Methodological reflections on geographies of blackness

Abstract

This article argues that work on geographies of Blackness and Black Geographies emphasizes different aspects of Black experiences and relies on different methodologies in making these emphases. I focus on the work of six prominent geographers who engage with questions of Blackness and examine the different data sources they draw on. I show that they all employ a multi-method, interdisciplinary approach in their scholarship and that all of them, regardless of emphasis or method, foreground the experiences of black populations. I argue that this collective multi-method approach pushes the conceptual boundaries of the wider discipline of Geography.

Keywords

Black Geographies Black Studies geographies of blackness methodologies methods

I Introduction

For centuries, black struggle has asserted black humanity through analyzing, critiquing, and offering alternatives to the violence of Western modernity. Black Studies is one of many expressions of this struggle. Black Studies acts, first and foremost, as ‘a critique of Western Civilization’ and calls into question the truths of Western modernity (Robinson and Morse, 1999: 8). Black Studies can and must be a plurality of views, voices, and methods that foreground the plurality of black experiences in the world and, in the process, push back against common sense notions of humanity and anti-blackness. The discipline of Geography’s engagement with Black Studies presents opportunities to move away from disciplinary ties to imperialism and scholarly homogeneity (de Leeuw and Hunt, 2018; Livingstone, 1993; Pulido, 2002, 2018) and toward acknowledging the importance of black experiences and thinkers in the making of space. Indeed, Geography’s articulation with Black Studies has yielded various critiques of ‘the traditional canon of geography’ by reflecting on the spatiality of myriad global black experiences (Hawthorne, 2019a: 4). This articulation has relied on an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach.

This article draws on the work of six specific geographers to show how geographies of blackness and Black Geographies¹ have distinct emphases and varied methodologies within them, while also having at their core a critique of the modern world and dominant modes of geographic inquiry. The article is broken down into three main sections. The first section looks at Geography’s initial investigation of questions of blackness in the 1960s and 1970s, paying specific attention to the work of Harold Rose and Bill Bunge. I argue that Rose and Bunge employ a mainly quantitative set of methods in their work on urban black populations in the US, reflecting on black experiences in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. The second section examines the work of Bobby Wilson, Clyde Woods, and Ruth Gilmore and their collective emphasis on the US political economy as experienced by US black populations during specific shifts in the capitalist political economy. All three scholars employ a Black Marxist analysis, centering the experiences of black populations in the political economic shifts they profile. The third and final section discusses the work of Katherine McKittrick and her ontological reflections on (anti-)blackness which stem from Diasporic literary, historic, artistic, and scholarly sources. Black experiences and insights from Canada, the US, the Caribbean, and Europe animate McKittrick’s arguments about the centrality of anti-blackness in modern notions of humanity and space and the radical human potential found in black life.

This article argues that work on geographies of blackness and Black Geographies emphasizes different aspects of black experiences and relies on different methodologies in making these emphases. I point out, nonetheless, that some foci (anti-black racism, references to political economy, and the use of statistical data) remain common to all the thinkers discussed herein. More importantly, I maintain that the collective works profiled in this article push the discipline of Geography to take Black Studies and black populations’ experiences seriously, thereby expanding the scope of geographical inquiry in important, if distinct, ways.

If methodology is the act of collecting data that leads to research and learning outcomes, then scholars engaging with geographies of blackness and Black Geographies push the wider discipline of Geography to recognize the knowledges, experiences, and practices of black populations as viable geographic data (McKittrick, 2019). These scholars identify and push the bounds of dominant geographic knowledge by refusing to limit themselves to the traditional sources of geographic information. Instead, they merge established geographic methodologies with founts of knowledge and experience that are produced by, and accountable to, black people who fathom humanity amidst constantly renewed forms of violence (Hartman, 2016: 210, 213). Thus, the different methodological emphases I describe below – quantitative, political economic, and ontological – exist beyond traditional geographic employments of such methodologies.

II Emergence During the Civil Rights Movement

Geographical engagements with blackness began in earnest during perhaps the most sustained black critique of US society in the 20th century – the Civil Rights Movement. A central demand during the Movement was black access to electoral, consumptive, economic, dwelling, and educational spaces previously denied them. A variety of Movement actors, from Martin Luther King to more militant, armed groups like the Deacons for Defense, championed desegregation as black physical inclusion in previously racially exclusive spaces (Hill, 2004; King, 1991).

Measures like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1964 appeared as necessary for societal changes to occur. This legislation, coupled with black direct action aimed at enforcing it (see Hill, 2004; Umoja, 2013), presented the potential for Black Americans to access institutions which had previously not been available to them. Nonetheless, black communities across the US remained underserved, impoverished, and marginalized compared to white communities, and it was this fact that spurred Geography’s initial investigation of black lived experiences. Following the Movement, geographers began examining the spatial realities of black life, as well as some of the potential causes of societal anti-blackness and how black communities responded to these phenomena.

III Quantitative Analyses of Post-Civil Rights Black America

From the 1950s–1970s, geographic research went through the ‘Quantitative Revolution’. Drawing on sources such as census data and metropolitan planning initiatives, geographers investigated issues like urban land use, the expansion of metropolises, land rent, and spatial change in commercial structures (Adams, 2001; Wheeler, 2001: 550; Yeats, 2001). While the majority of this quantitative work did not explicitly deal with the question of race, a small body of scholars did.

