Black Geographies: Vulnerability, Possibility, and Futurity in the U.S. South

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Vulnerability to ecological disaster that results from state neglect and violence is a defining feature of Black communities in the United States and beyond in the wider Diaspora. In large measure, this results from the geographic and spatial imperatives of racial capitalism, through which Black communities have diminished access to the levers of power and heightened exposure to risk as meted out in the spatial organization of American society. Understanding the geographic underpinnings of this radical exposure to dispossession and premature death are crucial for the preservation of Black life within the Anthropocene. On this panel, we will discuss this condition of visceral vulnerability in the U.S. South and beyond, as well as the radical re-imaginings of the world that Black communities produce out of these conditions. Using analytical insights from cultural anthropology, literary analysis, and history, the panelists will excavate the ways that vulnerable Black communities survive and thrive within conditions of geographic marginality. In the process of contouring new future horizons, these communities map out a vision of Black survival far beyond their specific locales in the U.S. South, in ways that demand the interruption of racial capitalism and articulate new visions for a more just, sustainable, and survivable world.

Sub Unit

• 101st Annual Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Chair

• Francis Gourrier, Kenyon College

Individual Presentations

• "I'm Back, By Popular Demand": Charter Schools, Black Social Life, and the Refusal of Death on Post-Katrina New Orleans - Justin Hosbey, University of Florida

• Grounds for Imagination: Looking Out from Mississippi in Post-Katrina Fiction - Dana Cypress, University of Pennsylvania

• ‘Put ya one leg up’: Go-Go and Black Working Class Consciousness Across Two Geographies of Disaccumulation - J.T. Roane, Smith College

Commentator

• ASALH Audience, .