Black Geographies
This graduate seminar explores the inextricable connection between blackness and geography. Considering Katherine McKittrick’s claim that Black geographies are “‘the terrain of political struggle itself’ or where the imperative of a perspective of struggle takes place,” we will situate the spatial relations of blackness by placing Black people at the core of spatial production and examine the mechanisms by which this takes place. In this course we ask: what are the limitations and possibilities of traditional geographies? How does Black geographic thought produce wider material and conceptual space for geographic knowledge? How does Geography account for and understand blackness as condition, experience, and imaginary?
Topics
- The course is organized around on two themes: (1) “Black Spatial Matters” involves our analysis of critical approaches to nature, space, place, and other geographic matters that meaningfully contribute to theorizations of blackness; and (2) “Black Space Matters,” through which we will focus on the political economic means by which the production of Black space is foundational to imaginative Black placemaking, self-actualization, and ways to catalogue future and existing spaces. Each text that falls under the “Black Spatial Matters” category will be followed by a corresponding “Black Space Matters” text. The two texts should be thought directly in relation to one another. Throughout the course we will engage such themes as Black cities, Black economies, Black poetics, and Black value by drawing on intellectual histories and politics of Black feminist, queer, indigenous, post-colonial, and critical race studies.
Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027