Using quantitative modeling techniques, geographers demonstrated that desegregation, as defined by Civil Rights Movement activists, had never occurred.² Special issues in Southeastern Geographer and Economic Geography, as well as individual interventions across different scholarly publications, touched on a variety of topics regarding the segregated nature of black households, constricted employment opportunities for black individuals, and the lack of spatial mobility and possibilities for black interactions with non-blacks, among other topics (Berry, 1979; Berry et al., 1976; Birdsall, 1971; Florin, 1971; Brown, 1972; Davies and Fowler, 1971; Deskins, 1972; Dudas and Longbrake, 1971; Meyer, 1970; Morrill and Donaldson, 1972). Such work offered a snapshot of the inequalities and the lack of opportunities that continued to confront black communities in the US, focusing mostly on the characteristics of continued (de facto) segregation in society. While not as controversial as other contemporary quantitative research on urban black communities (see Geary, 2015; Moynihan, 1965; Thompson et al., 1967), such approaches cited the problems facing urban black communities as opposed to the sources of those problems, potentially reifying anti-black spatial relations as the norm (McKittrick and Woods, 2007: 6). The works of Harold Rose and Bill Bunge offered the earliest sustained critiques of anti-blackness that offered insight into the root causes of black urban experiences in the discipline of Geography.

Harold Rose was at the forefront of early scholarship on geographies of blackness, as he made inquiries into the conditions in which US black populations lived and the factors that determined those conditions. Taking influence from living in the intensely segregated city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Rose’s work demonstrated that the lived experience of black populations in the US was an isolated, segregated, marginalized one. He based his work on quantitative, scholarly literature; government data from sources like the US Census and public health reports; and emerging social science work on black life in urban spaces, thereby placing most of his focus on the conditions in which black communities lived. This synthesis of quantitative data on urban life and emerging scholarship on urban black experiences made Rose’s studies of geographies of blackness unique to the Geography of the 1960s and 1970s.

For Rose, the 20th-century expansion of ghetto spaces was the result of national demographic and economic shifts. Drawing on the findings from demographers of the era, Rose defined a number of processes that led to black urban segregation, including post-1920s rapid national industrialization, national urban growth, and black outmigration from the US South (Rose, 1969: 3–6). Engagement with policy and urban studies literature showed that ethnic and racial tensions accompanied these shifts and led to the creation of public and private social, economic, and political institutions designed to spatially segregate groups along racial lines (Rose, 1969: 7, 11, 12). Rose maintains that these institutions were the result of white populations’ general unwillingness to share space with black populations, as hostile whites perceived blacks as threatening, invasive, and contaminating (Rose, 1969: 12, 1970: 2, 4). His work showed how black populations’ separation from whites was rooted in long-standing demographic and emotional trends which were informed by white refusal to share space with black populations. Through no choice of their own, blacks thus remained relegated to urban ghettoes. These ghetto formations had significant concrete effects for blacks.

By using data from public sources like the US Census, US Census of Population and Housing, US Department of Labor, and Public Health Reports, Rose concludes that ghettoization curtails black life chances via lack of financial capital (Rose, 1971: 16); lack of black-owned businesses and general employment opportunities (Rose, 1971: 61, 95); low-quality housing (Rose, 1969: 19–20); and precarious health care (Rose, 1971: 126). The lack of opportunity in black ghettoes led to uprisings – phenomena which very much defined the public perception of urban spaces in the years immediately following the Civil Rights Movement (Allen, 1990). Rose’s spatial analysis of riots is based on the findings of Brandeis University’s Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence, sociological scholarship of the time, and civil society organizations like the Urban League. Uprisings resulted in greater police surveillance – a fact that meant ghetto spaces were intensely occupied, yet extremely unprotected (Rose, 1971: 96, 100, 131). These factors led to the creation of what Rose termed ‘the geography of despair’, a common phenomenon across urban territories in the US (Rose, 1978: 464).

Rose’s assessment of this despair was informed not only from public data sources but also from scholarship on criminology, public health, and epidemiology. Increased consumption of alcohol and drugs and deaths from health problems and interpersonal violence punctuated the geography of despair, as these factors were results of, and contributors to, high-risk, high-stress environments (Rose, 1978: 458–459, 461, 464). Rose’s use of quantitative data and research, as well as contemporary social science research on urban black experiences, offered insight into the lived realities of black communities, while also naming racism as a confluence of ‘national mores’ which made these realities possible ( Rose, 1970: 14, 1978: 464). Other geographers writing in the same time period as Rose touched on black communities’ attempts to negotiate the depressed conditions in which they found themselves.

An early pathbreaker in the Quantitative Revolution, Bill Bunge’s experiences living in Detroit, Michigan, pushed him to put quantitative methods to use in service of black urban communities. The late 1960s and early 1970s political climate in Detroit inspired Bunge to use quantitative analysis ‘with social-theoretical critique and with action research in the field’ (Bergmann and Morrill, 2018: 296). Bunge’s fieldwork in Detroit took place during the unrest of the post-Civil Rights Movement and the nascent rise of the Black Power Movement (Bunge, 1974: 485), as black communities’ frustration with the unfulfilled promises of integration manifested in radical grassroots activism (see Davis, 2016; Jackson, 1990; Newton, 2009; Seale, 1991; Ture and Hamilton, 1992).

