GEOG 595 A: Special Topics in Geography

This course provides an overview of key texts in Black studies on space, place, and environment. Students will interrogate the ways in which our understandings of nature are materially and symbolically bound up with notions of race. We will also consider placemaking practices and ecological relationships across and within the African Diaspora despite repeated movements, dispersals, and displacements. Centrally, this course will guide students through the question, what is the place of blackness? This should not be confused with inquiries that simply locate where Black people live. Rather, by focusing on ecological relations and conceptions of place, postcoloniality, and diaspora in Black studies, we will couple the study of dominant geographic orders with that of socio-cultural productions of space and environment. The nature of the subject demands multi-disciplinarity. Thus, while our principal vantage points will be geography and related social sciences, we also will engage cultural studies, literary studies, and philosophy.