Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place
We consider critically and recast 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.
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.
Alternative Modes of Being
We are scholars across disciplines focusing on Asia and Africa who seek to bring premodern knowledge traditions, epistemologically decolonized, into dialogue with social and natural scientists focused on the interlocking crises of capitalism, colonialism, and climate chaos. We hope, ultimately, to be able to think towards alternatives to models of analysis and practice that have rendered scholarship and art irrelevant to our times, and to modes of life leading to the destruction of our planet.
About
Project Director: Mana Kia
Working Group Members: David Lurie (EALAC), Alison Vacca (MESAAS), John Phan (EALAC), Ali Karjoo-Ravary (History), Jonathan Peterson (MESAAS), Amir Izadpanahi (MESAAS)
Alternative Modes of Being unites scholars across disciplines focusing on Asia and Africa who seek to bring premodern knowledge traditions, epistemologically decolonized, into dialogue with social and natural scientists focused on the interlocking crises of capitalism, colonialism, and climate chaos. Decolonialization did not, and cannot, end with political independence. It requires a conceptual regeneration. This project pursues such regeneration by reconnecting with earlier modes of knowledge to critically reengage lost ideas that can potentially contribute to current issues. Temporal, disciplinary, and institutional divides often stymie rich debates of scholars engaged in analysis of the present from trickling into the purview of premodernists. By the same token, scholars engaged with the present rarely engage in any systematic way with the premodern worlds. Ultimately, we cannot fully rethink substance, however, without also rethinking academic form, why it is essential that artists, photographers, and creative writers join the conversation. Our three main themes are around questions of 1) Growth and Prosperity, 2) Self and Social World, and 3) Beauty and Ethics.