Mathematics Black Life

Decolonising geographical knowledges

“…Following Fanon and Peruvian scholar Anibal Quijano, MCD scholars argue that the colonisation of the Americas inaugurated colonial‐modern divisions of labour, the racialisation of non‐Europeans and intersectional hierarchies of race‐gender‐class and knowledge (Lugones ; Maldonado‐Torres ). In this sense, ‘the tenets and the lingering histories of slavery and colonialism produced modernity as and with and through blackness’ (McKittrick , 17), while settler colonialism undercut Indigenous sovereignty (Radcliffe ; Razack ). As argued by critical race scholars in geography, racialisation is integral to understanding knowledge production in the discipline that is majority white, resulting in insufficient attention being paid to racialisation in geographical theory, practice and institutions (Kobayashi ; Pulido ).…”

“…As argued by critical race scholars in geography, racialisation is integral to understanding knowledge production in the discipline that is majority white, resulting in insufficient attention being paid to racialisation in geographical theory, practice and institutions (Kobayashi ; Pulido ). In parallel, decolonial writers seek to make visible white supremacy's material and epistemic consequences in order to disturb the ‘very system that cannot survive without anti‐blackness’ and anti‐indigeneity (McKittrick , 17; Sium et al . ), as in the activism of #IdleNoMore .…”

“…Comprising one strand in the broad field of decolonial thinking, Indigenous theory seeks to pinpoint the specificity of Indigenous disempowerment and to provide analytical and political alternatives to the Indigenous colonial present. This stance removes decolonial approaches from the realm of the metaphorical to examining the material and political costs of settler colonialism (Radcliffe ; Tuck and Yang ), and a scholarship defined neither by a ‘descriptive analytics of [anti‐black or anti‐Indigenous] violence … , a sigh of … post‐race relief, [nor a] dismal dance of authenticity’ (McKittrick , 25). Inspired by subaltern methodologies and feminisms of colour among others, decolonising geographical methodologies are sitting in plain sight, although the enactment and practice of decolonisation requires caution, guidance and humility, and is always complex and highly contentious.…”

The Impossibility of a Future in the Absence of a Past: Drifting in the In-Between

“…"This chain of names," Fehskens offers, "bears witness to what remains unrecoverable, an historical record of Africans on board the Zong" (2012,415). In this way, Philip forces her readers to account not only for the violence aboard the Zong but also for the violence of archival erasure (Austen 2011, Fehskens 2012, Hartman 2008, Lambert 2016, McKittrick 2014. Drift moves us between, forces us to confront illogic as we drift from sound to sound, borne on the invisible waves of Philip's literary imaginary.…”

Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life by Marcus AnthonyHunter and Zandria F.Robinson, University of California Press, Oakland, 2018, 312 pp., paperback $31.14 (ISBN 978‐0520292833)

“…It is not just a mapping of where Black people are and histories of where they have been; rather, Black geographies situates its difference by centring Black knowledge in a discipline rooted in white epistemological frameworks. Studies on race are often critiqued for fetishizing Black suffering and thereby portraying Black people as less than human and always in relation to violence (McKittrick 2014). Hunter and Robinson do not shy away from discussing violence committed against Black communities; however, these discussions are centred around Black knowledge and experience instead of the acts of violence themselves.…”