Black Spatial Storylines: Connections of Black Space,Sound and Story as Pedagogy

Abstract

Black education has interrogated race, context, and power questions, yet these practices spanning geographies and learning contexts have not always been valued as spatial knowledge. Further, Black scholars have carved out spaces that honor the communal and spatial sensibilities of Black students, educators, and communities. Black geographies thought can help us reshape how we understand and interrogate issues within education and learning with attention to anti-blackness, futurities, imagining, placemaking, and efforts to create a sense of belonging despite perpetual unbelongingness in dominant educational and learning spaces. Thus, our piece engages with Black Geographies to emphasize the Black radical traditions of space and freedom-making to reorganize our approaches to pedagogy and storytelling. We engage what we call Black Spatial Storylines through our shared and individual stories. We present multiple vignettes and examples to model the ways Black Sound, particularly hip-hop, invites us to engage Black Spatial Storylines as both methodological and pedagogical techniques that start at Blackness. Not only do we highlight and use our own stories as examples, we detail how this process shifts our understanding of Black urban life, and allows us to reorient our educational praxis through Blackness. We conclude with suggested pathways for future applications of a Black geographies framework to education and learning, including the abundance that is the interweaving of Blackness. Thus, we hope to honor and uplift Black communities’ spatial knowledge by formulating our foundational understandings of Black spatial knowledge and the role it plays in education and learning studies.

Keywords

place space black spatial storylines black education hip hop pedagogy black storytelling emplacement

Introduction

Over the last 50 plus years, hip hop has served as a storytelling technique that supports Black resistance, Black life, and teaching and learning methods too. This music and cultural movement has served as a means of calling attention to hardships like urban decay, policing, and gentrification, in addition to joy, hope, and building self-determined futures and community amongst one another. Further, hip hop has impacted various disciplines and fields, including educational and learning settings, to orchestrate pedagogical techniques that celebrate Blackness often with attention to class, gender, and spatial politics (Baszile, 2009; Brown, 2009; Hill & Petchauer, 2013; Love, 2015).

Hip hop and Black music-making have served to provide insight into the identities, social movements and brilliance of Black youth and communities (Nzinga, 2018). Black music-making has also promoted knowledge-building and ways of being that reflect Black communal practices of survival, placemaking, and resistance (Hunter & Robinson, 2018; Steptoe, 2018; Woods, 1995). In addition to how scholars have discussed hip hop in connection to Blackness and education, we engage dimensions of spatial relations through Black geographies scholarship; particularly as the activation of spatial knowledge, a key feature of Black geographies (Hawthorne, 2019). For example, Black Geographies has examined Black people’s relationships with land through agriculture and food (Garth & Reese, 2020), Black space and the environment through education (Nxumalo & Ross, 2019) and connections to physical schooling environments (Shange, 2019). Black Geographies uplifts “the situated knowledge” and placemaking of Black people and communities to “both real and imagined human geographies [as] significant political acts and expressions” (McKittrick & Woods, 2007, p. 4). As a spatial and cultural practice, hip hop–birthed and music making– has facilitated methodological and pedagogical processes to analyze and promote spatial, educational, and learning experiences affirming of Black life.

With focus on the role of hip hop in our spatial and communal experiences, this paper aims to make space for others to continue jiving with diverse yet connected Black geographies and belonging to places we, Black folks, create for ourselves to work towards individual and collective freedom. We begin by highlighting the methodological work of thinking with Black Geographies. Through conversation we have explored our individual and collective understandings of spatial knowledge, complexities of time and space, and everyday spatial relations and practices of Black people (McKittrick, 2020). In addition to Black Geographies scholarship, we also draw from endarkened story work and Black storytelling (Toliver, 2021) as a Black tradition and position it as a spatial practice. We engage several of our familial, communal, and place-based stories auto-ethnographically to decenter traditional, white-centered qualitative methods.

Our storywork connects to afrofuturist notions of reconnecting to space for justice through what we call Black Spatial Storylines. Black spatial storylines can illuminate the breadth and diversity of Black spatial experiences (e.g., via migration, different regional and ethnoracial identities, and gendered and other intersectional experiences). Further, Black spatial storylines draw from Black Feminist traditions that uplift the perspectival and situated nature of lived experience as insight and advantage (Hooks, 1990; Ross, 2020; McKittrick, 2015). We engage and position this process as a methodological and pedagogical tool to shift how we start at and honor diverse, context-specific, and time-spanning forms of Blackness in education and learning, building off Wynter’s “gaze from below” logic (McKittrick, 2015, p. 11). By bringing Black spatial storylines into the public consciousness, we can shift pedagogy to be more situated toward affirming and liberatory pedagogies of practice and space-making for and with Black students (Nxumalo & Ross, 2019; Ross, 2020; Shange, 2019; Sojoyner, 2017; Warren & Coles, 2020), Black educators (Givens, 2021; Ohito & Brown, 2021; Stovall & Mosely, 2023), and Black families (Mazama & Lundy, 2012; Nickson, 2021, 2022; Turner et al., 2023).

Employing sound, particularly hip hop, as a Black Spatial Storyline in this paper shows the synergies and differences across our stories, although soundscapes are not the only means of engaging Black spatial experiences. Historian Tyina Steptoe (2016) explained that “sound has played a crucial role in racial formations in the United States, so racial history is also sonic history” (p. 12). In our process of engaging our familial and regional sonic histories we connect Black Geographies, Blackness and Storytelling to offer implications for pedagogical practices with and for Black children and communities and methodological practices that honor diverse and emplaced Black life and learning. We are guided by the following research questions:

1. How does Black Geographies thought show up in our own familial, communal, and educational experiences? What does Black Geographic thought allow us to see?

2. How can Black Geographic thought and storytelling inform collaborative methods and approaches in learning and research?

