Premise
That black people, across different geographies and political histories have inhabited urban spaces and contributed to urbanization processes in ways that remain unprecedented
and unparalleled. With vernaculars, socialities, temporal orientations, and techne that have had to navigate the tricky conundrum of black people attempting to insert themselves into what passes as the normative ethos and demeanors of urban life—whose affordances have been largely foreclosed or distributed unevenly—while simultaneously refusing to “normalize” themselves according to the structures of power and codes that have subjugated them.
In these volatile, often ephemeral interstices, emerges the materialization of distinctive ways of being urban that are constantly recalibrated, but yet constitute a living archive whose sensibilities are constantly being ignored, repressed or coopted. Any deliberation on humanity’s urban future must attempt to shed the predominance of anti-blackness to learn from this archive, perhaps more important than ever.
Objectives
1. To map out the temporal terrain of black futurities: as a time of repeated catastrophe, non-linearity, incessant struggle. Imagination, unbounded by developmentalism, a plurality of past futures, cities yet to come.
2. To consider the making/unmaking of operational territories—not just those of geographies but of collective bodies and genres of being human, of modalities of expression and performance. Focusing on the urbanization of the relations among things, as blackness has long connoted the interweaving of the disparate and
contradictory, as well as the extensiveness of place into a larger surround.
3. To consider how urban imaginaries have materialized beyond conventional form, constantly shape-shifting and obdurate, indifferent to subjecthood and proportionality.
Course Themes
The course will be organized around three themes. Students will select one of the three themes to develop a short power point presentation, such as with Canva, that can make use of multi-media tools to present their own thoughts and experiences with the specific theme chosen.
1. Black well-being: Black urbanities are concerned with the realities of black well-being. But who defines it and according to what terms of reference? Past efforts have focused on various intermixtures of:
*refusal—to be defined by prevailing norms.
*claims of commensurability—where differentiated black practices are seen as the equivalent to the prevailing norms in terms of moral standard and practical efficacy and capable of being seamlessly translated into each other.
*parallelism—where black values and practices are claimed to be fundamentally different yet functionally able to co-exist with prevalent social reproduction practices; capable of acting as a virtuous complement or supplement.
*non-distinctiveness—where there is not a claim for black distinction, but rather the functional adherence or approximation to prevailing norms—where the degree of realization is attributed to structures of opportunity.
2. Black expressiveness: Whereas many institutionalized expressions of black collective life focus on the explicitly political dimensions of combatting anti-blackness, racism, and social exclusions—advocating for legal protections, political participation, judicious provisions of necessary affordances— there are also dimensions of such institutionalized expressions that focus on cultivating ethical orientations to everyday life, including acts of aspiring and maintaining historical continuities, that are critical aspects of figuring black well-being.
These aesthetic considerations are also facets of political action in that they constitute ways of experiencing and assessing black existence in terms that extend beyond the frames of compensation, endurance, and complicity.
3. Black justice: Using Denise Ferreira da Silva’s: difference without separability,
where the availability of black livability and resourcefulness to the world is not the basis of a differentiated subjecthood of the modern, white individual or social.
Not a resource to be extracted from in order to buttress the formation of property as the substrate of white privilege. But as an elemental feature that exceeds any specific use or valuation.
Urban justice is thus not the restoration of some overarching commonality,
not the equilibration of difference through the fair apportionment of specific resources or opportunities, (no matter how important) but rather the availability of differences to generate new ways of living without judgments of their efficacy according to standards they have not contributed to developing.
Core Texts. (all texts will be provided)
Alves, Jaime 2021. F*ck the Police!: Antiblack statecraft, the myth of cops’ fragility, and the fierce urgency of an insurgent anthropology of policing
Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 91: 100–114
Esteves, Brais 2022. Black life and aesthetic sociality in the Subúrbio Ferroviário
de Salvador, Bahia. In Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the City: Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics, edited by Laura Trafí-Prats, Aurelio Castro-Varela.
Hartman, Saidiya 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. WW Norton (selection)
Heron, Adom Philogene Heron 2022. Goodnight Colston. Mourning Slavery: Death Rites and Duppy Conquering in a Circum-Atlantic City. Antipode 54, 4:1251–175
Kisukidi, Nadia Yala 2020.Geopolitics of the Diaspora. Eflux #114
Lewis, Jovan Scott 2024. Black life beyond injury: Relational repair and the reparative conjuncture. Political Geography 108
McKittrick Katherine 2011. On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography, 12,8: 947-963
Nascimento, Beatriz 2021.The Concept of Quilombo and Black Cultural Resistance.
Antipode 53, 1:279–316.
Towne, Sharita. A Black Geographic Reverie & Reckoning in Ink and Form 2023. In The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, edited by Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis. Duke University Press.
Supplementary Texts
Campt, Tina 2019. The Visual Frequency of Black Life Love, Labor, and the Practice of Refusal.
Social Text 140; 37, 3
Crawford, Margo Natalie 2022.What Time Is It When You’re Black? The South Atlantic Quarterly 121:1.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise 2009. NO-BODIES Law, Raciality and Violence.
Griffith Law Review 18, 2.
Hesse, Barnor 2022. Black Populism The South Atlantic Quarterly 121:3.
Leel, Ana Paulina 2022. Urban Sorcery, Segregation, and Ethnographic Spectacle in Twentieth-
Century Rio de Janeiro. Luso-Brazilian Review 58:2
Perry, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry 2016. Geographies of Power: Black Women Mobilizing
Intersectionality in Brazil. Meridians 14,1: 94-120.
Shange, Savannah 2019. Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality & the Refusal of Ethnography.
Transforming Anthropology, 27, 1: 3–21,
Videos
Black Urban Life Panel-IRAAS 25th Anniversary Conference
(Deborah Thomas intervention)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoIZ2gU-jK0
Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CS627aKrJI
Hortense Spillers – Shades of Intimacy: Women in the Time of Revolution
https://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/hortense-spillers-shades-of-intimacy-wo…
Histories of Imagining Urban Futures in Central Africa (Filip de Boeck)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lv5dVr_IfM
Left of Black | Hip-Hop Feminist Dr. Joan Morgan, 25 Years of "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiPuXVMA24M
Left of Black | Celebrating "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination" with Robin D.G. Kelley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D23W_fRDm98
Moor mother videos
https://moormother.net/videos
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