Black Geographies and the Politics of Place - Softcover

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9780896087736: Black Geographies and the Politics of Place

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0896087735 ISBN 13: 9780896087736

Publisher: South End Press, 2007

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The history of black people in the Americas and the Caribbean cannot be told without addressing powerful geographical shifts: 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 question: 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 Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle.

Clyde Woods authored Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta.

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About the Author

Assistant Professor in women's studies at Queen's University is the author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (U. Minnesota Press, 2006). A frequent contributor to journals and books McKitrick has worked as a volunteer with the Toronto Women's Bookstore Assistant Professor of African American studies at The University of Maryland

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