The radical promise of holding ground in the archives
Topics: Historical Geography
, Black Geographies
, Qualitative Methods
Keywords: historical geographies, Black geographies, marronage, archival methods
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 58
Authors:
Celeste Winston, Temple University
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Abstract
This paper takes up the idea of “holding ground” as a methodology for doing and writing historical geographies that counter ongoing racial violence. ‘Holding ground’ signifies a refusal to yield, bend, or compromise in the face of attack or affront. ‘Holding ground’ also delineates a geographic practice of making and sustaining place. Drawing on archival work focused on historical geographies of marronage in Montgomery County, Maryland, I illustrate how marronage is itself a method of holding ground that, in turn, demands a liberatory methodological approach of doing the same. The methodology of holding ground refuses conventional ideas of what counts as historical and geographic knowledge in order to recast marginalized historical geographies as part of a real, material basis for constructing places of freedom. In efforts to understand ongoing histories of anti-racist organizing and placemaking, what seemingly unlikely connections might be drawn across place and time through refusing the methodological impulse to exhaustively account for and document historical causality and continuity? Holding ground against the foreclosures of conventional ways of knowing in the archives illuminates the value and radical promise of historical geographies done and written differently.
The radical promise of holding ground in the archives
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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