Issues of spatial politics, racialized surveillance, and movement for African Americans have come to the fore in recent years, especially with the recent rise of street protests countering police and vigilante violence on Black people. The question of how to understand Black mobility in highly surveilled, regulated, and policed spaces, however, has been contested. A rich body of scholarship on race and space has investigated how the re/production of racialized spaces is fundamental to the maintenance of racial capitalism (McKittrick, Gilmore). These Black Studies scholars have emphasized the ways in which Black subjects cannot (easily) move outside spaces of enclosure. Others have argued that research should focus on Black geographic thought and practice that approaches the production of space differently, staging acts of resistance and fugitivity that contest racially structured geographies. In particular, this panel draws on Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods’ (2007) monograph entitled Black Geographies and the Politics of Place in which they highlight how a Black poetics of space works against antiblack spatiality in and through such place-making strategies as foodways, the blues, the plot, or marronage (McCutcheon, Bledsoe, Woods, Wynter).

As we evoke the notion of Black Geographies, we are thinking about how placelessnes and a Black sense of place shapes the emotional lives of humans, specifically, celebratory emotions such as joy and sorrow. While there is exciting scholarship on the complexities of Black pleasures, erotic or otherwise (Lorde, Nash, Miller-Young), few of these works have centered the significance of geographies in producing such pleasures. Our panel more directly examines the relationship between sorrows/joys and geographies by reconceiving these emotions in spatial terms and accounting for the ways in which they infuse geographies with affective attachments. Thus, each panelist’s paper uncovers expressions of Black joy and sorrow within spatial matters, experiences, and imaginaries.

Inspired by the figure of the flâneur but aligned with scholarship on Black Geographies and Ecologies, Mozes’ presentation seeks to better understand the affective attachments of Jones’s characters to their homes, their neighborhoods, and their human and nonhuman companions. For the professional woman awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call announcing her mother’s passing, the familiar urban landscape resonates with sorrow. When she intentionally loses herself in the city, a distinct Black geography emerges that produces unpredictable, improbable possibilities for joy. In “Joys and Sorrows of Black Geographies in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City,” Mozes thus argues that errantry allows city-dwellers to feel a complex blend of sorrow and joy that relate to the ongoing environmental destruction and the attendant loss of human and nonhuman life.

In “Re-Producing the Meaning of the Geography of Enslavement: Henry Box Brown’s Environmental Resistance,” Martha J. Cutter applies McKittrick’s insight about the production of space to the life and performance work of an enslaved man who came to be known as Henry Box Brown (due to his escape from slavery in a large postal crate that he mailed from Richmond Virginia to Philadelphia in 1849). She shows that Brown creates what McKittrick might term an “oppositional geography” via the space of his box itself, which becomes a realm of human terror (he could have died during the initial voyage) but also resistance and self-possession. Brown also produces and reproduces the carceral environment of enslavement by invoking two other sites of terror: the slave ship and the auction block. She argues that by invoking these specific geographies, Brown struggles to produce a space where his fugitivity can be reconfigured even while also demonstrating the “everywhere” of slavery.

In “Sonic Geographies of Relation: Soundscapes of Joy and Sorrow,” Meina Yates-Richard explores how within Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) and A Mercy (2008), Césaire and Morrison mine soundscapes of politically unheard Black experiences to imagine forms of Black liberation. These writers turn to what she names Black maternal sonority by centering Black maternal figures as sonic conduits of knowledge production through similar models of acoustic representation. Thus, both authors map Americas’ sonic geographies of Black sorrow and (fleeting) joys that engender forms of what Glissant names Relation and compel us to listen closely for echoing freedom dreams.

The panel is divided into three 20-minute papers, followed by a twenty-minute discussion period. This format best suits the session because the individual presentations offer readings of particular Black geographies, while the discussion enables us to dive deeper into the problems, issues, and questions posed by affective engagements with geographic insurgences within and across the Black literary tradition.