As we walk readers through our process of addressing our research questions, we foreground our collaborative storytelling and writing through our interwoven focus on Black storytelling, Black space in education, and Black Geographies. At this intersection, we showcase how Black sound as a methodological and pedagogical practice invites us to start at Blackness while both honoring the cosmological dimensions of Black sound¹ across time and space (Graham-Jackson & Moeller, 2023). We put forth elements of our own approaches to storytelling and how we have come to understand when, what, and where we know from as a methodological technique. Then we detail our connections to hip-hop through spatial storytelling involving hip-hop artist Biz Markie and the way he uses storytelling to detail urban decay and Black joy, and Houston’s hip hop scene, particularly hip hop artist Lil’ Flip who hails from Sunnyside, a historically Black community that is home to the second author’s family. These stories serve as an example of engaging with Black spatial storylines, or points of inquiry that engage in methodological and pedagogical techniques that illuminate context-specific dimensions of power, race, space, history, cultural production and praxis. We apply a gaze from below (McKittrick, 2015) perspective that illuminates Black life. Therefore, Black spatial storylines brings stories often deemed illegible via a dominant gaze into the fold, and serve as a means to help us learn, read and understand where we, Black folks, know from to build worlds we’ve not yet known.

Black Storytelling and Black Spatial Storylines

We look to Black storytelling as a means for communicating Black spatial relations and a Black sense of place in everyday life. Black spatial relations and a Black sense of place examine the multifaceted ways Black folks are constrained by dehumanizing and marginalizing geopolitical practices, yet seek and create “escape(s) from colonial humanist logics of Black subjectivities” (McKittrick, 2011; Nxumalo, 2020, p. 37). Black storytelling, a capacious and communal practice, can hold the complexities and diversity of time, space, pedagogy and Black beingness. Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) discuss restorying the self to disrupt internalized racialized and hegemonic narratives, and thus “narrating the self into existence” (p. 313). This idea of narrating the self into the public consciousness is a way we understand Black folks who emplace themselves through storytelling as a means of learning (Takeuchi & Aquino Ishihara, 2021). Emplacement has been understood and taken up “as dynamic and constantly in the making,” (Takeuchi & Aquino Ishihara, 2021, p. 4) and as means for resistance through place. We tie storytelling with the process of narratives of place as a form of becoming or, as Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) call it, the alterverse. This restorying connects to concepts of place and location of stories regarding identity in fan fiction,² particularly to redress futures through narratives of Black folks across time. Lines and praxis for restorying our relationships across time and space allow us to determine the for, by, and with whom of stories and listening.

We aim to build on this literature by creating a concept of Black spatial storylines. Black Spatial Storylines disrupt racial stereotypes, deficit narratives and white normative ways of teaching Black stories, histories, ways of being, and learning. This process also restories what Nasir et al. (2013) call racial storylines in a way that values and centers Black epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies to address and understand the brilliance and possibilities of Black space. Further, stories serve as a mechanism for relational becoming, including an understanding and emergence through place relations (Meixi et al., 2023; Roberts, 2018). We also build onto concepts of kin relations. Barry et al. (2023) explain that we have a responsibility to more than human kin and through stories, we can cultivate reciprocal relations. Black spatial storylines allow us the opportunity to enact restorying as a means of cultivating such relations to place and more than human kin through sampling realities and connections across space and time.

Through our collective storytelling process as a pedagogical and methodological praxis, we aim to uplift and honor Black spatial stories by engaging our own as a model. For example, Black space and aesthetics have been discussed as a means of storytelling and as an illustration of diverse and specific forms of Blackness (Hooks, 1995; Summers, 2019). In the U.S. South, the Haint Blue Door is an aesthetic choice particular to the region. However, the Haint Blue Door’s longer histories show that this aesthetic traveled with enslaved West Africans through the middle passage. Specifically, Gullah and Geechee folks have used this painting as a means to ward off evil spirits. Illustrating the ongoing connections and restorying of the Haint Blue Door in The Brownies,3 Thomas (2021) shares:

Perhaps they were tucked near a half-opened window or next to the cookstove in the segregated neighborhoods of the cities, perhaps sitting in the shade of a porch painted haint blue or tucked beneath a magnolia tree in the countryside of the racial nadir at the height of the Ku Klux Klan’s power. (p. 407)

Through this example, Thomas (2021) detailed how “today’s creatives, especially those telling stories for young people, are tied to traditions long and deep and wide” as they connect Black space, storytelling and learning. Through Black spatial storylines, we uplift engagement of “(re)storying work as a provocation to think of how imaginaries are necessary parts of refiguring Black life” (Nxumalo, 2020, p. 38). Indeed, Black spatial storylines serve as an entanglement praxis of restorying across time and space. By connecting storytelling to space, we work to unearth what it means to resist belonging to places not built for us, and how that knowledge can invite pedagogies and ways of being that center Blackness and Black livingness (Jenkins, 2022).

Engaging spatial stories further pushes the opportunity for imagining, designing and building speculative futures that start with Blackness. Black spatial storylines recognize the longing to be connected across humanity, more than human kin, history, and place; and an opportunity for weaving threads together from the past to engage ideas and concepts in the present for the future.

Black Space in Education

Our work is grounded in traditions of Black educational research that while constrained by white logics and methods have sought more humanizing and liberatory ways of understanding and historicizing the educational experiences of Black children, families, and communities (Givens, 2021; Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis Hoffman, 2002; Paris & Winn, 2013; Toliver, 2021). These traditions particularly help us see the ongoingness, goodness, resistance and storied nature of Black fugitive education spaces (Givens, 2021; Nxumalo & Ross, 2019; Ross, 2020; Sojoyner, 2017; Stovall & Mosely, 2023). For instance, Nxumalo and Ross (2019) engage Black storytelling and speculative fiction to promote fugitive space imaginings where “Black childhoods are not defined by the enclosures of antiblackness and settler colonial logics in early childhood environmental education, and Black children’s interests and curiosities about places, plants, and animals are listened to and nurtured” (p. 509). In this way, storytelling works as an imaginative mechanism to center Black children’s dreaming, learning, and land and place relationships.

Black fugitive spaces in education are integral to Black spatial storylines as they are sites that illuminate the context-specific and time-spanning creativity, resistance, and placemaking of Black children, educators, and families in antiblack schooling environments and systems. Annamma’s (2018) work on educational journey mapping details the experiences of girls of color with disabilities by illustrating and naming people, places, barriers, and opportunities to visualize their intersectional spatial stories of where and when they resist racialized narratives and exclusion. Educational journey mapping specifically serves as a mechanism to bring girls of color with disabilities into the public consciousness, especially those who are incarcerated. Similarly, Shange (2019) highlights the ways Black space emerges within and through the built environment of a school, analyzing how school hallways served as an escape from colonial and restrictive practices in classrooms, functioning as a fugitive space. Germinaro (2024) engages this line of thinking to highlight how students use the hallways to resist and engage in learning opportunities for their sociocritical literacies, opening up various interpretations and applications for how Black students want and do learn in schools.