Bunge’s work in Detroit took place largely in the Fitzgerald neighborhood and was conducted through the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), an activist-scholar organization created through Bunge’s collaboration with local residents. Locally based black women activists like Gwendolyn Warren and Rene Spears were as responsible for the DGEI’s work and approach as Bunge, as they not only participated in research, data collection, and publication, but actually served as the architects for the DGEI’s approach, insisting the organization work on issues immediately pertinent to their community (Heynen, 2013: 747). By taking direction from community activists and members like Warren and Spears, the DGEI and Bunge theorized geographies of blackness through phenomena like wide scale ‘slum’ formation in both Fitzgerald and the US at large, a reality Bunge insists was not created by black communities but rather forced upon them through practices like blockbusting and urban renewal (Bunge, 2011 [1971]: 171, 230). Bunge went further, arguing that on top of living in these marginal locations, ‘automation…made blacks economically worthless and permanently unemployable, therefore rebellious, therefore a threat to the white power structure’ and thus expendable (Bunge, 2011 [1971]: 119) All of these factors, Bunge argues, were the collective result of racism; a violent tendency he argues is practiced exclusively by whites (Bunge, 1974: 485). Bunge thus demonstrates not only how segregation – in the form of slum formation and black relegation to those slums – takes place, but the mechanisms (racism, impoverishment, etc.) that make slum formation a reality. Bunge’s locally based research on such geographies of blackness yielded a number of cartographic representations of the conditions in which he and the DGEI worked.

Bunge’s work with the DGEI treated Detroit community members as ‘students and as professors’ who could actively contribute to the creation of geographic knowledge (DGEI Field Notes, 1969: 4). His work thus contributed to scholarship on Black Geographies by recognizing agentic spatial practices of black populations. For instance, DGEI coupled communal experience with quantitative data from the Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, Metropolitan Fund, Detroit Public Schools, the US Census, and DGEI fieldwork to map educational segregation in Detroit and construct counter-maps, suggesting a more just redistricting of Detroit public schools (DGEI Field Notes, 1970).

DGEI and community participants further mapped and analyzed ‘health hazards, income flows, traffic flows, death rates, and other variables of concern to’ community members, creating maps that depicted where commuters ran over black children pedestrians in downtown Detroit; the distinction between majority white and majority black neighborhoods in terms of litter, green spaces, recreational equipment, and children’s time with their parents; absentee landownership in majority black neighborhoods; and residential density across the city (DGEI Field Notes, 1971). All of this research, while guided by Bunge, was conducted by Black Detroiters – those ‘who [had] lived and experienced these things [under study]’ and who wanted to address issues like ‘death, hunger, pain…and frustration in children’ (DGEI Field Notes, 1971: 4, 10). Bunge’s work, then, was reliant on the populations of Detroit whose lives had remained oppressed in the wake of the passage of Civil Rights laws, and who had publicly called attention to this fact through their activism.³

Geography of the 1960s and 1970s offered a quantitative scholarship on geographies of blackness and, to a lesser extent, Black Geographies. Both Rose and Bunge’s methods were in line with the prevailing Quantitative Revolution, however, their quantitative approaches to geographies of blackness offered a sustained engagement with the experiences of black populations in the US – something other geographers had only done in an ad hoc manner. Furthermore, while heavily quantitative, both scholars also named specific societal characteristics as the root causes of the anti-blackness they witnessed. Both Rose and Bunge posited phenomena like generations-long racism and economic shifts like automation as some of the underlying causes of this black exclusion. Bunge’s work also demonstrated an early example of research on Black Geographies, as he drew on, and spoke to, how black communities responded to this violence, thus portraying the spatial agency of black actors. Later work on both geographies of blackness and Black Geographies would draw on quantitative data, while also offering structural analysis of the factors leading to the spatial marginalization of black populations.

IV Qualitative Shift

Geographers of the 1960s and 1970s had used quantitative methods to demonstrate the marginalization black communities faced, while offering abbreviated commentary on phenomena like political economy and racism as factors leading to this marginalization. The qualitative shift in Geography brought new forms of scholarship that offered structural explanations regarding the social, political, and economic factors that influenced the production of space (Kwan and Schwanen, 2009). The work of scholars like David Harvey (2009 [1973]), Neil Smith (2008 [1984]), and Doreen Massey (1995 [1984]), among others, employed Marxist analyses of political economy to uncover the forces at play in the creation of urban spaces of the Global North. Still, race did not figure prominently into the critical, Marxist turn.

Near the turn of the 20th century, geographers began explicitly articulating the question of blackness with a Marxist analysis of political economy, joining a well-established group of Diasporic scholars that had drawn on historical, historiographic, economic, sociological, and quantitative sources to show the centrality of race and anti-blackness in global capitalist development (Cox, 1970 [1948]; Marable, 2015 [1983]; Robinson, 2000 [1983]; Rodney, 1981, 2011 [1972]; Williams, 1994 [1944]). This turn toward merging Critical Marxist Geography with Black Studies also coincided with new expressions of Anti-Blackness in society. Whereas geographers of the 1960s and 1970s had explored black lived experiences in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, later scholars analyzed Black populations in the wake of a variety of other generationally defining Anti-Black phenomena. At the forefront of the geographical push to understand the intersection of Anti-Black racism and capitalism was Bobby Wilson.

1 Critical Marxist Shift

In the 1970s and 1980s, Bobby Wilson’s work was very much in line with the quantitative trends of 1960s and 1970s geographies of blackness (Wilson, 1977, 1985, 1989). By the 1990s, however, Wilson turned his attention from examining segregation in a statistical manner to discussing, in detail, the mechanisms by which segregation continued. Specifically, Wilson theorized the production of space vis-à-vis the history of capitalist development in the US South, with special focus on Birmingham, Alabama (Wilson, 1995). From the late 20th century into the early 21st century, Wilson pushed Marxist geography to account for race’s role in capitalist modes of production. In doing this, he not only innovated geographic studies of political economy but also drew on, and contributed to, already-established quantitative methods of analyzing racism, while posing some important ontological considerations regarding the centrality of race in the production of modern space. His methodology has yielded an oeuvre of geographies of blackness that offers a detailed picture of how labor, race, and capitalism shape black experiences in Alabama’s largest city from the antebellum period through the 21st century.

Wilson carefully covers over a century of Birmingham history. He shows how capital routinely resolved crises of accumulation and challenges posed by labor through the exacerbation of assumed racial differences among Birmingham’s working class and thereby created racialized ‘divisions of labor to increase profits’ (Wilson, 2000a: 1). He expands Marxist theories of labor exploitation with this approach, centering anti-black racism in capitalist development by planting the ‘flesh’ of Birmingham’s black experience on the ‘bones’ of a Marxist critique of political economy (Wilson, 2002: 33). For example, Wilson’s reading of historical scholarship reveals how Birmingham planters and industrialists overcame problems like lack of investment capital via the hyper-exploitation of black underpaid and convict labor, as well as maintaining black laborers in subordinated positions and aggravating already-existing anti-black racism (Wilson, 1992: 184–186, 2000a: 112–118, 137–139). The preservation of race-based exploitation set the groundwork for both entrenched segregation and a highly adaptable capitalist structure.

Wilson supplements his insertion of Birmingham’s racialized history into Marxist analysis with quantitative data that demonstrated the spatial effects of racism present in 19th- and 20th-century Birmingham. By drawing on sources like the US Census and different city ordinances, Wilson shows how the racial machinations of Birmingham’s capitalist class determined urban residential and work spaces. Quantitative census, city, and penal data illustrate the prevalence of black surplus labor, rise of black convict laborers, legal segregation ordinances, and the relegation of Birmingham’s black workers to menial jobs, among other phenomena (Wilson, 2000a: 107–109, 115–116, 157, 215–216). The use of this quantitative data helps reflect black working-class experiences in 19th- and 20th-century Birmingham, as it demonstrates the spaces in which black populations were forced to live and work as a result of the political economy prevalent in Birmingham during this period of analysis. Furthermore, Wilson shows how these experiences of racialized labor exploitation evidence an example of Marxist theories of surplus value, as racism aided in the capitalist class’s ability to extract ever-increasing value from the Birmingham working class.

Wilson contributes to Black Geographies by charting shifts in Birmingham’s political economy as experienced, and driven, by black communities, as well. Drawing on historical scholarship about the Civil Rights Movement, as well as literature about the Movement and urban black experiences from the 1970s, he argues that by relying on the guidance of a ‘neo-black elite’, civil rights struggle turned away from a structural critique of capitalism and instead looked to capitalist corporations as distributors of various social, political, economic, and legal goods (Wilson, 2000b: 125, 127, 201). By breaking with a class-based approach, the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement separated black struggle from wider labor struggles and a more collaborative, inclusive form of politics. Wilson shows how black communities’ decision to pursue a political struggle based on identity versus class ultimately meant a preservation of the capitalist mode of production, which led to even further, more pernicious forms of segregation following the end of the Civil Rights Movement.

Whereas Fordism and early industrialization was possible, in part, due to the spatial and political separation of white and black workers, post-Fordism deepened black marginalization through capital flight, automation, and cybernation ( Wilson, 2000b: 152, 162). Post-Fordism had effects that persist into the present. Wilson draws on research evaluating the long-term effects of Civil Rights legislation to show that 21st-century global capital has led to black unemployment and poverty levels twice that of the rest of the national population and a segregated learning environment for most black students, nationally (Wilson, 2007: 97–98). His decades-long historical, regional, Marxist, and quantitative research on geographies of blackness in Birmingham leaves Wilson with some significant conclusions about race, class, and capitalism.

Seeing race as neither a serendipitous phenomenon nor an example of false consciousness, Wilson makes clear that capitalism requires racism for the reproduction of capitalist modes of production (Wilson, 2000a: 231–233). He maintains that analyses of historical materialism should not assume blacks to be part of the working class nor equate their condition with that of the proletariat (Wilson, 2000a: 2). Race, he argues, has an ontological status all its own, affecting the economic, political and ideological realms of social formation (Wilson, 1992: 174). Ascribing race an ontological status was a unique approach within late 20th-century Critical Marxist Geography.

Wilson is clear that orthodox Marxist theories only go so far in explaining the history of industry and labor in Birmingham, arguing that ‘contrary to Marxist theory, capital development in much of the modern world left race-connected practices largely intact’ (Wilson, 2000a: 171, 231). Indeed, Wilson indicts Marx, Engels, and ‘neo-Marxists’ for under-theorizing race and the centrality of black underdevelopment to the development of capitalism (Wilson, 2000a: 231–232). Wilson’s diverse methodological approach both contributed to, and created new spaces within, the Marxist trend in Critical Geography. This approach is an example of geographical Black Marxism, as it pushed Geography to re-examine taken for granted concepts around political economy. By using Marxism as a framework along with a plurality of sources reflecting on geographies of blackness in Birmingham, Wilson was able to innovate Critical Geography’s conversations on political economy by introducing the topic of racial capitalism, while also acknowledging the ontological importance of assumed human difference in society. Wilson’s work suggests that racism, segregation, exclusion, and capitalism all walk hand in hand. Other scholars demonstrate this fact with respect to other locations around the US.

