black earth
Session Organizer: Dimitri Diagne and Morgan P. Vickers
For many Black communities, the environmental crises of our time are not novel. They are the continuation of centuries-long historical processes ranging from intensive sugar cane farming in the colonial Caribbean, to gold mining in South Africa, to dam construction in the U.S. South. Black peoples’ relationships with land and natural resources are crucial to situating contemporary environmental crises in longer histories of capitalism, colonialism, and globalization. This panel brings into relief the sociopolitical, racial, and geographical contours of environmental crises by attending to the spatial and historical specificity of various communities’ experiences of environmental degradation. We turn to Black ecologies, which “names the corpus of insurgent knowledge produced by these same communities, which we hold to have bearing on how we should historicize the current crisis and how we conceive of futures outside of destruction” (Roane & Hoseby 2019).
The Black Earth theme addresses historical eco-social relations, contemporary crises, and futures outside of destruction. We seek works that explore Black individuals’ and communities’ economic, sociopolitical, and cultural engagements with landscapes and natural resources. This theme is not merely about histories of Black people coerced into participating in or bearing the costs of unsustainable and exploitative ecological projects. Rather, it encompasses diverse histories of Black modes of relating to the ecological world.
Citations
Roane, J. T. and Hosbey, Justin. (2019). Mapping Black Ecologies. Current Research in Digital History, 2(1).
Proposals submitted under this theme might address, but are not limited to:
- Black agricultural practices across time and space
- Eco-social connections between Blackness and material formations, such as earth, sand, soil, sediment, and water
- Black ecological relations outside of futures of destruction
- Black living, survival, and adaptation in the face of climate change, rising tides, droughts, and other extraordinary climate events of the Anthropocene
- Marronage, fugitivity, and other historical Black liberatory ecological practices
black California
Session Organizers: Morgan P. Vickers and Robert Moeller
California is a state of diverse topographies, rich cultural histories, multiracial convergences, and a long history of some of the starkest income disparities in the nation. The geography, politics, economy, and sociality of the current state represent, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, “150 years of California history and more thay 300 years of national anxieties and antagonisms.” Extractive industries like gold mining, forestry, agriculture, hydroelectricity, oil drilling, shipping, tourism, and development have historically produced racial disparities and exploited Black labor in California.
Yet, Black Californians have spearheaded political revolutions, established interracial and intercultural solidarities, shaped West Coast culture, and produced billions of dollars of wealth in every corner of the state. This confluence of industries, ecologies, and cultures also produced a distinct Black West coast feeling, shaping social spaces, music, media, fashion, and vernacular. California’s distinct and intertwined economic, cultural, and environmental characteristics position the state as ripe for physical and human geographic analyses.
This panel explores the making and remaking of Black California throughout its history, attending to our understandings of the state as a Black place, how the state (or portions of the state) have been made Black through racialization and resource extraction, and how California serves as a rich case study to explore the geographical complexities of Black West Coast life as a collection of feelings, reactions, cultures, vibes, and placemaking practices.
Citations
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. (2007). Golden Gulag Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. UC Press, p. 1.
Proposals submitted under this theme might address, but are not limited to:
- Black migration patterns: Great Migration, railways, and Green Book sites
- The making of Black urban, suburban, and rural spaces and places in California
- Black Hollywood and Black West Coast music, sounds, and culture
- Black organizing and resistance from the Black Panther Party to the LA Riots and beyond
- Economic and military histories of Black labor in the Pacific and California port cities
- Racial capitalism, mass incarceration, and the making of the “Other”
- Blackness in the California industry and economy — including explorations of Black labor, commodity, racial capitalism, and social reproduction in the state
black sound
Session Organizers: april l. graham-jackson and Sibahle Ndwayana
This panel explores the racialization of sound and how it is mediated, contextualized, and experienced through place-based orientation and the sociosonic textures of Black life. This cluster draws from Black poetics to think with Black acoustemologies—the ways Black people know, order, and understand their worlds —and what is audible to and for them through sound and racial positioning. Black sound tends to the affective and cross-sensory dimensions that inform, express, disrupt, and (re)shape Black life. Within this context, sound as a geographic modality deepens what Katherine Mckittrick identified as a “Black sense of place” and diagrams the materialities of Blackness as sound that highlight the sonic fluidity of Black places and the Black people we find in them.