Black space in education connects to and interweaves with Black Geographies, our theoretical frame, via analyses of space, spatial relations and the ways stories, or the situated knowledge of Black people, carry through and across time. We further detail our theoretical frame in the next section. In connecting Black space to hip hop and our moments of storytelling, we leverage the process of sampling to elicit depictions of components of our stories connecting moments in time through their context, furthering a sociohistorical and spatial grounding.

Black Geographies and Black Soundscapes

We broaden the scope of Black space in education by particularly engaging Black geographies framings of education. Black geographies illuminate the situated knowledges of Black people and communities “with the goal of unsettling racist and colonial forms of spatial organization” (Hawthorne, 2019, p. 7). Thus, Black Geographies helps us to see the geographies of exclusion and racial violence that diverse and specific Black people and communities navigate, and their daily struggles and imaginings to create and shape place anew (Hawthorne, 2019; McKittrick & Woods, 2007).

Woods’ (1998) foundational Blues Epistemology theorized and honors Southern cultural systems of resistance “that inform black daily life, social institutions, and movements, and served as a method of restoration across the south,” through spatial storytelling via blues soundscapes (p. 82). Woods described this process as a means of interpreting and critiquing crises to build a new future grounded in economic, social and cultural justice. Within blues music, the author is seen as both self-reflective and carrying knowledge that speaks to a criticality that engages the consciousness and learning of the audience (Woods, 1998). In essence, the blues artists engaged in ontological and epistemological moves that provided spatial stories through music as a means of resistance through collective and community education.

Hip Hop, which grows and iterates from Blues traditions, also offers spatial and communal stories as a means of resistance, reflection, and future-making. Created in the 1970s by Black and Latinx youth in postindustrial Bronx, New York, hip hop borrowed, sampled, and iterated from “cultural forms such as mambo, funk, and Jamaican soundclash…to create a rich, complex, and interwoven set of expression” (Petchauer, 2009, p. 946). With recognition of the Black Geographies from which hip hop and other Black creative forms grow, Shabazz (2021) explained that “Black cultural production is informed by the social and spatial conditions in which Black life is lived” (p. 448). In particular, Shabazz names the role of spatial containment and subjugation, along with Black humanity and resistance in shaping Black stylistic flair and cultural production including hip hop. In schools, the continued racial and epistemic marginalization Black youth experience contributes to harmful dynamics affecting Black communities in the U.S., and therefore also affects cultural production (Baszile, 2009). However, youth and communities can alter and transform oppression into creative strength and resistance. Storytelling via music making and sound can help engage and process memories, practices, and learning–both harmful and liberatory– that reverberate across time and space. Like the early formations of hip hop, as learners engage, build, and sample from Black spatial stories, they put forth a methodological and theoretical praxis that provides critiques for a more informed and just future.

While Blackness shares commonalities across varied places and spaces, there are particular and place-based dimensions to how Black experiences, creativity, and livingness are conveyed– forms of embodied and spatial storytelling that involve self and communal expression through sampling of Black sociospatial realities (Hunter & Robinson, 2018; Woods, 1998). These ongoing and particular practices within Black relations and communities connect to our methodology of leveraging and sampling familial and communal stories as key to designing and building more relational and pro-Black educational environments. Further, we build on the continued work of Black auditory placemaking at scale, particularly in the context of building and engaging stories of space through sound (Graham-Jackson & Moeller, 2023). We center storytelling through a Black Geographies lens as a pedagogical act and process for building out methods for praxis.

Listening, Writing and Dialoguing Through Endarkened Storywork

Activating dreams through stories and storytelling is a Black cultural practice and research method (Kinloch et al., 2020; Toliver, 2021). As such, in our writing process, we deeply discussed and leaned on the synergies across our familial and communal stories of space, noting connections and differences across geographies and educational experiences. We critically discussed and examined our social locations, values and biases regarding our learning experiences. Further, we individually and collectively moved through the writing process to think through how stories, specifically our relationships to and across places, could inform educational praxis. Our shared dialogue supported our ability to “co-create, co-author, narratives…grounded in critical listening” (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014, p. 22).

Toliver (2021) describes the alchemy of stories as teaching, healing, and possessing the ability to build worlds. She explains that storytelling,“for Black people, it is our very existence” yet “our storied lives are often shunned in academia” (p. xv). Thus, Toliver (2021) asserts the importance of “alternative sites of knowledge and being, and honoring the spiritual within the everyday lives of people whose stories have been discounted in traditional academic settings” (p. xvi). Endarkened storywork as a method, facilitates community members, who were once ignored in qualitative research, to be invited into the research process and to be part of the story. Both theoretically and methodologically, this framework gracefully holds tension for how stories don’t “fit within tight spaces and guiding frameworks” (p. xxxiv). In discussing endarkened stories, Toliver (2021) intentionally chooses the phrasing of endarkened to center Blackness and moves away from the Eurocentric canon of conducting research. This pathway of endarkened storywork “chooses to liberate the mind by allowing space for different truths about reality-truths that refuse objectivity, require community, and remember responsibility” (p. xvii). This framework allows us the ability to frame Black spatial storylines through ancestral knowledge, traditions and relations to worlds we are intertwined with. Therefore, we engaged in endarkened storywork to both center our own lived experiences as Black people and our hi(stories) through the research process (Toliver, 2021).

As a mechanism of engaging endarkened storywork, spatial storylines, and hip-hop, we also build on the creative process of sampling our stories to detail the conceptual and methodological offerings of Black spatial storylines. Sampling in hip-hop is the process of mixing and matching previous sounds, verses, productions and inevitably stories, as a means to produce a new track. In this way, we are leveraging the praxis of sampling our spatial stories to unearth the endarkened storylines embedded in our collaborative resonance and experiences. While hip hop isn’t solely the sound that brands Black experience, it serves as our method to weave our spatial storylines across our experiences. Through our process of sampling, we honor a distinctive methodology that honors Black lives while challenging normative qualitative methodologies.

