Incontestable: Imagining possibilities through intimate Black geographies

Abstract

This editorial takes the form of a dialogue between the editors of this Themed Intervention on Black intimate geographies. It frames the voices of the Black geographers from the USA and the UK assembled here as speaking to both the incontournability of anti‐blackness as a political reality and to Black ways of knowing, imagining, and dreaming our presents and our futures against and beyond resistance to anti‐blackness. The editorial celebrates the diasporic collaboration on which this Intervention is grounded and points to the possibilities of Black life and knowledge production.

For a new weird geography

“…There is no global weirding without histories of racism and misogyny, just like there is no Anthropocene without histories of colonialism. We highlight contemporary iterations of the weird, like the Black Weird (Dunning, 2020), as modes that expose the horrors of whiteness in society, and suggest there are critical overlaps with Black Geographies (Hawthorne, 2019; Hirsch and Jones, 2021; Noxolo, 2022) that future work in literary geographies should explore. In this sense, global weirding renders the current epoch of socioenvironmental change inherently political, which the Anthropocene does not always do (Yusoff, 2017).…”

“…The geographical subdiscipline of Black Geographies (e.g. Allen et al, 2019; Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; Eaves, 2017; Hawthorne, 2019; Hirsch and Jones, 2021; Moulton, 2022; Noxolo, 2022; Puttick and Murrey, 2020) is well-placed to examine this genre.…”

Geographies of race and ethnicity 1: Black geographies

“…The emplacedness of Blackness requires an attention to specificity. Where in the US intimate sites of Black existence like the stoop and the Black-owned business are key spatial sites and symbols of Black discourse and resistance (Brand, 2018), in the Caribbean, Canada and Australia studies of other intimate spaces – the lakou , the street corner, the mall, the café – reveal other political sites of surveillance and resistance through dance and playfulness (Sapp Moore, 2021; Lobo, 2016; Recollet, 2015; Stanley Niaah, 2010; see also Hirsch and Jones, 2021 on intimacy and joy). But emplacedness does not of course deny the transnational and geopolitical logics of white supremacy, in terms of the mobile and shared logics of colonialism (McKittrick, 2011) that intersect (Massey, 1995) each place.…”

Agonistic politics in post‐crisis landscapes: Comparative insights from Athens and Madrid

“…That said, we perceive our present contribution to critical debates in human geography beyond the specific cases and geographical contexts analysed in this paper and in dialogue with more recent profound reorientations of politics. In this sense, thinking of the spatialities, modalities, and temporalities of agonistics may further help us unpack the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis by interrogating the uneven geographies of vulnerability, blame, interdependence, and care (Sparke & Anguelov, 2020), and by acknowledging the more "intimate" or "ordinary" situated experiences (Hirsch & Jones, 2021) that are able to generate forms of political agency and democratic politics, across multiple and diverse contexts, spaces, and scales.…”