Recovering Black Place-Making: Toward a Poetics of Landscape and Literacy With Black Youth

• In Event: Sites Unseen: Reimagining Literacy Sites for Just and Equitable Futures

Abstract

I am all of the wonderful wards. I’m all streetcar and red beans and Zulu for Mardi Gras… I am the free Indians, the free Africans in Congo Square, I’m that too...that too...I’m all me. I’m all me in New Orleans...
-Tank and the Bangas, New Orleans (2019)

I begin with the words of singer/poet/performer Tarriona “Tank” Ball to note a soulful recent entry into the long legacy of Black women’s poetics of landscape, what McKittrick (2006) describes, referencing Glissant (1997), as “constituting narrative acts...delineating a relationship to the land...disclosing the underside, unapparent histories and stories that name the world and black personhood.” (p.xxii-xxiii) Throughout the performance, Tank elaborates upon how her identity is deeply connected to the lived experiences within her home New Orleans, pointing out how local food culture, public transportation, community celebrations, and collective histories of resistance have left an imprint on her self-becoming. When understood as scholarship, as Tank theorizing about the city, “New Orleans” serves as a counternarrative to conventional social science scholarship that discounts and/or erases the fullness and multiplicity of Black relationships to Land (Tuck et.al, 2014).

When we consider creative practices by Black youth as spatial matters, with the added significance that their “imaginations and mappings are evidence of their struggles over social space” (McKittrick, 2006, p.9), it allows us to bear witness to ways that the literacy practices and cultural repertoires of Black youth have the potential to express themes of survival, reciprocity, community, and refusal (Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017), affirming these experiences as sources of strength and sociocritical inquiry. Moving through New Orleans to Philadelphia to Chicago and beyond, the social lives of Black youth and their attendant spatial practices are a key site to understand how youth multimodal literacies can make visible multiple worlds within contained geographies (ex. Kinloch, 2010), countering mainstream single stories (Adichie, 2009; Cairns, 2018) and emphasizing Black personhood (McKittrick, 2006; McKittrick & Woods, 2007). With the recognition of these literacy events as a repository of reflections on the past, present, and future of their communities, the counterarchive produced by Black youth can be utilized as a corrective to the dominant trend within social science scholarship, rarely attending to the life lived within Black urban communities (Kelley, 2001; Hunter et al., 2016). Working against what Wacquant (2007) calls territorial stigmatization, or the marginalizing representation of poor, racialized communities, Black youth may produce counternarratives of place where representations of their lived communities embrace the city as a “site of play, pleasure, celebration, and politics” (Hunter et al., 2016) to disrupt damage-centered (Tuck, 2009) framing.

Extending from this conceptual essay, I aim to bridge insights from critical urban studies and the emerging field of Black Geographies to build a research foundation for further investigation, reflecting on how Black youth engage in practices of (re)storying place (Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2018), thereby contributing to long-standing legacies of community preservation and “freedom dreaming” (Kelley, 2002; Love, 2019) amid ongoing processes of dispossession.

Author

• Christopher Rogers, University of Pennsylvania