Process of Collaboration and Co-Writing

We engaged in fourteen one-on-one conversations about our experiences with Black geographies, our learnings from reading across Black geographic theories, and how they connect to our personal lives over the course of 1.5 years. This took place after our initial meeting to discuss writing together. After several meetings, we noticed there were many synergies across our educational experiences that had implications for the way Black geographies can complicate the pedagogical praxis for how we can better cultivate relationships to space from a Black perspective, and design learning environments that are pro-Black, anti-colonial, and anti-racist (Alexakos & Pierwola, 2013; Siry et al., 2016; Tobin, 2009). This dialogic and unrushed format allowed us to critically engage in listening practices across our stories, furthering our depth of understanding and analysis of the through lines between them.

In addition to Toliver’s work, we also drew from McKittrick’s (2020) foundational thought on Black and anti-colonial methodologies in Dear Science and Other Stories. McKittrick, a scholar who works across Black Studies, Geography, and Planning explains that Black life is known through varied, diverse, changing, and yet connected knowledge systems. McKittrick names that Black lives and ways of knowing are tied to the body and feelings, and also to the collective, and this requires that “we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices” (p. 5). Put simply, we cannot simply rely on dominant scientific methods to understand a Black sense of space, or Black life (McKittrick, 2020). Thus, in our sharing we discussed varied family and community stories, artifacts, memories, and practices that helped illuminate themes across our sharing.

Together, we ask how Black spatial storylines can support the reclamation of space through unearthing stories as a way to cultivate futures, heal spatial trauma and repair relationships to land, place and space. Therefore, we connect Black sound as a spatial storytelling method, one that engages sound as both a connector and distinguishing facet of diverse forms of Blackness. We engage sounds from our familial and educational stories, particularly Biz Markie and New York Hip Hop and Lil Flip and Houston’s Chopped and Screwed style. We discuss how our experiences are interwoven with different forms, styles, and genres of hip hop that tell stories connected to place, Black beingness, and resistance often excluded or demonized in schooling and dominant curricula. We draw on resonant memories, histories, and experiences that complicate and extend across time and space. Akin to hip hop, our stories sample and mix from what we know and feel to help us think about designing learning and educational experiences that honor diverse forms of Blackness and Black being.⁴

We begin with sharing our starting point and positionality in this work. Through collective dialogue we pinpointed how our commitment to humanizing and pro-Black education spaces extend beyond our writing and scholarship, while offer necessary framing to the stories and memories we share. After sharing about our starting point, we offer our stories.

Our Starting Point to Connect Through Black Spatial Storylines From Our Positionalities

Kaleb: Music, Blackness and Southern Landscapes

My first juncture with Black geographies occurred during a 20th-century multimedia class in my senior year of high school. This was Mr Garvey’s class, a short, shiny-headed teacher from the south side of Chicago who loved music. My high school didn’t exude diversity, or culturally sustaining pedagogies on a regular basis, and I didn't often see myself in the curriculum, as was the case in most Phoenix schools. While this rang true for most of my classes, Mr. Garvey decided for this course to center around how Black folks gave the world music by taking a historical and geographical approach by focusing on how blues and jazz artists traveled the Mississippi. He explained the ways Black artists made space for themselves, exercised resistance and built, activated and cultivated spatial knowledge through their music-centered learning designs. He also detailed how modern music has and continues to build off blues artists, specifically Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. The ways Black artists’ music playing was political when it came to European music groups choosing not to play in venues and cities that didn’t support Black people’s rights, paying homage to Black blues and jazz artists.⁵ Up until this class, I hadn’t seen myself reflected in the curriculum in a way that sustained me, let alone one that valued my family’s relationship to music, one that contributed to the birth of hip-hop, the resonance of Motown and my love for Afrobeats as a means of connection to place. Even so, I hadn’t heard of Black Geographies until grad school, where I experienced a serendipitous and monumental moment while reading Clyde Woods (1995) Blues Epistemology. At that point, I understood a need for Black geographies in education that could offer ways to design, understand and promote learning environments through spatial inquiry and activation of said knowledge. Shoutout to Mr Garvey for activating a part of me that I seldom experienced while putting me on the path to designing learning environments that invoke that feeling for others.

Dana: Black Geographies and Honoring Home

Texas, a state where confederate flags openly fly, has an ongoing political and cultural history rooted in secession and white supremacy. Oil, guns, good ol’ boys, and a trenchant commitment to maintaining white supremacy through political repression, work to actively overshadow and erase the longer legacies of this land cultivated by Native peoples and my ancestors.

The Texas in popular imaginaries is and is not the Texas I know. One of the most racially diverse states in the U.S., Texas is also home to unabashed, down home, and diasporic Black cultures and peoples. Texas, specifically Houston, is where I hear chopped and screwed music blaring down the street, proclaiming we are here, and we will be heard. Texas is sitting with elders and sharing food, stories, and memories while watching Family Feud or a basketball game. Texas is contradictory grocery store encounters with middle-aged white ladies that remind me we are being surveilled and that I am seen and part of a fraught community and place. With interrogation, I call Texas my home, and it is home because of the people whose love and embrace are felt in ways I have not and will not find in other places.

As an adult, I have lived in different cities across the U.S. and world, yet, the ongoing call and draw to Texas I feel no matter where I find myself remains. Finding Black Geographies in graduate school illuminated what I long felt, but could not always express. Particularly, reading Tyina Steptoe’s (2016) Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City along with George Lipsitz’s (2007) “The racialization of space and the spatialization of race: Theorizing the hidden architecture of landscape” gave words to the long histories of Black placemaking that I viscerally felt through my own family and community experiences. Amid and beyond political repression, spaces of congregation and belonging for complex Black personhood, joy, debate and learning deeply linked to identity, place, neighborhood, and sound are what I felt and know about my people.

