An official website of the United States government
According to the Association of African American Museums (AAAM), there are more than 200 African American history and cultural museums—or other sites with substantial African American collections such as libraries and archives—across the U.S. Many of these museums had their start shortly after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, with a surge in establishments in the 1970s. Black museums serve to decenter White stories of America and refocus on Black experiences. While geographers have studied an array of memory, heritage, and tourism sites, museums remain understudied and under-theorized. Building upon the subfields of Museum geographies—particularly by considering the concept of museums as theatres of pain—and Black geographies, our research examines the ways these museums are integral to the relationships between Black placemaking and the tourism landscape, which remains steeped in anti-Black racism. Using museum exhibit documentation, semi-structured interviews of museum staff, and content analysis of online travel reviews (primarily TripAdvisor and Google Reviews), this paper analyzes two case studies: The National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio, and The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Through our two case studies, we show how Black museums enact curatorial practices of commemorative geographies and create redemptive spaces that cultivate not only a homeplace for visitors, particularly for Black Americans and people of the African diaspora but also serve as sites of belonging and joy.
more »
« less
The mapping behind the movement: On recovering the critical cartographies of the African American Freedom Struggle
Responding to recent work in critical cartographic studies and Black Geographies, the purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework and a set of evocative cartographic engagements that can inform geography as it recovers the seldom discussed history of counter-mapping within the African American Freedom Struggle. Black resistant cartographies stretch what constitutes a map, the political work performed by maps, and the practices, spaces, and political-affective dimensions of mapping. We offer an extended illustration of the conventional and unconventional mapping behind USA anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, high-lighting the knowledge production practices of the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute’s Monroe Work, and the embodied counter-mapping of journalist/activist Ida B. Wells. Recognizing that civil rights struggles are long, always unfolding, and relationally tied over time and space, we link this look from the past to contemporary, ongoing resistant cartographical practices as scholars/activists continue to challenge racialized violence and advance transitional justice, including the noted memory-work of the Equal Justice Initiative. An understanding of African American traditions of counter-mapping is about more than simply inserting the Black experience into our dominant ideas about cartography or even resistant mapping. Black geographies has much to teach cartography and geographers about what people of color engaged in antiracist struggles define as geographic knowledge and mapping practices on their own terms.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1660274
- PAR ID:
- 10213684
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geoforum
- ISSN:
- 0016-7185
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
In April of 2019, the Rockefeller Foundation's ‘100 Resilient Cities’ (100RC) programme abruptly shuttered, surprising programme proponents and critics alike. In this paper, we explore why this happened, why some styles of geographic critique could not anticipate 100RC’s closure, and what this inability means for dominant strands of critical geographic analysis. To answer these questions, we bring literature on the biopolitics of resilience, technopolitics and Black geographies to bear on the case of Greater Miami resilience planning. We argue that answers to these questions revolve around the designerly roots of resilience thinking, whose distinct intellectual lineage conventional critical approaches have struggled to pick up on. We show how, on the one hand, design practices of synthesis in Greater Miami attempted to frame and instrumentalise Black histories of and experiences with racial and environmental violence as bounded knowledge that could improve the functioning of complex systems. On the other hand, synthesis created overflowings: opaque knowledges and experiences that resist the framing process and continue to mediate political battles over what resilience in Greater Miami practically becomes. Based on the case, we propose that an inductive style of critique that traces processes of framing and overflowing can help advance critical geographic analysis. As we illustrate in the paper, this mode of critique pays specific attention to the opaque, historically and contextually specific knowledges and experiences that refuse to be framed or synthesised, and work to counter-frame dominant conceptions of resilience—critical and conventional alike.more » « less
-
As resilience has become an increasingly influential governance principle, geographers have been among the most ardent critics of the concept and its depoliticizing effects. But what might the last decade of geographic critiques of resilience tell us about the geographic thought today? Situating geographic research on resilience in the discipline’s reparative conjuncture and the problematic of the Anthropocene, this paper draws attention to what I call salvage geographies. Playing on James Clifford's (1986), sense of salvage ethnographies, salvage geographies refer to practices of geographic knowledge production that are organized around desires to secure the promise of modernist futurity in the Anthropocene. Analyzing the affective landscapes shaping critical geographic resilience research, I identity two forms of salvage geographies: first, solutions-oriented approaches prevalent in critical sustainability studies strive to salvage modernity’s promise for science to secure a future of limitless, progressive growth and development; second, radical approaches prevalent in political ecology and security studies often strive to salvage the promise of modernist critique to politicize knowledge. These salvage geographies can only be sustained through the instrumentalization of difference, which defutures or consumes the potential for other forms of geographic thought. Turning to feminist, decolonial, and abolitionist research, I highlight the potential for reparative disciplinary futures that orient geography towards problem-finding rather than problem-solving activities.more » « less
-
Counter-hegemonic Computing: Toward Computer Science Education for Value Generation and EmancipationStudents’ lives, both in and out of school, are full of different forms of value. Wealthy students enjoy value in the form of financial capital; their fit to hegemonic social practices; excellent health care and so on. Low-income students, especially those from African American, Native American, and Latinx communities, often lack access to those resources. But there are other forms of value that low-income students do possess. Most examples of what we will call Counter-Hegemonic Practice (CHP) in the African American community involve some mixture of Indigenous African heritage, contemporary innovation in the Black community, and other influences. Moving between these value forms and the computing classroom is a non-trivial task, especially if we are to avoid merely using the appearance of culture to attract students. Our objective in this paper is to provide a framework for deeper investigations into the computational potentials for CHP; its potential as a link between education and community development; and a more dignified role for its utilization in the CS classroom. We report on a series of collaborative engagements with CHP, largely focused on African American communities.more » « less
-
Bennett, Audrey; Eglash, Ron (Ed.)The concept of enoughness holds importance for both African American and Indigenous communities. In Indigenous contexts, ideas of enoughness can be about moving from extractive to sustainable economies where balance, interdependence, cooperation, and decentralization are prioritized in the production and sharing of resources. In African American contexts enoughness is about challenging deficit views of Black children as maladjusted and incomplete with an insistence that people, especially educators, see their existing brilliance and celebrate the fact that they are already enough. We explore how these concepts shaped efforts to make science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education more equitable, justice-oriented, and generative, thus re-thinking the shape of STEM itself as a platform for generative justice. We detail how this was accomplished through designing and researching educational technologies called Culturally Situated Design Tools.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