2 Regional (Black) Political Economies

Clyde Woods, like Wilson, merges a close historical study of black experiences with an analysis of political economy. He closely scrutinizes the persistent nature of anti-black racism in the Mississippi Delta while also paying attention to the ways in which black populations analyze, and respond to, these violent developments. His emphasis on structural forces and black communal responses to those forces makes clear contributions to scholarship on both geographies of blackness and Black Geographies. Woods identifies the Mississippi Delta as a region dominated by ‘the plantation and neoplantation development tradition of preserving racial and class inequality’ (Woods, 2017: 258). His work analyzes Delta history from precolonial times through the post-Katrina moment of the early 21st century. Drawing on a trove of political and cultural histories of the region, he shows how land and resource monopoly, as well as the routine displacement of black communities, are typical Delta phenomena which shape the region’s geographies of blackness. Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the hegemonic ‘bloc’ which dominates society takes shape in Woods’ discussion of the plantation bloc, a small, powerful, influential group of people in the Delta who are able to routinely reify anti-blackness and working-class exploitation to secure disproportionate benefits.

He draws on documents from the Cotton Planters’ Convention, Illinois Central Railroad Company, Southern Alluvial Land Association, Mississippi Valley Committee, US Census, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, state data on child welfare and family services, and – extensively – the Delta Council.⁴ His use of these primary sources lays bare the discourses and processes by which the Delta plantation bloc conceived of, and executed, various instantiations of regional hegemony throughout the past several centuries (Woods, 1998, 2017). Secondary sources like Critical Geography and political economic literature and the regional newspapers Memphis Commercial Appeal, Arkansas Democrat, Memphis Press Scimitar, Jackson Advocate, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, and New Orleans Times-Picayune also reflect the unfolding of plantation logics in the Delta.

With these sources, Woods contributes to literature on geographies of blackness by demonstrating how spatial, political, and economic trends like slavery, sharecropping, enclosures, anti-black populist movements, neoliberal austerity measures, asset-stripping, extractive industries, and, ultimately, the effects of Hurricane Katrina, all represent different manifestations of plantation and neo-plantation relations in the Delta. He evidences how episodes like Katrina are far from ‘natural’, and are, rather, outcomes of the dehumanizing agenda of the plantation bloc (McKittrick and Woods, 2006: 2). Woods does not solely focus on the machinations of plantations elites, however, as the willingness of black communities to shape their own lives comprises a central portion of Woods’ approach to Black Geographies.

Black analysis of, and resistance to, the violence they face in the Delta emerges through the Blues tradition, ‘an unapologetic celebration of life, resistance, spiritual affirmation, community, social and humanity, and the highest levels, the ‘upper rooms’ of African American culture and philosophy’ (Woods, 1998: 20). The Blues, as a multifaceted spatial expression of human being, is a major shaper and example of the Delta’s Black Geographies. Woods reveals the analyses inherent to the artistic expressions of traditional Blues artists, examining the lyrics and biographical information of Blues legends like WC Handy, Bessie Smith, Sippie Wallace, Charley Patton, Son House, Bumble Bee Slim, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Willie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Jelly Roll Morton, Smiley Lewis, Will Stark, Willie Foster, and Early Palmer, among others. He also looks at the work of artists like Tupac Shakur, Juvenile, Scarface, and Master P, as further exemplars of Blues epistemologies and black analysis of plantation logics (Woods, 1998, 2017). The various artistic manifestations of the Blues act as a kind of sonic archive of political analysis and action that both condemn the violence of the plantation bloc and proffer alternative forms of knowing and being in the world. Alongside these artistic expressions, Woods draws on files and archives from the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Delta Ministry, and personal interviews he conducted with a wide array of New Orleans activists and social workers, who offer empirical examples of political organizing by Blues actors.

These primary sources are augmented by scholarly work on the history of the Mississippi Delta and the writings and speeches of black activists who shaped the Blues ethic in the Delta, such as Ida B Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. These sources further show how Blues epistemologies took and continue to take shape in concrete political action in the Delta. Blues epistemologies led to mass movements in the Delta such as Reconstruction; the United Negro Improvement Association and Pan Africanism; the institutional strivings of the ‘Double V’ generation; and the ‘Second Reconstruction’ of the Civil Rights Movement and its various outcomes (Woods, 2017). These political movements embodied the Blues epistemology and ontology as a viable means of knowing and being in the world that did and do not rely on the violence and exploitation typical of the plantation bloc (Woods, 2017: 35). The struggle between plantation and Blues epistemologies is the dialectic that has pushed the different political, economic, and social transitions in the Delta throughout generations, as Blues practitioners have relentlessly challenged the plantation bloc’s hegemony, leading to the constant creation and recreation of spatial relations and arrangements.

Woods’ work, then, is a deep dive into the Mississippi Delta and the generations-long struggle between the capitalist plantation bloc and the black and working-class communities struggling to create a more egalitarian society. His sweeping history of the present draws on scholarly sources, personal interviews, archives, census data, state data and reports, files from civil society organizations, newspaper articles, activist literature, and artistic expressions, among others, demonstrating his ability to employ a wide array of quantitative, qualitative, and empirical data to paint a detailed, nuanced picture of the Delta and the ongoing struggles occurring in the region. By inserting black knowledges, experiences, and spatial praxes into Gramscian and Marxist theories, his analysis of plantation political economies and Blues geographies attends to both geographies of blackness and Black Geographies. Furthermore, he recognizes the onto-epistemological stakes of the Blues as a mode of analysis and blueprint that offers more just ways of living in the world. The multi-method regional approach to understanding the anti-black racism inherent to the capitalist political economy applies to locations outside the US South, as well.