On days when I feel far from home, I imagine my childhood self at a Juneteenth parade sweating hard and enjoying the music and dance; or at a Prairie View A&M football game swaying to the booming sounds and pageantry of the halftime show. I see the Black teachers who looked out and cared for me across city and suburban schools and I feel alright. I am reminded of the love and care that sustains me.

Black Spatial Storylines in Action: Black Geographies, Hip Hop, and Our Stories

Our stories below detail two dimensions of Black Spatial Storylines, focusing on the when and where of the situated knowledges Black Geographies honors, along with the when and where of Black cultural production with focus on hip-hop. The timeliness of East coast hip-hop in history as a geopolitical and sociohistorical tool detailing urban decay and resistance in Black communities provided a venue to engage and confront spatial injustice, and ultimately resistance. Similarly, Houston hip-hop, particularly Chopped and Screwed, later emerged as a spirited and unique iteration reflecting Black Southern culture and beingness. This plays on the spatial relations of sound and place, particularly in how we, Black folks, come to know and create sound. Sound in this context serves as a unifying element to how we understand the vastness and myriad connections across Blackness. We know what hip hop is when we feel it, as a form of resonance memory reverberating across geographical and regional variations. These storylines serve as points of inquiry and connection, teaching and learning, as well as resistance and liberation⁶ that we further explore in our discussion.

When Portion of Black Spatial Storylines

Hip-hop has long been recognized as a cultural movement that embodies the experiences and perspectives of Black Americans living in urban environments. One of the most distinctive features of hip-hop is its use of storytelling to convey the struggles and resistance triumphs of marginalized communities (Martinez, 1997). This essay focuses on the intersection of Black geographies, spatial storytelling, and urban histories through hip-hop, with a specific focus on the life and legacy of my late cousin Biz Markie. This serves as a means to preserve and document his contributions to hip-hop, center our family’s history, and resist the commercialization and appropriation of hip-hop that caters to white capitalistic notions of storytelling and erasing/controlling Black histories and cultural practices. In sharing Biz’s story, I will highlight the ways we can start with Blackness as a method to understand history through a soundscape and its connection to our life’s sociospatial relationships as cultural praxis.

Biz Markie and Black American Urban History

Biz Markie rose to fame when Black American urban history underwent significant shifts. The 1980s and 1990s marked a period of urban decay, disinvestment, and social dislocation in many cities across the United States (Weeks, 2005). At the same time, the hip-hop movement was emerging as a powerful voice for Black urban youth, providing a platform for artists to express their experiences of urban life. With his unique blend of beatboxing, humor, and storytelling, Biz Markie became an icon of this movement, embodying the creativity, resilience, and joy of Black urban culture.

Spatial Storytelling and the Art of Hip-Hop

One of the defining characteristics of hip-hop is its use of spatial storytelling to convey the experiences of marginalized communities (Love, 2014). Hip-hop artists often use specific urban locations and landmarks to tell stories about their lives and those around them. For example, in his music video for “Just a Friend,” Biz Markie uses the iconic Georgetown University basketball team to evoke a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era of Black urban culture. By donning a Georgetown sweater and embodying a character that is equal parts Mozart and James Brown, Biz Markie creates a visual and sonic landscape that speaks to the rich history and culture of Black urban communities. Not only does this highlight his vocal storytelling but rather the embodiment of said space through storytelling through fashion, which is often overlooked as a cultural and spatial storytelling method. Biz, and hip hop largely, regularly interrogated the spatial aesthetics of Black Life. We are engaging hip hop as a spatial aesthetic storytelling method to detail the storyline of urban decay, while championing it as a mechanism to resist this ongoing geographic harm and degradation.

Black Geographies, the Preservation of Hip-Hop History and Education

The rise of hip-hop as a cultural movement has profoundly impacted Black American urban history. Hip-hop has provided a platform for Black urban youth to express their experiences and perspectives in a way that has resonated with resistance movements and people from urban cities in the US to Palestine (see Nzinga, 2023). However, mainstreaming hip-hop culture has also raised concerns about preserving its history and legacy as a means of knowing and being (Oliver, 2017). As rap luminaries like Biz Markie pass away, it is essential to recognize the significance of their contributions to Black Geographies and the need to preserve their stories for future generations. This history depends on our ability to preserve the story; left unattended, the genre-shifting moments we hold dear may dissolve into urban legend.

Black Geographies then offer us a way to start at Blackness by focusing on the spatial production process and attending to the spatial knowledge told through spatial stories, such as those told through hip-hop praxis and resistance (Graham-Jackson & Moeller, 2023). This also promotes the historical connections to the long lineage of spatial storytelling of Black people from the South, and a practice that traversed contexts and made their way to the urban north in a similar mechanism as Black southerners who made the trek through the great migration, similarly detailed in Dark Agoras and the ways the practices from the south made their way north (Roane, 2023). There are further connections from hip hop to larger social movements, activist praxis and positioning education as a tool for resistance (Nzinga, 2023). As someone who made my migrations back to the South every summer, like many Black youth and families, there’s a knowing of how we are connected to said place, the geographies of resistance and how spatial knowledge is actualized through learning and storytelling.

Biz Markie’s legacy as the “clown prince of hip-hop” values and centers on creativity, resilience, and joy within Black American urban culture. He embodied resistance to urban decay, economic change and continued divestment of Black urban communities through his method of storytelling. His use of spatial storytelling and humor cemented Black history and its connection to space, while evoking a teaching and learning opportunity for how to resist through joy. As kin, and a Black boy who grew up on 90’s hip hop, Biz reminded me of both my lineage, my connection to this history and the ways stories emerge in our lives across time. Stories of hip hop provided me with praxis and an aesthetic experience of various acoustic ecologies and understanding how they connect across time in space.

Where of Educational Landscapes as Told Through Music

Hip Hop as a global cultural movement is iterated and heard across diverse spaces–shapeshifting to inflect different meanings that reflect the time and positionality of the listener. In this story, Dana highlights how hip hop traverses across space–in this case a southern Houston neighborhood, Sunnyside, to the suburbs of North Dallas–to connect and convey her family histories and spatial relations. This story underscores the place specificity of hip hop and Blackness, along with its spanning and migratory dimensions.

