A Black British response to Rashad Shabazz: ‘We gon be alright:’ Containment,creativity and the birth of hip-hop

My thanks go to Hester Parr and Mona Domosh for inviting me to review Rashad Shabazz’s book ‘Spatializing Blackness,’ ¹ out of which his keynote, at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference 2019, arose. The invitation gave me the opportunity to read a book whose authority, scope, erudition and timing give it the status of a Black Geographies manifesto. It states repeatedly, in resonant and memorable phrases, how Geography is implicated in US structural racism, and therefore its analysis is fundamentally relevant to global anti-racist politics – for example: ‘Geography makes social and political inequalities visible by situating them within physical space’. ² It contemplates the ways in which geographical practices, such as planning and architecture, have direct consequences for Black communities, ‘remaking the city while containing blackness’. ³ And it reveals how the containment of blackness happens at a range of scales: ‘Rather than operating on a larger scale, as police power did [he looks at this in detail in later chapters] carceral power in the kitchenette was scaled down, bringing it into the domestic lives of Black Chicagoans’. ⁴

In thinking about those spaces, the book works with and through a range of geographers and a range of Black scholars, both academics and those who are writing from prison or who are writing literary works. I think it is true to say that the later chapters are not quite so steeped in this range of Black scholarship, and I am very glad to see the work on hip hop develop further in his presentation today.

What Shabazz does even more consistently and deliberately in Spatializing Blackness is to engage with feminist literature in order to ‘examine the social, historical, institutional and spatial production of masculinity’. ⁵ The upshot of this, and the last but not least important element of the Black-Geographies-manifesto quality of the book is a focus on Black agency. We see this in terms of reaction (as when black men’s reaction to the containment of the kitchenettes is to flee) and in terms of resistance (e.g. in the religion-inspired discipline that Black gang leaders were able to draw on as a resource to organise gang members within prison). Most powerfully, Shabazz reveals Black people’s spatial agency, for example in the rise of urban agriculture amongst Chicago’s black communities, in which they are not only caring for themselves by growing and eating fresh food (in contrast to governments and planners who have contained them and not cared for them), but where they are also ‘changing the landscape’. ⁶ Memorably, Shabazz concludes that this spatial agency ‘shows that poor and working-class people can be architects and planners’. ⁷

What interests me about the work that Shabazz has presented at the conference is its contemplation of Black music as arising out of the spatiality of the city, or music as a spatial practice. In his presentation at the RACE working group’s pre-conference event, Shabazz considered Prince and the Minneapolis Sound. His fascinating analysis showed that, though a global icon, Prince was not a deterritorialised musical genius. The phenomenon that was Prince was produced within a musical landscape that threw up a wide range of notable performers, and Prince was as much a product of an education system that (unlike in many other US cities) really invested in music education within the state education system, as he was a product of his musically-talented parents. Prince also gave back to his city, to the library system, through his estate, Paisley Park, as well as his generosity in relation to a range of women performers globally.

It was through Shabazz’s analysis of Prince that I, as a Black British geographer, began to be able to see the very personal relevance of Shabazz’s analyses for me and my work. I’m not ashamed to say that Prince was my first screen crush: I saw a beautiful young Black man, a gifted musician, but also a person whose body moved mesmerisingly, skilfully, completely within his own controlled choreography. My own work on dance has recently considered embodied movement in and through the city. ⁸ It considers how the spaces in and through which Black bodies (indeed all bodies) move, the architecture and planned environments, might choreograph our movements. To really reflect on choreography, rather than just performance, is to consider the power of buildings, structures, textures, surfaces in relation to the configuration and flow of bodies. And to consider the power of British cities to assist in choreographing the movement of Black bodies is inevitably to think about the internal and external geographies of British cities, the transnational trajectories cutting through them – in short their colonial connections, their postcolonial structures and their decolonial potential.

In the space of containment that Shabazz so ably describes in the US, in the context of the ‘prison-industrial complex,‘ Black music and dance are forms of personal expression that are inevitably forms of counter-carceral agency. Shabazz’s paper refers to Parliament Funkadelic’s (1978) global hit ‘One Nation Under a Groove’: ‘Here’s our chance to dance our way, out of our constrictions’. ⁹ And that took me right back to the 1970s and 80s, to dark and sweaty nightclubs, where this was the track, this was the tune, that got us all moving together in our packed and constricted space, in a two-step side-to-side that was always highlighted by someone blowing a whistle. At that time, as young people who were still being called ‘second generation immigrants’ in the UK, in a time characterised by what I have referred to as ‘decolonial churn,’ ¹⁰ dancing together was not just a release: it was a planting of our bodies determinedly and repeatedly in place, a corporeal affirmation of grounding, or perhaps more succinctly, these sweaty dances were our groundings. ¹¹

Although containment is an important part of Black male experience in the UK, ¹² the divisive discussions around Brexit, ¹³ combined with the painful and ongoing experiences of the Windrush scandal, have revealed that the discourse of expulsion remains a highly important constriction out of which Black British people must continue to dance our way. The Windrush scandal broke in 2018, when it became clear that the UK government was systematically disenfranchising and deporting people who had come from the Caribbean as young children, as part of the so-called Windrush generation. ¹⁴ The Windrush scandal revealed what Black British people already knew but perhaps had begun to hope we could forget: that the connection between Black and British is still, oh still, not settled – it is yet still to be argued and affirmed. To move through a city that has shaped you, or to dance in a packed inner-city club with a multiracial crowd of people who are dancing together, is to feel a real sense of actually-existing belonging, of not just having a right to be here, but of feeling a rightness in being here. Black Geographies in Britain will be an important arena for reinforcing this ongoing embodied work.