Attending to the late 20th century, Ruth Gilmore draws out the ways in which incarceration came to dominate the California landscape as a response to economic and political crises, as well as the role blackness and black experiences played in the rise of mass incarceration and the responses to incarceration.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a number of urban uprisings and the emergence of Black Power as manifestations of black discontent with the chronic un- and underemployment characteristic of post-WWII US urban spaces (Gilmore, 2007: 36–39). In addition to this unrest and radical political organizing, Gilmore shows how Marx’s concept of the tax revolt occurred among California’s capitalist class. This tax revolt contributed to federal withdrawal from offering states aid, leading to a significant decrease in social spending at the state level, and increased poverty for black and brown communities. Political elites and the mainstream media cast these immiserated communities as undeserving of quickly retreating public aid, leading to the law and order approach of politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (Gilmore, 2007: 39–40, 57). Like the authors mentioned above, Gilmore employs quantitative data to spatialize these historical facts. Data from the California State Controller, Department of Finance, and Department of Corrections reflect the statistical decline in manufacturing jobs following the end of WWII and the rise in proprietors’ income that made possible, and continued after, the tax revolt (Gilmore, 2007: 51, 59). The confluence of real poverty, imagined dereliction, and emphasis on punishing and isolating the black communities of California set the stage for incarceration on a scale never before seen in the world.

The siting of prisons came about due to surpluses of land, finance capital, and state capacity. These three forms of surplus, along with the identification of black communities as a problem in need of addressing presented ripe conditions for incarceration. Gilmore draws on a rich cache of sources to explicate these interacting surpluses, citing Marxist geographers and World-Systems Analysis; data from the California Department of Finance, California State Public Works Board, and California Department of Corrections; scholarly and policy-oriented literature on California’s 20th-century economic, agricultural, and political shifts; scholarly and journalistic literature on national political economic trends; and scholarly literature describing the racialized effects of these shifts. Using these varied resources, she shows how investments of financial capital essentially built prisons on otherwise vacant farmland in California, while state police forces worked to capture ‘surplus’ black and brown populations (Gilmore, 2007: 58–84).

Gilmore evidences the efficacy of Marx’s theory of capital’s need of a reserve army of labor, using California state and federal reports about incarceration, scholarship on policing, and criminal justice industry literature on emerging penal laws to show how racialized populations – and disproportionately black populations – made ‘surplus’ by capital were subsequently policed and incarcerated (Gilmore, 2007: 108, 113). In her explanation of late 20th-century hyper-incarceration, Gilmore contributes to conversations on geographies of blackness by showing how various factors in the California, US, and global political economy led to the disproportionate criminalization and imprisonment of Black Californians. Black Geographies also figures into her analysis, as the political approach of groups like the Black Panthers served as a justification for incarceration, while groups informed by black spatial praxes are currently at the forefront of anti-prison activism.

Gilmore appropriately points out that a number of coalitions across California have fought against incarceration and its negative effects. She specifically highlights the work of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) – an organization based in Los Angeles with which she worked directly. Gilmore draws on her experience with the organization, critical race studies literature, scholarship on gender and black feminism, work on the intersections of gender and political economy, and scholarly literature on black history in reflecting on the significance of Mothers ROC. The organization draws on generations of black women’s communal, oppositional politics of radical mothering to cultivate alternative notions of being and belonging in the world. For example, family members grieving the police murder of a loved one help solidify an ‘identity of purpose’ that holds up the state as an object to be resisted, while communal prayer meetings establish an ethos of propriety over one’s individual children, as well as those of the wider community, thereby affirming the humanity of individual community members (Gilmore, 2007: 202, 221–222).

The stakes of this human affirming are made even clearer as Gilmore narrates scenes of communal analysis, where group members from Mothers ROC collectively develop a grounded theory of state violence and the differential value the state places on populations (Gilmore, 2007: 224–227). These different collective actions draw on the experiences of black women and communities, as blacks have most intensely felt the effects of legal violence and have established techniques of social mothering due to such racial terror (Gilmore, 2007: 236–237). Thus, Black Geographies play an important role in combating the effects of incarceration, as the analyses and relationships created by black women struggling for prison abolition inform the approach taken by groups like Mothers ROC.

While acknowledging the reality of incarceration across racial lines, blackness remains crucial to Gilmore's analysis of California’s system of mass incarceration. The rise of mass imprisonment in California occurred in part through the reification of black dehumanization and its effects disproportionately reach black communities. Nonetheless, these processes meet resistance in black communities and in movements like Mothers ROC which adopt black practices of social mothering and take for granted the humanity of society’s dehumanized populations. Gilmore’s approach engages a political economic analysis of California, relying on quantitative data to bolster her claims, while simultaneously offering ontological reflections on the human stakes of prisons and prison abolition via her direct participation in prison abolition activism.

In the collective works of Wilson, Woods, and Gilmore, we see a variety of methods that contribute to understanding how the capitalist political economy takes shape through various forms of anti-blackness. The work of these three scholars point out how capitalism in the US depends on the isolation, discrimination, segregation, and oppression of black populations. The individual projects of these authors rely on close place-based analyses, as they show how the overarching principles of capitalism take root in the specifics of cities (Birmingham), regions (the Mississippi Delta), and states (California). All three authors draw on, and are very much part of, the conversation around Marxism and political economy in Critical Geography. Nonetheless, they are unique in that they center black populations as agents and actors in the unfolding of capitalism in the US and globally. Wilson, Woods, and Gilmore thus expand geographic interventions on political economy by evidencing the importance of a phenomenon (blackness) and (black) populations that are otherwise not discussed in detail in Critical Marxist Geography.

In uncovering the intimate connections between capitalism and anti-black racism, these scholars also employ quantitative data to represent the statistical realities black people have faced as capitalism innovates. In this way, the critical turn taken by geographers studying blackness continues to draw on quantitative work – as previous scholars had – to explain the political economic structures affecting black communities, as well as the concrete outcomes of these structures. Furthermore, Woods (2017), Gilmore (2002), and Wilson (2000a) all concede that, while black populations remain unquestionably tied to capitalist shifts, these same populations remain affected by logics that exist beyond the questions of class and the economy. Put another way, they all suggest that race has an ontological component. This question of ontology is more fully interrogated in the work of Katherine McKittrick.

