 186–197. Malden, MA: Wiley, Blackwell, 2013.
Barron, Melanie. “Remediating a Sense of Place: Memory and Environmental Justice in
Anniston, Alabama.” Southeastern Geographer 57, no. 1 (Spring 2017) 62–79.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Brighenti, Andrea. “On Territory as Relationship and Law as Territory.” Canadian
Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et Societé 21, no. 2 (2006):
65–86.
Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Elden, Stuart. The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Foote, Kenneth. Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Hoelscher, Steven and Derek Alderman. “Memory and Place: Geographies of a Critical
Relationship.” Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 3 (2004): 347–355.
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
McKittrick, Katherine. "Wait Canada Anticipate Black." The CLR James Journal 20,
no. 1/2 (2014): 243-249.
Osterhoudt, Sarah. "Written with seed: the political ecology of memory in Madagascar." Journal
of Political Ecology 23, no. 1 (2016): 263-278.
Said, Edward W. “Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveler” Boundary 2
21, no. 3, (Autumn 1994): 1–18.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016.
Till, Karen. “Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care.” Political
Geography 31 (2012): 3-14.
Tolia-Kelly, Divya. “Locating processes of identification: Studying the precipitates of re-memory
through artefacts in the British Asian home.” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 29(3) (2004): 314-329.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda