Chasing Ghosts: The Forgotten Maps of Black Women’s City Space

• In Event: Hauntings

Abstract

This paper reads between the lines, looking at the in-between spots to create an alter-map of Black women’s city space. Space can hold a particular form in the urban sociological imagination: street corners, stoops, perhaps even workplaces and corner shops. Black women are side characters, never the protagonists. What happens when we look beyond this traditional map? What can be disrupted both conceptually and methodologically? I explore this via personal research case studies: Black women recording police brutality in Minneapolis; Black girls in the Bronx navigating nighttime streets in a neighborhood of sex economies; Black women evicted in Los Angeles and pushed into the desert, up against the walls of an empty prison. We will follow them as our cartographic markers, as I argue that populating city spaces with Black women is like chasing ghosts - finding us in the liminal, beyond the frame, just out of the reach of what we are told to see. What emerges is a clear trail of insidious spatial misogynoir. But, Black women are transmuters, and we will discuss too, the hidden maps they create, pass down to each other, and walk along in order to survive and create home. These forgotten spaces are the critical ones of our time. As evictions rise, cities become increasingly militarized, and space itself becomes a quest for capital, we learn from disrupters, from rebuilders, from those that have been made ghosts.

Author

• Whitney Richards-Calathes, University of the West Indies