V Ontological Reflections

Katherine McKittrick’s work draws on a variety of Diasporic voices to uncover how, at the core of dominant, modern notions of space lie geographies structured in human disempowerment and dispossession, which are, nonetheless, opportunities for new ways of being human. McKittrick’s approach shows how racial violence gives spatial form to dehumanization, making various forms of spatial belonging conceptually unavailable to black people within dominant landscapes (McKittrick, 2006: 3). Nonetheless, black populations find ways to create life in the crevices of power. McKittrick’s work draws on historical episodes, pre-emancipation archives, works of fiction, social science research, music, poetry, and present-day realities to show how, in the present, Black Geographies, often perceived as ‘emptied out of life’ and thus as ‘the lands of no one’ nonetheless offer countless examples of struggle for life (McKittrick, 2013: 7).

In her exploration of the anti-blackness inherent to modern spatial practices, McKittrick draws on historical catastrophes, like the slave ship Zong, in which the ship’s crew murdered over one hundred slaves to collect insurance and shorten the time at sea. In reflecting on this mass murder, McKittrick comments, ‘one cannot help but think about these deliberate killings alongside a whole host of contemporary premature and preventable deaths that continue to realize the closed system – deaths that are too many to list and too many to grieve (miners shot, hoodies, killing black youths to bring silence to black music, executing the unarmed, and more)’ (McKittrick, 2015: 11). Linking historical events to present-day anti-black violence like the murders of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis – to which McKittrick obviously alludes – evinces her charting of the ontological threads tying together past and present.

In addition to historical events, McKittrick uses literary sources for insight into black experiences. Indeed, her discussion of the Zong relies on the poetry of Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip, whose poem about this maritime massacre offers a critical, creative reflection on ‘anti-black violence in order to demonstrate the ways in which transatlantic slavery prefigures our contemporary planetary troubles and a closed biocentric system that thrives on racial terror’ (McKittrick, 2016: 15). Fictional works, like William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, provide the basis for McKittrick’s theorization of the association of black populations with ‘uninhabitable’ space (McKittrick, 2013: 6). Her combination of historiographic and artistic sources help chart the different mutations of anti-blackness through phenomena like the plantation.

The plantation as a geography of anti-black violence and the origin point of emergent humanities looms large in McKittrick’s work. To reflect on the significance of plantations, she examines the role of the plantation in the unfolding of world history. Turning to the work of Caribbean economist George Beckford, McKittrick argues that trans-Atlantic slavery and plantations underpinned the modern global economy and had economic and ontological ramifications that lived beyond the moment of emancipation (McKittrick, 2013: 3). McKittrick insists that the same logics that underpinned the creation of the plantation during chattel slavery inform present-day practices of decay, incarceration, pollution, gentrification, white flight, racial profiling, police brutality, and ‘urbicide’ (McKittrick, 2011: 951–952). She thus links historical and theoretical considerations on plantations with work on present-day black experiences, noting that we must ‘not to conflate time and space but rather notice how The Zong moves forward in time and becomes implicated in a similar circular closed system’ (McKittrick, 2016: 11). McKittrick’s rich, trans-historical approach to geographies of blackness draws on a variety of sources to show how anti-blackness, as an ontological phenomenon, has played a role in shaping space for centuries, albeit in distinct ways. Nonetheless, McKittrick also insists that, as geographers, ‘rather than simply analytically reprising violence’ we ‘puzzle out new and unexpected – and undisciplined and unacceptable – modes of being human’ (McKittrick, 2014: 18, 2017: 98–99). Her reflections on the black potential for realizing new humanisms draws on a number of sources.

McKittrick contributes to conversations on Black Geographies by acknowledging the many forms of resistance and human invention present in Diasporic black practices like creolization, the Blues, marronage, and revolution. She draws on black scholars and artists from Canada, the US, the Caribbean, and Europe, such as Clyde Woods, Kamau Braithwaite, Edouard Glissant, CLR James, Michaeline Crichlow, Paul Gilroy, Ntozake Change, Sylvia Wynter, and Stuart Hall. These Diasporic thinkers express their analyses through approaches as diverse as poetry, theatre, historiography, critiques of political economy, and philosophy. Beyond these individuals, McKittrick’s archival work calls attention to everyday forms of resistance through readings of black women’s actions while on the slave auction block, while also engaging slave narratives as records of the knowledge and sacrifice necessary to gain freedom (McKittrick, 2006). McKittrick also takes music seriously as an expression and form of analysis.

She turns to the work of Sylvia Wynter to argue that the processes of human (re)invention that took place among enslaved black populations on plantations ‘were, largely, musical inventions that, in their waveform and lyrical enunciations, expressed new forms of what it means to be human’ (McKittrick, 2016: 81). Per McKittrick’s reading of Wynter, black music such as ‘reggae, the blues, and jazz’ exists alongside ‘marronages, mutinies, funerals, carnivals, dramas, visual arts, fictions, poems, fights, dances,…[and] revolts’ as ‘a revolutionary act that keeps heretical (nonmarket) time, negates black nonbeing by honoring and recording black life, repurposes and interrupts linear temporalities, and is expressed in the midst of a violent and stigmatizing knowledge system’ (McKittrick, 2016: 88). McKittrick cites the lyrics of Stevie Wonder, Erykah Badu, Nina Simone, and Kanye West as examples of black musical invention that diagnose anti-blackness while also evidencing the creative forms of expression and escape blacks employ.

