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THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF
black people cannot be told without addressing
powerful geographical shifts: massive forced
migration, land dispossession, and legal as well as
informal structures of segregation. From the Middle
Passage to the "Whites Only" signposts of North
American apartheid, the black diasporic experience
is rooted firmly in the politics of place.
Literature has long explored cultural differences
in the experience of blackness in different
quarters of the diaspora. But what are the real
differences between being a maroon in the hills of
Jamaica, a fugitive slave in Chatham, Ontario, and
a runaway in the swamps of Florida? How does
location impact repression and resistance, both on
the ground and in the terrain of political
imagination?
Enter Black Geographies. In this
path-breaking collection, twelve authors
interrogate the intersections between space and
race. For instance, some scholars, activists, and
communities have sought to protect, restore, and
reimagine black historical sites. Yet each of these
locations has in common acts of racial hatred and
state terrorism that have erased black geographies,
leaving few historical structures standing. This
begs the question: Can preserving and restoring
such sites promote social justice and spur
community redevelopment?
Black geographies -- invisible and visible, past
and present-pose revealing questions about the
politics, and possibilities, of place.
Katherine
McKittrick lives in Toronto, Ontario, and
teaches gender studies, critical race studies, and
indigenous studies at Queen's University in
Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Demonic
Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of
Struggle, and is also researching the writings
of Sylvia Wynter.
Clyde Woods lives in Santa Barbara,
California, and teaches in the Department of Black
Studies at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. Woods is the author of Development
Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the
Mississippi Delta.
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