Black geography rejects the ontological turn by replacing “the body” with space as the focus of analysis

(Camilla, Geo@SantaCruz, Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty‐first century Geography Compass, 13(11) https://escholarship.org/content/qt04h2968t/qt04h2968t.pdf)

Black Geographies asserts the inherent spatiality of Black life—the spatial imaginaries, spacemaking practices, and senses of place rooted in Black communities. Starting from the understanding that all social relations are grounded in spatial relations, this scholarship privileges Black world-making practices in all of their multiplicities. Such an emphasis counters longstanding trends in the discipline of geography, in which Black people were seen as lacking geography (due to the upheaval of the trans-Atlantic slave trade); or as victims of geography (due to ongoing practices of displacement and spatial segregation). Taken together, these modes of analysis efface a Black sense of place (McKittrick, 2011) and perpetuate a dangerous understanding of space as transparent—of geographies as static, inert, and self-evident, and of current spatial arrangements as natural, innocent, and ahistorical (McKittrick, 2006, pp. 5–6). The lens of transparent space elides the relationship between racism, racialization, or racemaking, and the production of space. In response, Black Geographies scholarship asserts that racism is also a spatial practice—space is not just a blank canvas upon which racist activity unfolds. As Lipsitz argues in his classic text How Racism Takes Place, space both reflects and (re)produces racisms (Lipsitz, 2011). Indeed, one of the primary ways in which anti-Blackness functions is by positing Blackness as perpetually “out of place” or as placeless (Domosh, 2017). Central to this argument is an understanding that Blackness and Black knowledge, while embodied, are not rooted solely in the biocentric body. As McKittrick explains, an overemphasis on the Black body (even in the form of well-intentioned critiques of scientific racism) detracts from the study of Black life by “singularizing” and “flattening it” into mere biology (McKittrick, 2016, p. 6). Similarly, an understanding of Black knowledge as necessarily tethered to such a “violated body” denies the existence of multiple forms of Black knowledge—including spatial knowledge. The idea that Blackness emmanates from the body is central to the current “ontological turn” in Black studies (Warren, 2018; Chari, 2017, 170 - see note 4), rooted in a particular reading of Fanon's “zone of nonbeing” (Fanon, 1952/ 2008). Shifting the lens of analysis from the body to space and place (after all, Fanon was also deeply concerned with the spatialities of colonial racial hierarchies [Sekyi-Otu, 2009]) allows for a reading of Black life as not reducible to racism, violence, and death (Woods, 2002). By de-centering the body as the primary unit of analysis, Black Geographies in turn opens up new avenues for the study of racism and Black resistance. Food has been a particularly generative site of engagement, bringing traditional geographical concerns with nature, agrarian production, and political economy together with questions of Black space-making. This work studies Black spatial knowledges as they relate to food production, as well as the ways Black communities past and present craft food security and sovereignty in the face of racialized dispossession (Carney, 2001; McCutcheon, 2015; Ramírez, 2014; Reese, 2019; Walker, 2015). Finney similarly takes up questions of Black space-making in relation to ideas of “nature,” upending dominant narratives about Black alienation from the environment (Finney, 2014). Scholars have also brought geographical analytics to bear on questions of diaspora, examining how Black subjectivities operate both within and against hegemonic understandings of nation, race, place, and membership (Brown, 2005; Walcott, 1997). And, influenced by Black feminist and queer theory, a growing number of researchers have foregrounded the rich spatial imaginaries and space-making practices of Black queer communities (Bailey & Shabazz, 2014; Eaves, 2017; Ellison, 2019; Hamilton, 2018). Geographies of racial capitalism Black Geographies has also contributed important insights to political economic analysis. Specifically, Black Geographies emphasizes the mutual significance of the material and the symbolic, rejecting simplistic economic determinisms and base/superstructure binaries in which racism is understood as being of secondary importance to the means and relations of production. Robinson famously argued that capitalism and racism coevolved, such that capitalism had been thoroughly suffused with race and practices of racial differentiation since its emergence out of feudalism (Robinson, 1983/2005). As Kelley argues, Robinson's intervention was to transform the concept of “racial capitalism” from the description of a specific system (i.e., apartheid South Africa) to the characterization of capitalism as a whole (Kelley, 2017)—a shift that in turn centered slavery and colonialism in the history of capitalism. For geographers, then, the task is to study how capitalism's tendency to racially differentiate takes spatial form. Gilmore argues that while there has been a range of approaches within geography for contending with racism and race, they generally share two assumptions: “(1) social formations are structured in dominance within and across scales; and (2) race is in some way determinate of sociospatial location” (Gilmore, 2002, p. 17). As she explains, once scholars recognize the interdependency of power and structure, it subsequently becomes necessary to untangle the ways power is distributed within a structure (Gilmore, 2007, p. 17). This in turn requires a finely grained, spatial analysis of the relationship between racism and capitalism.