Fear of an other geography

Ten years ago, I began a PhD program. I had no idea what I was getting into when I left North Carolina for Florida International University. The move to Miami-Dade County proved to be a difficult transition for a small-town raised budding scholar. However, it was sitting through Theory in Geography during my first semester (as well as the mentoring relationship soon to come) with Gail Hollander that signaled that I was in the right place at the right time. I was quickly initiated into feminist geographies and, shortly after, geographies of sexualities and came to know them as radical and relevant epistemological and pedagogical contributions, Oswin’s work included.

Early in graduate school, I began attending the AAG. I quickly learned how threatening a fat Black queer woman of a Southern working-class background is to a geography space. I could not be placed or contained in ways that conformed to some versions of geographical standards. My embodiment requires a deeper interrogation of the workings of capitalism as well as ‘patriarchy, colonialism, homophobia,…[and] racism’, as Oswin (2020) points to in her article.

And then, I had the audacity to do some research. Centering Black Queer Southern women as knowledge producers and as the conduits for geographical transformation in my research was and is not enticing to some geographers and their departments, which is something you come to know through spending several years of job searching, and is in line with Natalie’s ruminations on meritocracy. If nothing else, I am too much to put into place. I probably ask too many uncomfortable questions. I am probably too close to the subject of my research to maintain ‘objectivity’ in my scholarship.

When I conducted fieldwork and wrote my dissertation, it was the voices of queer Black women that filled the pages. Once, when I gave a talk, someone said, ‘that was interesting, wouldn’t it be great to interview white lesbians and compare their responses?’ Rather than take the time to sit with and listen to how and why Black queer spatialities are integral to disciplinary thought, I would find (and still do to an extent) geographers asking me about the most accessible piece to ask me about, because some of those geographers must always have a response and a question and are uncomfortable in the silences that force one to decenter the self and to reckon with the breadth and depth of geographical domination that includes one’s complicity with racism, homophobia, sexism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Oswin says, ‘We know…we know…we know’. We know that the discipline’s role in the current geographical order cannot be overlooked. The historical development of cartography and the mapping of ‘empty’ spaces renders the discursive formation of place. Mapping the world holds power. Geographers hold this power.

I stumbled upon Black Geographies in 2011 through a Google search. It was the writings of Clyde Woods (1998) and Katherine McKittrick (2006) individually and collectively (McKittrick and Woods, 2007) that transformed my approach to geography and empowered me to create the space I needed in the discipline. As McKittrick writes, ‘Geography’s discursive attachment to stasis and physicality, the idea that space “just is,” and that space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations, is terribly seductive: that which “just is” not only anchors our selfhood and feet to the ground, it seemingly calibrates and normalizes where, and therefore who, we are’ (2006: xi).

This is what Oswin has done with ‘An Other Geography’. She has invited a provocation to destabilize our ideas of stasis. That insistence means that we must all engage in the deep and painful work of unlearning and decentering ourselves to make room for an/other geography. It is by thinking about the disruption and uncoupling of stasis and physicality that I think about how remarkable it is to have a Black Geographies Specialty Group. The 2019 AAG Meeting included two sessions on the work of Bobby Wilson, who recently retired from the University of Alabama. Wilson’s work, which has and continues to provide important renderings of geography by centering the Black experience, is exquisite and—as those sessions are taking up—long overlooked. In fact, the University of Georgia Press is republishing Wilson’s America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham (2019 [2000]).

I remember the first time I told Bobby Wilson that I was going to organize around Black Geographies and work on getting a specialty group. His response was: ‘oh—again?’ There had been attempts before, unsuccessful, which only fueled my intense desire to see it manifest and take hold. Never did I imagine receiving a phone call from the AAG president in 2017 telling me that there would be a Black Geographies Featured Theme at AAG 2018 and that I would chair it and need to pick a cochair. Geographers (and some staff members from the AAG) continue to marvel about the sacred spaces we created in New Orleans. In her article, Oswin recognizes the significance of Black and Latinx Geographies as creating necessary sites of belonging. And this is certainly true. I have often spoken of the overwhelming terror that I felt as I entered the Seattle Convention Center during my first encounter with the white, patriarchal space of the AAG Meeting. Though often rendered invisible, multiple forms of discomfort and violence in the form of microaggressions are created through the AAG Meeting space. Black and Latinx Geographies serve as spaces for us to be—without explanation, without becoming small, without fear.

At the same time, geography has to reckon with the devaluing of Black geographers who came before our current generation. Geography failed Black geographers. Geography and geographers did not ensure that they were retained through tenure (seriously, why did Carolyn Finney have to make the decision to leave academia? She should be tenured) or through, simply, a radically welcoming and affirming campus/department climate. Critical geographers of privilege who tout anti-racist leanings but fail to decenter the embodied power that they hold are as complicit as the structures that they dismantle in their research. Oswin reminds us that space is relational. The relationality of whiteness and power, and the disinterest in disrupting formulaic ‘geographical thought’, as Oswin describes, is a dangerous combination. The promise of Black and Latinx Geographies is to, among other things, dismantle the epistemological and pedagogical frames that dismiss ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (Woods, 2007). This has the potential to uphold the future of the discipline.

On a final, more personal note, I worked on Black Geographies, in part, as a way to work through grief. I defended my dissertation on July 1, 2014. Later that day, my mother entered the hospital and the next day went into hospice care. She passed away on July 21, 2014. My mother was my muse and inspiration, and, truthfully, I first learned Black geographical thought and praxis through her. Because she was not laden with geography’s credentials, she would have been dismissed by/in the discipline. Moving my mother’s name from the acknowledgments to the dedication before I filed my dissertation nearly ripped me apart. It is only now, 5 years later, that I am willing to open my dissertation and reengage in my past work.

Black Geographies healed me and heals others. I hear this all the time. This is why we need an other geography.