What Harriet Tubman and John Brown can teach us about abolishing ‘White men’

Abstract

This commentary argues that one path toward Natalie Oswin’s ‘An Other Geography’ is through abolishing the institution of ‘White men’. Like other oppressive institutions, ‘White men’ have produced epistemic violence that has shaped and structured the discipline of geography in uneven and unjust ways. This essay is an effort to show appreciation and gratitude, and to stand in solidarity, with Oswin’s prophetic vision of ‘an other geography’. I mobilize the linked biographies of Harriet Tubman and John Brown as an entry point given how little we have yet worked to understand abolitionist history for thinking through the many ways we can work to transform geography.

For a spatial politics of dignity

“…If we take this premise seriously, then it's not just that dignity has something to offer urban geography but also that critical urban (and nonurban) geographical scholarship, particularly that emerging from Black, Indigenous, and Latinx geographies, theorizations of racial capitalism, abolition geographies, decolonial geographies, and feminist geographies, has much to offer to a dialogue about dignity. Scholars working in these subfields can help us think in nuanced ways about the formations that constrain dignity, not least of which is the role that geography has played therein (Curley and Smith, 2020;Eaves, 2020;Faria and Mollett, 2020;Gieseking, 2020;Heynen, 2020;Oswin, 2020;Roy, 2020a). They offer insights into how people organize at 'novel resolutions' (Gilmore, 2008: 36), shedding light on the importance of alternative spatial imaginaries and epistemologies to praxes of liberation.…”