Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place
About
Project Directors: Brandi T. Summers, Columbia University; N. D. B. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University
Working Group Members: Vanessa Agard-Jones (Anthropology), Fennet Habte (SIPA), Maya Sapienza (UC Berkeley Geography),
Black Archipelago considers critically and recasts responsibly narratives about how the production of Black space is foundational to imaginative Black placemaking, self-actualization, and ways to catalogue future and existing spaces.
Black archipelago, for us, describes islands of affinity and belonging as well as islands of predicament. The Black Archipelago also describes both Black people’s shared encounters with white supremacy as well as, more crucially, how Black people stay connected to each other, to place and to notions of blackness. Through Black Archipelago, we seek to advance collaborations and, hopefully, methodologies grappling with the many threads of domination and insurgent innovation constituting historical patterns of the Black experience. To be sure, these patterns, regardless of capitalism’s various twists and turns, have ensured certain continuities of colonial administration and have tethered imperial cultural norms to modern-day racial and gender formations among Black people.
A Black archipelago is an answer to the question of how to think about enduring crises and enduring people in the Black World. This framework allows us to pay closer attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation.