Locating Texas Hip-Hop

At varied scales, educational spaces (classrooms, lunchrooms, bus rides, neighborhoods, and cities) are undoubtedly marked by the rhythms, cadence, and beats of hip hop. Indeed, my own experiences of growing up in a suburb of Dallas and frequently visiting family in Houston exposed me to hip hop geographies that were both material and imagined, and past and present. Notably, Lil’ Flip, a Houston rapper from the same historically Black community in southern Houston where my grandmother resides, Sunnyside, was being played everywhere during my middle and early high school years. “I Can Do Dat,” (2000) was in regular rotation on local radio stations, BET’s 106 and Park, and in turn, playful freestyle sessions at lunch and in classrooms.

Naming the many things Lil’ Flip’s confidence and money could attain, in “I Can Do Dat” he raps “Next year I might buy Worthing,” referring to Evan E. Worthing High School, one of Houston’s historically Black high schools. Throughout his catalog, Lil’ Flip has frequently referenced Worthing, in addition to Houston’s other historically Black high schools–Jack Yates, Booker T. Washington, and Phillis Wheatley. As a child, I always rapped this line with a bit more pizazz. Like Lil Flip, my mother attended Worthing High School and remained connected to her high school through attending reunions and maintaining relationships with friends that have been aunties and loving adults in my life. Further, my grandparents, now grandmother, have remained in the surrounding community. We frequently drove past Worthing during our time in Houston, where my mother would share stories from her time in high school or remark on additions or changes to the building and surrounding blocks. Indeed, drafting this story is equally my mother’s memories, as I frequently called her to ask questions or to clarify memories or histories she shared about in the past. My mother guides this story and the following history more so than any scholarly text.

Evan E. Worthing High School and Sunnyside Pride

In 1958, Evan E. Worthing High School opened to serve Black students who previously traveled outside of their community to attend Jack Yates located in Houston’s Third Ward community in southeast Houston. While Houston’s historically Black schools operated in a segregated public school system with white leadership, Black administrators and educators proudly led these learning and community spaces (Steptoe, 2016). Steptoe (2016) documented that “Teachers were esteemed leaders in (Houston’s) black communities, and the schools they led became sources of local pride” (p. 157). These schools also had well-supported music programs, where students learned to read music and play instruments, along with African American music and oral traditions of improvisation (Liddell, 2022; Steptoe, 2016).

Throughout the 1960 and 70s, my Aunt Karen was a drum majorette and Uncle Ronnie played the trumpet as a member of Worthing’s band, The Marching 100. My mother, a member of the ROTC during her time in high school, recounted that the field was always joyfully packed during halftime at football games– dancers, cheerleaders, and band members performed with pride and precision for their families and community. In the short documentary, “Sunnyside Stories: Narratives of a Historic Black Neighborhood” (Zainob & Mathew Create, 2023), a resident remarked “We had a grand time in Sunnyside, I don’t think we really recognized we were being discriminated against.” There was pride in the air and although contained by racial segregation and discrimination, residents made place with flair, complexity, and joy.

Sunnyside was the first community south of downtown Houston where Black folks were able to purchase homes (Sunnyside Neighborhood Plan, 2017)). Defined as a “rurban” site to explain “fringe areas between urban development and agricultural lands” (Longoria & Rogers, 2013, p. 27), Black folks predominantly from East Texas and Louisiana, were attracted to communities like Sunnyside due to increased space compared to Houston’s city center. Further, Black residents appreciated access to a network of Black-led institutions and businesses, and the ability to gain a sense of reprieve from more intense forms of Jim Crow practiced within the city (Wiese, 2019). The Sunnyside Neighborhood Plan (2017) details that “Sunnyside has been a close-knit community with high levels of social capital” via schools, churches and civic clubs and organizations. Residents physically and communally made Sunnyside, coming together “to pave the roads and construct a civic building for meetings and other gatherings” (Longoria & Rogers, 2013, p. 28).

Sunnyside residents’ love and care for their community has persisted despite and beyond anti-Black public policy. In the 1930’s the government-backed Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlined mortgage lending in the community. Additionally, throughout the 20th century waste dump sites for Houston were placed in and adjacent to Sunnyside neighborhoods (Bullard, 1983). In recent history, the neighborhood has struggled with school closures, land speculation, and flooding caused by municipal planning (Longoria & Rogers, 2013; The Sunnyside Neighborhood Plan, 2017). In the face of structural violence and extensive population loss, my 96 year old grandmother remains in Sunnyside–refusing to leave her home bought with my late grandfather in 1957, and still in community with neighbors, former students, and newcomers to the area. A proud Sunnyside resident and former educator, she continues to steward a homeplace for our family and generations of former students that stop by, seek her counsel, and mutually care for her.

Lil’ Flip, Sunnyside, and Reverberations Across Time and Space

Lil’ Flip, a member of Houston’s legendary Screwed Up Click—a collective of Houston rappers hailing from historically Black neighborhoods across the city–captures the pride and power of Black folk’s collectivity, placemaking, and pride in Sunnyside. Rapping about and claiming Worthing high school is Lil Flip’s experience, and generations of Sunnyside residents including my mom, grandparents, aunts, and uncle. While Lil Flip may have relayed “I might buy Worthing” in jest or bravado, I wonder what this ethos of worth, pride, and protection must look like towards our beloved Black schools and institutions amid gentrification, school closures, and continued migration and displacement of Black folks from urban cities and neighborhoods.

As a Black girl growing up in the suburbs of Dallas, viscerally aware of the anti-black practices and logics that pervaded my own educational experiences, Lil’ Flip reminded me of my familial and communal home, pointing to the importance of knowing and sustaining where we have been, still are, and honoring the efforts of Black educators, elders, and caregivers like my grandmother who continue leading and loving within communal traditions of self-determination and collective care. Like a base-filled slowed-down percussive beat, this experience is not my own, but very much our own. It reverberates in my body–affecting, influencing, and providing rhythm as I navigate different places and times.

