Our topic, “Black Geographies and Black Literature since 1980,” addresses recent work in Black Geographies, an emergent interdisciplinary field comprising work in African American studies, human geography, sociology, philosophy, and other disciplines. Black Geographies has a twofold inquiry. On one hand it examines the spatial legacy of the plantation regime, including its physical and cultural traces across modern history and into the present, and the ways that these traces are systematically ignored and erased by academic inquires and pop-cultural artifacts fundamentally informed by white supremacy. On the other, it describes the geographies—that is, the imagined and actual maps and routes—that Black people produce for themselves, and that white institutions and discourses ordinarily disavow. Literary texts and literary theory have been central to the field’s development, as demonstrations of Black geographical imagination, and as tools for recognizing erasure and reading in its despite. This panel’s contributions each further developing Black Geographies’ ongoing discussions of location, travel, the Black body, and the sites and occasions of resistance to white supremacy. As will be explained in detail below, the panel contributors all focus specifically on the US and the Caribbean, and on very recent literature.

Rationale

Review of the last two years’ MLA Convention Programs reveals no panels and no individual papers addressed to or informed by Black Geographies, despite the field’s exploding importance across African American studies and the social sciences. The most recent American Association of Geographers meeting was devoted to the topic, for example, while major essay collections are forthcoming from presses including Mississippi and Duke. In literary studies proper, a special issue of American Literature on the plantation planned. The topic is not only timely for the Convention, in other words; it’s overdue.

Relation to Existing Literature

Major figures working in Black Geographies include the geographers Kathleen McKittrick and Clyde Woods, as well as sociologists including George Lipsitz and Elijah Anderson, and their scholarship has inspired some literary criticism. Importantly, though, primary theoretical innovations in Black Geographies—particularly its description of the disavowal of black knowledge, and its emphasis on the uncanny and traumatic traces of the plantation and the Middle Passage in ordinary public discourse today—come directly from Black women literary scholars including Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, as well as Black women writers and poets including NourbeSe Philip, Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat and Toni Morrison.

This panel’s goal, therefore, is not to apply social-science or philosophical concepts to literary reading, but rather to further develop and demonstrate what literary reading can do for the social sciences, and for the broader project of Black resistance. To this end, each panelist offers a literary reading that demonstrates the presence and flexibility of Black geographical knowledge in the world today. Our hope is that the session will both engage scholars already involved in Black Geographies, and draw in those who are unfamiliar with its precepts and concepts.

Operations of the Panel

We will offer three, fifteen- to eighteen-minute papers, leaving at least fifteen minutes for debate.

Individual Presentations

Gwen Bergner’s presentation “Lòt bò dlo and the Spatial Relations of Haiti’s Dyaspora” addresses a major figure in Black Geographies’ intellectual lineage, the Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat. Bergner’s paper explains how the story cycle The Dew Breaker (2004) systematically develops a geography based in Haitian culture and the Kreyol language. The stories use phrases and concepts that describe Africa and the afterlife to describe immigration to the US, and hence also complicates the often basic and undifferentiated notion of diaspora that frequently informs discussions of Haitian American culture. Her paper demonstrates, in other words, both the Black Geographies method of turning to vernacular and extra-institutional worldviews for new insights, and the greater analytic depth and precision it affords.

Chiyuma Elliott’s “What They Say About Dixie: Race, Place, and Sonic Allusion in the Poetry of C. S. Giscombe” takes up a cliché of American studies—the railroad as intruder on the pastoral and symbol of destructive modernity—and explains how culpably naïve such geographic readings are from the perspective of African American poetry. In Giscombe’s poetry, the train and its intrusive sounds do not signal a lost Garden; for his post-Migration Black Southerners living in the North, they rather demonstrate how dangerous pastoral is for Black people, by constantly reminding them of loss, an escape that is not quite complete, and racial violence that can never be fully evaded. Her work thus explains, not only the specific symbolic and actual Black geographies of the poet’s cycle, but also the way that those occluded, traumatic maps of the world disappear behind more familiar images of rural and urban, and past and present.

Dadland Maye’s “Black Social Justice Geographies: The Battle Between Dancehall and Transnational Queerness (1980-2014)” directly compares two different Black geographies, on one hand that of Black Caribbean popular music, and on the other that of Jamaican, US and international LGBTQ activists, in the context of the latter’s protests against homophobic dancehall lyrics. While the activists depict a social geography riven by gratuitous homophobia (including violence), the musicians emphasize a broader context of Black Caribbean struggle against white supremacy. Maye’s goal is not to adjudicate between the two sides’ competing claims, however, but to demonstrate both the fact of that competition, and the incompletion of both sides’ accounts of social justice, points that so far remain unaddressed by dancehall scholars such as Carolyn Cooper and Nadia Ellis. His paper therefore demonstrates that Black Geographies are necessarily multiple and contingent, not monolithic or systematized, and that no scholarship that excludes this complexity can fully address the realities of Black resistance.