A Black Sense of Place: Black Geographies

Black feminist geographer, Katherine McKittrick, defines Black geographies as “subaltern or alternative geographic patterns that work alongside and beyond traditional geographies and a site or terrain of struggle” (2006, 7).

This Black studies approach structures analyses of geographies across the Black diaspora in this course. Students will explore the relationships between race, racisms, space, and place through an interdisciplinary examination of the intimate, the material, the political, the body, and the collective as “sites of struggle.” We will read from texts such as Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans and Erica Lorraine Williams’ Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements.