Geography
Research Resources for Geography
Black Geographies
Black Geographies and the Politics of Place by
The history of black people in the Americas and the Caribbean cannot be told without addressing powerful geographical shifts: massive forced migrations, land dispossession, and legal as well as informal structures of segregation. From the Middle Passage to the “Whites Only” signposts of US apartheid, the black Diasporic experience is rooted firmly in the politics of place.
Literature has long explored the cultural differences in the experience of blackness in different quarters of the Diaspora. But what are the real differences between being a maroon in the hills of Jamaica and a runaway in the swamps of Florida? How does location impact repression and resistance, both on the ground and in the terrain of political imagination?
Enter Black Geographies. In this path-breaking collection, fourteen authors interrogate the intersection between space and race. For instance, confronted with the importance of space in black cultural creation and preservation, some activists have sought to protect or restore black historical sites such as Tulsa's “Black Wall Street” and the African Burial Ground in New York City. For the dispossessed, all markers of history and belonging, including cultural property, become paramount. Yet each of these sites has in common acts of racial hatred and state terrorism that have left few of the historical structures standing—making them unlikely candidates for preservation. This begs the question: Is it even possible that advocating for preserving historic locations can act as a vehicle for social justice and spur community redevelopment?
Other contributors consider how Bob Marley's music maps a path to freedom, whether Malcolm Little could have emerged as Malcolm X outside of a black urban center, and if “lost” communities can be recovered.
ISBN: 9781897071236
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by
Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her--paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land--lie largely eroded and lost.
In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the country's still unfolding history, and ideas of "race," have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from "Indian Territory" and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital,Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past.
In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons.
ISBN: 9781619025738Publication Date: 2015-11-10
Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago by
Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.
ISBN: 9780252039645Publication Date: 2015-08-30
Feminist Geographies
Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle by
In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women's geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition.
Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs's attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter's philosophies.
Central to McKittrick's argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change.
ISBN: 0816647011Publication Date: 2006-05-03
Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies by
How is gender linked to geography? Do men and women live different lives in different parts of the world? And if gendered attributes are socially constructed, then how do femininity and masculinity vary over time and space? These are some the questions Linda McDowell explores in this accessible, wide-ranging, and thorough introduction to feminist perspectives on geography.
ISBN: 0816633940Publication Date: 1999-03-01
Feminist Spaces: Gender and Geography in a Global Context by
Feminist Spaces introduces students and academic researchers to major themes and empirical studies in feminist geography. It examines new areas of feminist research including: embodiment, sexuality, masculinity, intersectional analysis, and environment and development. In addition to considering gender as a primary subject, this book provides a comprehensive overview of feminist geography by highlighting contemporary research conducted from a feminist framework which goes beyond the theme of gender to include issues such as social justice, activism, (dis)ability, and critical pedagogy.
Through case studies, this book challenges the construction of dichotomies that tend to oversimplify categories such as developed and developing, urban and rural, and the Global North and South, without accounting for the fluid and intersecting aspects of gender, space, and place. The chapters weave theoretical and empirical material together to meet the needs of students new to feminism, as well as those with a feminist background but new to geography, through attention to basic geographical concepts in the opening chapter. The text encourages readers to think of feminist geography as addressing not only gender, but a set of methodological and theoretical perspectives applied to a range of topics and issues. A number of interactive exercises, activities, and 'boxes' or case studies, illustrate concepts and supplement the text. These prompts encourage students to explore and analyze their own positionality, as well as motivate them to change and impact their surroundings.
Feminist Spaces emphasizes activism and critical engagement with diverse communities to recognize this tradition in the field of feminism, as well as within the discipline of geography. Combining theory and practice as a central theme, this text will serve graduate level students as an introduction to the field of feminist geography, and will be of interest to students in related fields such as environmental studies, development, and women's and gender studies.
ISBN: 9781138924536Publication Date: 2017-10-04
Latinx Geographies
Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest by
Environmentalism and Economic Justice spotlights another front in the ongoing wars over environmental issues, a front being fought by Chicano communities in the American Southwest. The book concentrates on struggles surrounding both the 1965-71 pesticide campaign of the United Farm Workers and a grazing conflict involving a Hispano cooperative and mainstream environmentalists in northern New Mexico. Within these stories, readers will find broader implications for understanding how minority groups are using available resources to mobilize and improve their social, economic, and environmental conditions.
ISBN: 0816516057Publication Date: 1996-02-01
Latino Placemaking and Planning: Cultural Resilience and Strategies for Reurbanization by
Latinos are currently the second-largest ethnic group demographically within the United States. By the year 2050 they are projected to number nearly 133 million, or approximately one third of the country’s total population. As the urban component of this population increases, the need for resources to support it will generate new cultural and economic stresses.
Latino Placemaking and Planning offers a pathway to define, analyze, and evaluate the role that placemaking can have with respect to Latino communities in the context of contemporary urban planning, policy, and design practices. Using strategically selected case studies, Jesus J. Lara examines how Latinos contribute to the phenomenon of urban revitalization through the (re)appropriation of physical space for their own use and the consequent transformation of what were previously economically downtrodden areas into vibrant commercial and residential centers.
The book examines the formation of urban cultures and reurbanization strategies from the perspective of Latino urbanism and is divided into four key sections, which address (1) emerging new urban geographies; (2) the power of place and neighborhood selection; (3) Latino urbanism case studies; and (4) lessons and recommendations for “reurbanizing” the city. Latino Placemaking and Planning illustrates the importance of placemaking for Latino communities and provides accessible strategies for planners, students, and activists to sustainable urban revitalization.
ISBN: 9780816537099Publication Date: 2018-03-27
On Site, In Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina by
In On Site, In Sound Kirstie A. Dorr examines the spatiality of sound and the ways in which the sonic is bound up in perceptions and constructions of geographic space. Focusing on the hemispheric circulation of South American musical cultures, Dorr shows how sonic production and spatial formation are mutually constitutive, thereby pointing to how people can use music and sound to challenge and transform dominant conceptions and configurations of place. Whether tracing how the evolution of the Peruvian folk song "El Condor Pasa" redefined the boundaries between national/international and rural/urban, or how a pan-Latin American performance center in San Francisco provided a venue through which to challenge gentrification, Dorr highlights how South American musicians and activists created new and alternative networks of cultural exchange and geopolitical belonging throughout the hemisphere. In linking geography with musical sound, Dorr demonstrates that place is more than the location where sound is produced and circulated; it is a constructed and contested domain through which social actors exert political influence.
ISBN: 9780822368670Publication Date: 2018-02-13
Queer Geographies
Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries by
What queer lives, loves and possibilities teem within suburbia’s little boxes? Moving beyond the imbedded urban/rural binary, Relocations offers the first major queer cultural study of sexuality, race and representation in the suburbs. Focusing on the region humorists have referred to as “Lesser Los Angeles”—a global prototype for sprawl—Karen Tongson weaves through suburbia’s “nowhere”spaces to survey our spatial imaginaries: the aesthetic, creative and popular materials of the new suburbia.
Across southern California’s freeways, beneath its overpasses and just beyond its winding cloverleaf interchanges, Tongson explores the improvisational archives of queer suburban sociability, from multimedia artist Lynne Chan’s JJ Chinois projects and the amusement park night-clubs of 1980s Orange County to the imperial legacies of the region known as the Inland Empire. By taking a hard look at the cosmopolitanism historically considered de rigeur for queer subjects, while engaging with the so-called “New Suburbanism” that has captivated the national imaginary in everything from lifestyle trends to electoral politics, Relocations radically revises our sense of where to see and feel queer of color sociability, politics and desire.
ISBN: 9780814783092Publication Date: 2011-08-01
A Queer Geography: : Journeys Toward A Sexual Self by
What makes up the gay identity? What part do upbringing, family tradition, and cultural "norms" play on the development of one's sense of self? In A Queer Geography, Frank Browning looks at the effect that geography - literally being in different places in the world - has on the definition of sexuality and sexual roles. From the streets of Brooklyn to the waterfront of Naples, from a small town in Kentucky to the lusty side of Capitol Hill, Browning explores the gay psyche. Interweaving the personal stories of individual men with his own reflections on gay life in Italy, France, Brazil, and New Guinea among other places, Browning argues that today's gay rights movement could have happened only in the United States. He discovers the roots of gay identity in a distinctly American experience, discussing such sure-to-be controversial subjects as how the Puritan compact led to the backroom bawdy house, how being "born again" is reenacted as "coming out", and how gay men's search for their own identity profoundly echoes America's relentless quest for a national identity of its own.
ISBN: 0517598574Publication Date: 1996-04-02
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by
In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms’especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.
In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don’t Cry, Halberstam turns her attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. She examines the “transgender gaze,” as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. She then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities.
Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place.
ISBN: 0814735851Publication Date: 2005-01-01