Black Spatial Storylines & Resistance Through Methodology

Our work aims to build out Black Spatial Storylines by leveraging Black geographies thought and studies of hip hop. The methodological offerings for education and learning broadly through Black sound showcase the ways flow, rhythm, language, and sound can be viewed as Black spatial storytelling methods that engage topics across disciplines. This work examines variations of Blackness to highlight how Black geographies, and specifically Black Spatial Storylines can inspire liberatory and inclusive praxis that honor young people and adults' intergenerational lived and communal experiences. Black geographies are characterized by their expansiveness, encompassing both materiality and poetics, and are not meant to be legible to the colonial gaze (Graham-Jackson & Moeller, 2023; McKittrick, 2020). In particular, Black sound geographies in education bring a justice-oriented and cultural perspective to learners’ place-based encounters, making them an essential part of anti-colonial and anti-racist education for both Black and non-Black children, educators, and researchers.

Blackness and Black Sound disrupts our notion of space and time, and illuminates the traveling stories that resonate through our social and cultural epistemologies and ontologies. It offers us a departure from traditional research methods by focusing on the ways Black Sound, Space and Spatial Storylines serve as interwoven threads across various sociohistorical and geographical landscapes. This is illuminated in how the sounds of Biz and southern hip-hop are so different. They are not the same and yet, they fall under Blackness, toying with the idea of belonging in space through music, while still knowing music is different and Black. It’s the internal ethic and knowing within our bodies that although house music originated in Chicago, house music in Baltimore and Detroit hold resemblances and differences, yet we know and feel the reverberations in our soul, as a spiritual practice across geographies. Graham-Jackson and Moeller (2023) explain that “music, sound, and materiality collide through listening, hearing, and the varying identities and multiple geographies within the self” (p. 655). We call attention to how our Black bodies are interwoven with Black Music, a form of resonance memory that reflects racial capitalist development and Black placemaking, producing a form of Black Memory that complicates, elucidates, and transcends the timespace.

Black Spatial Storylines are a research and pedagogical method that can help facilitate learners’ understandings of their own histories, agency, and cultural knowledge. For instance, Lil Flip’s lyrics suggest the central role of historically Black schools as sites of learning, goodness, and worth (Steptoe, 2016; Walker, 1996), and their role as vital sites of Black communal consciousness and identity-development (Ewing, 2018; Morris, 1999). Further, hip hop and Black cultural production at large have long captured the place attachments Black folks hold to their communities, and importantly the where and import of place to our being, struggle, and togetherness (Hunter & Robinson, 2018; Neal, 1999). As such, through exploration of the affect and connections evoked by Lil Flip’s “I Can Do Dat,” Dana is invited to explore and examine the places, histories, and (un)belongingness that fuel this sentiment or experience.

By engaging Black spatial storylines, learners are encouraged to engage in an archaeology of self that is attuned to place, politics, and time, and most important intersubjective and communal dimensions. Learners can start stories from both when and/or where they choose across timespace, thinking of time outside of a linear or necessarily progressing format, to understand it from a complex point of entry to complicate dominant teaching and learning processes of space and place that prioritize dominant cartographies and knowledge. Place and time are not solely shaped by individual experiences or dominant narratives, but also are a historical accumulation of spatial stories that move across generations and geographies–iterating, sampling, creating new meanings, and living collectively across complicated and caring collectives.

Inspired by Taylor’s (2018) call to action toward ethical teaching and learning in learning sciences, and grounded in Black Geographies theory (Hawthorne, 2019; McKittrick, 2020; McKittrick & Woods, 2007; Woods, 1995), we offer the following pedagogical questions and guiding principles for learning with Black Spatial Storylines:

- What spatial stories are missing from a particular school, neighborhood, and/or community and what are their implications for pedagogical praxis?

- Who’s telling the stories of Blackness in a community, how are they doing so and what message(s) are they communicating?

- What do embodied and communal knowledge and feelings, familial and cultural artifacts, texts, and sounds, among so much more, reflect and illuminate about Blackness?

- How and in what ways do spatial stories connect to historical contexts and teach us about history from a Black perspective? What does it mean and how can we use this information to inform our future world building via pedagogy?

Learning How to Listen

Key to following a Black Spatial Storyline is a need to learn how to listen. Listening serves as a learning praxis in the context of Black spatial stories that allow for learning of lessons and ways to interact. This is a format for how to resist by uncovering and starting at Black spatial (hi)stories and carrying storylines throughout a lesson, interaction and pedagogical praxis as a means for inquiry. Further, this form of storytelling serves as a Black social critique, providing insight into experiences and ways to analyze and disrupt harm. This way, we can critically learn about and analyze the joy and pain through cultivating creativity, knowledge, and joy in the face of ongoing spatial antiblackness. Black spatial knowledge is the crux that connects time and space. As a cultural asset and tradition, knowledge is storytelling, and storytelling communicates knowledge intergenerationally and across time. As stories travel with people, communities and lifeways, knowledge then is seeded and dispersed through time and across varied spaces and places both serving as a bridge and fruit to nurture ongoing futures and storybuilding. Therefore, Black spatial knowledge has a persistent element of spatial storytelling to listen, pass down, and collectively activate knowledge vital to our well-being, survival, joy, and liberation. When we reclaim stories, we also can reclaim space, connecting⁷ past and present through teaching and learning to design our futures. As Imani Perry notes:

“My elders taught me that I belonged to a tradition of resilience, of music that resonates across the globe, of spoken and written language that sings. If you’ve had the good fortune to experience a holiday with a large Black American family, you have witnessed the masterful art of storytelling, the vitality of our laughter, and the everyday poetry of our experience. The narrative boils down quite simple to this: “We are still here! Praise life, after everything, we are still here!” So many people taught us to be more than the hatred heaped upon us, to cultivate a deep self-regard no matter what others may think, say, or do. Many of us have absorbed that lesson and revel in it. (Perry, 2020)

Here, we see Perry detailing the connecting and sustaining prowess of Black literacies, conversation, and gathering including music. Music is positioned as directly connected to spatial experiences, familial storytelling realities, and distributing knowledge across time and space to serve as a mechanism to teach and learn from and through listening.