This theme is also designed to think with Black sound as a mode of relationality that emphasizes both movement and emplacement within the everyday rhythms of the African Diaspora. This panel takes seriously Vanessa Agard-Jones' provocation addressing the importance of localized framings (scales) of being “in place and being emplaced.” To that end, this framework considers “sonic creolisations” as an entry point for thinking with the various ways Blackness is heard, listened to, and sounded across a range of African Diasporic modes through movement (diffusion) and emplacement (fixity).
This panel seeks proposals concerned with the interdependence of and relationships between Blackness, sound, and geography. We welcome submissions attuned to listening, hearing, tuning out, and engaging the sonic dimensions of Blackness and how these linkages inform Black acoustic environments, the everyday lives of Black people, and what it means to be a racialized listening and hearing “subject.”
Citations
Agard-Jones, Vanessa. (2012). “What The Sands Remember.” GLQ-A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 18.
Feld, Steven. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, eds. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12-21. Duke University Press. 2015.
Glissant, Édouard, and Manthia Diawara. (2009). “Conversation with Édouard Glissant aboard the Queen Mary II.” Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic (2010): 58-63.
McKittrick, Katherine. (2011). “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social and Cultural Geography. 12 (8): 947-63.
Proposals submitted under this theme might address, but are not limited to:
- Black sonic orientations connected to Black places (e.g. the sounds of Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis and global resonances and “remixes” of the movement, house music and kwaito parties in Chicagoland and South Africa)
- Noise, “sonic pollution,” acoustic displacement, and sonic practices that mute and|or tune out Black sound (e.g. Don’t Mute DC Movement)
- “Schizophonia” or the ways Black sound “splits” from its perceived place of origin through technological advancements and reproduction|appropriation
- Methods|Methodologies addressing how we research, locate, and tend to Black sound when it is "absent" from historical archives
- Cartographic representations of Black sound, including voice, breath, language, etc. and Black soundings produced in|by landscapes, homes, beauty shops, market places, the yard, corner stores, fete, carnival, street bashes, sound clashes, etc.
black futures
Session Organizer: Matt A. Randolph
The Black Futures theme invites works across academic disciplines that explore the connection between possibility and reality. This panel seeks to understand where Black futures can be found or forged through Afrofuturism as a Black placemaking strategy. We draw from Black life worlds that do not harm or exploit Black people, but instead are structured through Black epistemologies and spatial practices that affirm Black places and sustain Black life. Afrofuturism has largely been understood through the confluence of technology, futurity, and the speculative. This theme approaches Black futures geographically by asking where they are located and experienced within and beyond our imaginations.
As Ytasha L. Womach has theorized, “Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation.” At the same time, Black futures have a geographical dimension as much as an intellectual one. Ruth Wilson Gilmore makes clear that “freedom is a place.” Therefore, in order to build a better world, the fluid realm of ideas, dreams, theories, and geographic imaginaries must materialize into something tangible.
We invite scholarship that explores how communities of the African Diaspora have resisted structural racism and imagined new possibilities through collective place-making across local and global scales. Works under this theme might range from historical case studies of Afrofuturist/Afropessimist thinking, being, and acting, to contemporary explorations of grassroots organizing fighting for a better future for Black people, to analyses of literary works that overcome racial injustice and speculate about living otherwise. This panel asks: How have Black actors envisioned and produced spaces of possibility for Black self-determination, liberation, creativity, and/or autonomy? How do we draw from the imaginative currency of Afrofuturism to conceptualize and produce a “Black sense of place”?
Citations
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.” Tabula Rasa [online]. 2018, n.28, pp.57-77.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press. 2002.
McKittrick, Katherine. (2011). “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social and Cultural Geography. 12 (8): 947-63.
Womach, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books. 2013.
Proposals submitted under this theme might address, but are not limited to:
- Afrofuturism, the Black Radical Imagination, and related topics and discourses
- Afrofuturistic aesthetics in popular cultures (i.e. Black Panther comics and films, Drexciya’s music, N.K. Jemison’s science fiction works, etc.)
- The relationships between freedom and place/space
- The intellectual history of Black social, educational, and political movements
- How dreams for more racially just worlds are forged materially in spaces and places (through activism, political mobilization, community work, etc.)
- Conflict and intellectual diversity about what the best Black future should look like
- Is there a universal claim to Black liberatory futures? (and if so, how does place-based orientation - thinking about where freedom is located - complicate this?)