The Block: The Language of Black Space

• In Event: Place, Space, and Black Life

Description for Program

D.S. Marriott wrote in his poem Another Burning “ Blackness wasn’t in the language– we saw it being evacuated but we still inhabited the ashes”(Marriott, 2022, p. 102). With these words, this project asks the following questions: how do we as Black folks conceptualize our existence when we have been and are currently being written off the ledger? How do we exist when we are objects and not the subjects of our own being? Given these questions, this project asks an additional question, what spaces can we exist in? To answer this question I investigate Black Geographies through the work of Katherine McKittrick and Simone Brown. Through this engagement, I have developed the idea of “The Block”. The Block furthers the work of Katherine McKittrick and her theory of a ‘black sense of place’. McKittrick describes that “A black sense of place is not a standpoint or a situated knowledge; it is a location of difficult encounter and relationality. A black sense of place is not individualized knowledge—it is collaborative praxis” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 106) Thus, the Block is a Black Public Sphere wherein Black folks convene together to disidentify the white hegemonic public sphere to rethink, reimagine, and redefine what it means to be Black and to exist. It is with this work that The Block creates new language to describe the centrality of antiBlack violence all in the efforts to prophetically write a present and a future wherein Black folks are not objects, rather we are subjects who can exist freely.

Author

• Charles Ross