Honoring the Beauty and Complexity of Blackness

What a lot of folks have noticed, for example, in hip-hop, is that there is a lot of referencing. There’s a lot of diasporic literacy. Names are dropped, but there is not this kind of comprehensive bibliography or biography that accompanies the name. I mean, there’s a lot of showing or telling—“this is what I know”—and it is gaming, too, a mode of playfulness or a request for a response or the narration of a difficult story through beautiful sounds and beats. There’s also a playfulness to this. Play can be hard and terrible and onerous too! But playing⁸ (playing songs, dancing, dropping names, claiming a place) is also fun. I’m not saying that it's not rigorous, but there is something beautiful about that— the way that Black creatives and intellectuals have used what they know, how they know, and turned it into something completely different. That is the anticolonial at work (McKittrick, 2020). A Black vernacular is used to make space, as opportunities for world-building, and as skills and exercises of creativity to understand Black Urbanism (Hooks, 1995). Black spatial storylines then offer education the opportunity to engage in Blackness, its complexity, and as an intellectual endeavor to understand cities and collective’s placemaking and place relations. Blackness then does the work of belonging, not for fitting in, but instead for disruption and re/making space for relations across theorizations to challenge the ontology of the urban, and to shift urban theory, including education. Blackness is also then positioned as an analytic, which we see Biz, and others, conduct as a cultural, spatial and social practice that carries roots from the rural south to the urban north. As a means of preserving hip-hop history, we preserve Black history and mechanisms to teach and learn with and from.

Discussing Black Geographies for/With Pedagogy

We have our own maps of emplacement and meaning– connected to education. In the afterlife of school segregation (Ross, 2021), Black people’s relationalities to each other, place, and sociosonic experiences provide grounding amid political climates that seek the erasure of our histories, analysis, and critique of the structures that harm us all (Graham-Jackson & Moeller, 2023; McKittrick, 2011; Steptoe, 2016; Woods, 1998). Black spatial storylines, although seemingly linear, differ in they complicate the timescape of our relationships to and through space. Therefore, the story doesn’t exist on a traditional 2D timeline, but rather is elevated and emerges as a 3D rendition of a timescape that evolves into a spherical context that centers around a particular concept, similar to our solar system in a way. As a metaphoric example, imagine a piece of thread that can be considered a timeline; it’s linear, sometimes can be bumpy but is otherwise straight in a 2D format. The Black spatial stories we are describing can be thought of as a ball of thread, interlocked, connected and woven threads where the end and beginning isn’t necessarily the central focus. Rather, the knot itself tells a story that is nonlinear, complex, interwoven, multi-scalar, and across dimensions of time and spherical space. This leaves a host of interpretation, opportunity to connect ideas and thoughts, and positions itself as an art form for education and methodologies.

In this work, the plantation and its attendant economies are mainly engaged as a site of oppression from which Black people creatively imagine and materialize liberatory worlds. This expansiveness of the materiality and poetics of Black geographies is essential; it underlines the liberatory praxis of Black geographies – as cartographies of Black Life that cannot be contained by white supremacy and are not necessarily meant to be legible to the colonial gaze (McKittrick, 2011, 2020). It includes work that interrogates the ways in which spatially enacted modes of Black exclusion normalize forms of citizenship that maintain colonial nation-building and imperialism. Black geographies scholarship provides invaluable insight into how Blackness and anti-Blackness are experienced and expressed through space and place. Black geographies are a necessary part of anti-colonial and anti-racist education. These perspectives are essential for Black and non-Black children, educators, and researchers. A significant contribution made by scholarship in early childhood studies that engage Black geographies is bringing a justice-oriented perspective to children’s place-based encounters (see Nxumalo et al., 2021). Engaging the spacetime continuum, particularly in a learning space for how the past, present and future are connected through our social, cultural and spatial relations is used to add complexity to our stories to better work towards liberation. Further, Griffin et al. (2023) highlights jazz pedagogues that build on Woods (1995) blues epistemologies and Kelley’s (2012) jazz histories as key Black spatial storylines to understand Black history, resistance and its connection to learning environments across the timescape. These examples all orbit the central topic of Black music making as a sociospatial and cultural practice of spacemaking and storytelling. This also connects further to the authors’ stories of when and where Black geographies emerged in our educational experiences. This engagement of Black stories and Blackness as a starting point allows us to build the world anew (Kelley, 2002), providing us space to actualize our spatial knowledge in real time.

Time-spanning Black knowledge and storytelling in the form of Black Spatial storylines aligns with what Sylvia Wynter calls “the gaze from below” (McKittrick, 2015, p. 11). Building from DuBois’ theory of double consciousness, “the gaze from below” asserts the vital import of marginalized perceptions to honoring our humanity and recognizing all forms of humanness (McKittrick, 2015, p. 53). McKittrick (2015) explains that people marginalized by race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or ability status have been made to embody the “wholly human Other status,” meaning they are othered, marginalized, and seen as less than fully human in dominant, white, and capitalistic imaginaries (p. 51). However, Wynter (2003) recognizes marginality as a strength, explaining that individuals and communities with marginalized identities are most attuned to the limiting and oppressive Western script of what, where, and when constitutes humanness and therefore also carry insight and experience on more expansive and affirming modes of livingness and therefore space and place. They posit that “gaze from below” perspectives and struggles must be honored and uplifted for liberation from an oppressive and limiting Western script of being (2015, p. 51). Thus, a “gaze from below” reflects a fervent beingness and continued search among multiply marginalized people for ways and modes of living a whole and fulfilling life outside of the scripts and imaginaries of anti-blackness and racial capitalism. As told through hip-hop, Black Geographies, spatial storytelling, and urban histories invoke importance to learning mechanisms from, and with, luminaries like Biz Markie and communities like Sunnyside for future generations. This highlights the need for education to acknowledge and appreciate the contributions of hip-hop culture to Black American urban history. Incorporating hip-hop and Black culture in learning spaces provides a powerful platform for Black urban youth to accentuate their spatial knowledge while providing mechanisms to showcase that knowledge, shifting our overall understandings of urban life, and particularly Black urban life.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We want to acknowledge and give thanks to those whose stories we’ve been able to uplift, center and carry with us into this project. This project being a collaborative effort includes many folks not on the author list including our ancestors, those we listen to and those in the future who this work connects with. We want to acknowledge our critical friends and mentors who supported the work on this paper as well through dialogue, kiki’ing and jammin with us as we celebrate the power of Black Sound.

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.

ORCID iDs

Kaleb Germinaro

Dana Nickson

Notes

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