McKittrick’s work offers deep reflections on the ontological stakes of (anti-)blackness in the modern world, as she shows how anti-blackness is a core condition for modern spatial practices and notions of being, while black creativity is a key to new forms of humanism. This approach contributes to geographies of blackness by recognizing the realities of anti-blackness in shaping the lived experiences of black populations, globally. Nonetheless, McKittrick does not focus solely on anti-black oppression. She engages Black Geographies to emphasize the past and present ways in which black communities and individuals have imagined and concretely established alternatives to anti-blackness, while also touching on the future potentials that Black Geographies entails. Her work overlaps with the scholars mentioned above. Her discussions of the political economic effects of the plantation resonate with work on the centrality of racism and anti-blackness to capitalist development. McKittrick’s ontological approach is distinct from, but certainly related to, that of Wilson, Woods, and Gilmore. Her work offers expansive explanations of the role of (anti-)blackness in the modern epoch, while also engaging how black populations conceive of, and create space, thereby expanding the ruminations of the other scholars profiled here.

VI Conclusion

Geographers’ engagements with the question of blackness and black experiences have drawn on a vast array of sources and methodological approaches. Arts and humanities, public data, activism, personal interviews, Marxist theories, and historical and historiographic scholarship, among other sources, have all played a part in the work of the authors mentioned in this article. The emphases of the scholars presented herein are distinct. Quantitative representations of urban black perspectives; black experiences and struggles as illustrative and corrective of Marxist critiques of political economy; and Diasporic reflections on the ontological stakes of (anti-)blackness comprise the main emphases of Rose and Bunge; Wilson, Woods, and Gilmore; and McKittrick, respectively. While these scholars underscore different aspects of black experiences, their studies of geographies of blackness contribute to the Black Studies’ ethic of critiquing Western Civilization and acknowledging the possibility of other forms of being. What is more, their critique of Western civilization is very much a critique of the prevailing manifestation of anti-black modernity that each author witnessed at the time of their writing. In addition to this commonality, these scholars’ areas of inquiry have overlaps, as well.

Rose and Bunge are hardly the only ones to draw on quantitative data, as most of the other scholars mentioned in the article draw on data from sources like the census, federal and state institutions, and public health organizations to illustrate their points. Wilson, Woods, and Gilmore offer the most thorough interrogation of capitalist political economy vis-à-vis black populations, but all of the others also discuss political economic issues such as employment, housing, automation, real estate development, urban renewal, and incarceration. Finally, McKittrick provides the most extended reflection on (anti-)blackness and ontology, however, all of the authors profiled acknowledge the determinant nature of anti-blackness qua racism in the modern spatial formations they critique. Some also point out the ontological possibilities of black struggles against anti-blackness. Thus, despite different emphases, the authors do share some commonality in approach. They evidence even more overlap in their critique of modernity and in their ability to advance geographic research beyond traditional disciplinary barriers.

All of the authors mentioned in detail here employ a multi-method approach to push a Black Studies approach in Geography, pointing out the anti-blackness of prevailing forms of modern space, accounting for the shortcomings of the overall discipline of Geography, and exploring, in different ways, what a more just world might look like. Nearly all of the authors described here address, in some way, Black Geographies as the agentic spatial practices of black populations and how they seek to create ways of existing not typified by anti-blackness. In doing this, the authors demand a more radical enactment of doing geographical work. Their methodologies evidence how dominant geographical research engenders ‘a kind of willful blindness’ to historical and contemporary experiences of blackness (Morgan, 2016: 188), while insisting that, despite this blindness, black communities and individuals exist as knowledgeable human beings capable of realizing more just spatial praxes. With this expansive methodology, these scholars point out not only the blind spots of disciplinary trends like the Quantitative Revolution and Critical Marxist Geography but also critique wider Western civilization from which these trends are born, positing the necessity and possibility of more human geographies. These varied approaches have spawned subsequent generations of geographical work on blackness.

Emerging work on geographies of blackness and Black Geographies has maintained the multi-method, interdisciplinary nature of its predecessors. Geographers engaging questions of blackness conduct research around the world, grappling with questions and different manifestations of (anti-)blackness in Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean (Berman, 2019; Bledsoe, 2019; Bressey, 2009; Goffe, 2017, Mollett, 2011; Hawthorne, 2019b). Others have sought to explicitly foreground questions of (anti-)blackness and political economy via the environment (Pulido, 2016; Vasudevan, 2019; Williams, 2018; Wright, 2018). Still others have forged new geographical histories of the present by reflecting on how little-studied black histories have played a central role in the creation of our present world (Bledsoe, 2017; McCutcheon, 2019; Meché, 2020; Winston, 2019; Wright, 2020). All of these works employ a variety of methods and frameworks, drawing on (among other things) archival sources, personal interviews and focus groups, national, regional, and city-based histories, and political ecology literature. This diverse body of literature shows how varied geographical engagements with blackness can be. What must remain central to emerging scholarship, however, is that which has driven geographies of blackness and Black Geographies thus far: a commitment to critiquing the closed notions of being and spatial formations inherent to Western civilization through a centering of black experiences and ways of being in the world. It is this ethic of black struggle that gave birth to Black Studies and this ethic which must continue to animate Geography’s engagement with blackness.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Chris Courtheyn for constructive and helpful feedback during initial drafts of this article; Madelaine Cahuas for critical insights on later iterations of the article; three anonymous reviewers for help in clarifying the article's main arguments; and Nina Laurie for supportive editorial guidance throughout.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Adam Bledsoe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota. His work considers the ways in which Black Diasporic populations critique and offer alternatives to the violence and Anti-Blackness of modernity.

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