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As a part of the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, our faculty and graduate students are sharing their syllabi inspired by and centered around the themes of our study. Below is the course description and link to Camilla Hawthorne’s undergraduate sociology course syllabus.

CRES 190D: BLACK GEOGRAPHIES AND THE IMPERATIVE OF ABOLITION

“I learned from reading and studying with people like Cedric Robinson, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis, Claudia Jones, so many people from around the world, how it is that we can make freedom out of what we have—not by yielding or sacrificing some of our comrades—but by trying to live the principle where life is precious, life is precious.” – Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Intercepted” podcast

Course Description:
The call to abolish or defund police has gained national, mainstream attention in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings that erupted in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Nina Pop, James Scurlock, Tony McDade, and David McAtee. But far from a recent development, abolitionist demands are actually central to a 400–year legacy of Black struggle.

This senior seminar looks to the burgeoning field of Black Geographies to help us understand the renewed urgency of calls for abolition in our current moment. As critical human geographers contend, “space” is not a blank slate upon which human activity unfolds; rather, the production of space is intimately intertwined with the production of difference. Indeed, Black scholars and activists have long
recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing nuanced theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, carcerality, and anti-/post- colonialism that are inherently geographical.

In this senior seminar, we will consider how a critical attention to the mutual production of race and space can help us understand phenomena such as police violence, mass incarceration, and immigration detention—and how these insights can in turn help us chart (in the words of Katherine McKittrick, 2006) “more humanly workable geographies.” Because abolitionist knowledge production does not take place in just one discipline—or, for that matter, solely within the academy—we will read interdisciplinary and engage with works of activism and speculative fiction. We will also make use of multimedia, including videos, podcasts, music, website, and graphics.

Link to pdf: Black Geographies & the Imperative of Abolition

Image credit: Mariame Kaba graphic by Bec Young (2020)

As a part of the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, our faculty and graduate students are sharing their syllabi inspired by and centered around the themes of our study. Below is the course description and link to Camilla Hawthorne’s graduate seminar syllabus. As the labs founding faculty member, Dr. Hawthorne’s reading lists and genealogy of thought are an inspiration to the lab as a whole.

SOCY290: BLACK GEOGRAPHIES

“Black is in the break, it is fantastic, it is an absented presence, it is a ghost, a mirror, it is water, air; black is flying and underground; it is time-traveling, supernatural, inter-planetary, otherworldly; it is in between the lines and it is postcolonial; black is bulletproof and magical and in every dark corner; black is social death, afro-pessimist, afro-optimist, afrocentric, afropunk, afrofuturist, soulful, neosoul, blues; it is negritude, postslave, always enslaved; black is like who/black is like me; black is everywhere and everything; it is make-believe and magic.”
– Katherine McKittrick, “Worn Out” (2017)

Seminar Description:
This seminar provides an introduction to recent scholarship about the relationship between Blackness and the production of space. As critical human geographers contend, “space” is not a blank slate upon which human activity unfolds; rather, the production of space is intimately intertwined with the production of difference. Black scholars have long recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, and anti-/post-colonialism that are inherently geographical. Yet these interventions were long overlooked by the mainstream of disciplinary geography, thanks to various practices of knowledge production that—as Katherine McKittrick argues in Demonic Grounds—worked to efface a Black sense of place and the elide the ongoing relationship between anti-Black racism and the production of space.

This seminar poses two interrelated questions. First, how can insights from critical human geography help us understand the lived experiences, practices, and meanings of Blackness? And second, how can centering a “Black sense of place” in turn transform the way we think about space, place, and power? We will take on these questions by reading monographs and articles by scholars from geography, anthropology, sociology, Black feminism, and diaspora studies. In doing so, we will touch on a number of key themes in Black Geographies scholarship: gender and sexuality; racial capitalism; plantation futures; carcerality; urban geographies; health; and environment. We will also consider Black Geographies outside of the North American context, and spaces of intersection where emergent Black Geographic disciplinary formations meet fields such as Native Studies.

Link to pdf: SOCY290 – Black Geographies

Image credit: Katherine McKittrick

We asked some of our lab members to contemplate the question: When you think of Black Geographies what do you experience sensorially? Below are their reflections, memories, and ruminations.

Theresa Hice Johnson: A memory comes to mind from the first time I visited Cuba with my research respondents: On our first night in Cuba we went to a restaurant on the outskirts of Havana. The restaurant was in a courtyard so that from the street you couldn’t really tell that a restaurant was there. There were string lights and long tables. There was a live band. While most of the customers (besides our group) and staff were white, the musicians were Black. One of the students stood up to watch the musicians and I walked over to him. He was staring wide-eyed at the band and the lady who was singing in Spanish. I realized that it was probably his first time hearing a Black person speak Spanish. I asked him if it was weird to hear a Black person speak Spanish and he replied, “No, I think it’s beautiful.” 

Ki’Amber Thomas: When I think of Black Geographies I remember the first Black Geographies conference at UC Berkeley in 2016. I remember walking into a densely packed rooom of scholars from different places, disciplines, and backgrounds, together in the same space to think, talk, and write about blackness, space, and place. I think I was one of the few undergraduates at the conference and I had travelled from Claremont to Berkeley alone. I arrived late because I took the train in the wrong difrection after I landed at Oakland Airport, and I was working with maybe 4 or 5 hours of sleep from writing my thesis until the early hours of that same morning of my flight. Sitting in that packed room, I listened to the different speakers panel after panel and I remember feeling like I was exactly where I needed to be. I could tell that this gathering was something special, like the start of something, the emergence of something, the budding of flower, the structure of feeling.

Naya Jones: I think of reading Katherine McKittrick the first time – an incredible mix of understanding and not understanding, of knowing and not knowing. I knew demonic grounds in my bones, but it took me years (and it’s still on-going) to understand the depth of work by McKittrick, Woods, and others in the field. I also see oceans when I think of Black geographies – and I appreciate how different oceans are part of our works (Atlantic, Indian, otherwise).

Chris Lang: When I think of Black Geographies, I envision a bit of trans- or multi-dimensionality. I think of this book ‘Of Water and the Spirit’ and the ways past and future, here and there, are all woven through the focal point of present consciousness. This book was a gift given to me by my Native boss, who is Mascalero and Warm Springs Apache. The day I opened it, almost 200 crows circled above my mom’s house, and I was flooded with connection to my late aunt, Laura Hunter. I sometimes think about the nonlinearity of time and how everything happens for a reason. Also, how ancestors of others can connect us to our own ancestors for moments of healing. I think about a return to Indigeneity.

Elsa Calderon: When I think of Black Geographies, I think of exploring unknown territories. Black Geographies is a network of culture, language, art, history, soil, and indigenous knowledge that keeps the world alive. All of these concepts are distinctive and unique but are found all over the world. You can find this essence of Blackness all over the world because we have been pollinated and scattered in all of the Americas, Carribean territory, Australia, Asia, and Europe. Black Geographies exists for us to connect the dots to re-write our history.