Black Geographies: Power and Difference in the Americas and Beyond

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course explores the emerging sub field of Black geographies through an American studies framework. Black activists and artists as well as scholars in geography, Africana studies, anthropology, history, and many other fields have begun to use Black geographic theory as an analytic: to think critically about Black space making practices, to recover hidden and suppressed histories, to reorient Black folks relationship to the environment, and to grapple with the ways power is shaped differently at various scales in various places. In this course, we will examine the development of Black geographies as a school of thought in field geography. We examine its relationship to the field of Black Studies through Black Feminist Thought, the Black Radical Tradition, and Black ecologies. And finally, we will think carefully and critically about the way Black spaces and places are produced in the Americas (and slightly beyond) to understand how the Americas have been underwritten socially, culturally, economically, and politically by Black geographies.