Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Camilla Hawthorne, University of California, Santa Cruz

; ,

Description:

Amid the wave of protests against anti-black racism in the last decade, that began with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and galvanized globally after the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, we begin to question more seriously the role of culture in Black political mobilization. Culture, as a meaning-making force, has been an essential component of protest politics mobilized by social movements (Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar, 1998; Reed, 2005). Black cultural politics, specifically, has also affected the ways we build alternative notions of place (Hunter et al., 2016). We draw on Katherine McKittrick’s (2011) concept of “black sense of place” to ground a discussion about how Black cultural geographies may be at once circumscribed by oppression without being wholly defined by such violence. Black geographic scholarship has turned toward such definitions of black sense of place by documenting how spatial epistemologies and affective ways of being in place encompass creative, cultural and relational practices (Woods, 1998; Hunter et al., 2016; Foster 2020).

In the midst of appropriative uses that commodify urban Black aesthetics while excluding and displacing Black residents (Summers, 2019) this panel aims to reassess how cultural practices, care and poetics (Glissant, 1997) offer more than a counter to racial violence, but provide a method for achieving Black political consciousness and economic claims to space across the Black/African Diaspora. This panel invites dialogue grounded in politically engaged scholarship to round out understandings of black senses of place, and the importance of culture and care to social movements that demand a recognition of Black people and the geographies of their lived relationships across the Diaspora. Following debates across the social sciences and the humanities we ask: How can Black cultural geographies ground our understanding of the political and economic production of place?

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda