As part of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum, we interview scholars about a recent article they’ve written for either an academic journal or popular publication. We ask these scholars to discuss their article, as well as some of the books that have most influenced them.
This week’s featured scholars are Alex A. Moulton and Inge Salo. Moulton is an Assistant Professor at Hunter College. Salo is a PhD student in Geography at Clark University. Their article is “Black Geographies and Black Ecologies as Insurgent Ecocriticism.”
Roberto Sirvent: You refer to Black geographies and Black ecologies as “insurgent ecocriticism”. What do you mean by this?
Alex A. Moulton and Inge Salo: In our paper we bring together Black geographies and Black ecologies scholarship and explore the thematic, methodological, and analytical overlaps between these two bodies of work that emerge in parallel but distinct disciplines. We argue that these bodies of work constitute a model of insurgent ecocriticism because of the scholar-activist approach of the folks doing the work. Their approach considers the social constructions and politics of race in the global ecological crisis and center Black environmental and literature discourses as productive spaces from which to critically understand the global ecological crisis. What this means is that Black geographies and ecologies challenge ecocriticism that is blind to race or that only treats it as a variable, and ecocriticism that does not seriously consider Black environmental and literature discourses in their analyses. This is all insurgent in character or radical because Black environmental scholarship turns attention to the material geographies and environmental outcomes of not just racist environmental ideas and practices, but the creative and ambitious anti-racist strategies to make space for Black life. More generally what we are pointing out is how Black geographies and Black ecologies as scholar-activist research continue a Black Radical Tradition of social, intellectual, political, and cultural activity that challenges domination and system of oppression. We think something of the insurgent nature of Black geographies and Black ecologies scholarship—as part of Black Studies—is signaled by attempts to ban this kind of scholarship from schools. This scholarship upsets sanitized histories and representations of that mask racism, romanticize the Black experience, or reduce the Black experience to slavery, plantations, environmental injustice, police violence, or border crossings.
For readers unfamiliar with her work, can you please share a little about Katherine McKittrick’s contributions to the field of Black geographies?
Katherine McKittrick’s work has been very influential to the body of scholarship that has developed into Black geographies. Her books Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006) and Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007) which she co-edited with Clyde Woods are seminal texts. These two texts pointed to a longer body of work that might not have been explicitly called Black geographies, and showed how that corpus of work was coherent and constitutive of a distinct framework. In Demonic Grounds McKittrick sets out an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and Black feminist approach which has been taken up by Black geographers and geographers interested in Black spaces and spatial thinking. McKittrick’s approach is so widely influential because of how it considers Black sexualities including Black queer and femme geographies, planning and development, performance studies and the visual arts, and cultural geographies. All this reflects a central assertion McKittrick makes: “Black matters are spatial matters”, which is to say, there is an inherent spatiality to Black life and that Black communities have their own spatial imaginaries and space-making practices. In the volume McKittrick co-edited with Woods, the polyvalence of Black geographies is showcased through chapters that examine themes of citizenship and deportation, blues and hip hop, urban renewal and commemoration, queerness and fugitivity with reference to Canada, the United States, Britain, Africa, and the Caribbean. Together the volume helps us understand how Black spaces of living are demarcated as uninhabitable because of historical and contemporary practices of racial domination but, at the same time, they argue that the concept of black geographies also reveal how Black people produce space. This book is essential reading. Alongside these two books is McKittrick’s Dear science and other stories (2020) and a rich body of work woven through brilliantly poetic and theoretically provocative articles and chapters.
Beyond her written work McKittrick has been an advisor, mentor, and champion for many Black geographies scholars. In a sense, her work serves as something emerging scholars can point to as the kind of space they fit into and are contributing to with their own work. McKittrick provides an architecture on which many others can build out scholarship demonstrating how profoundly consequential Black people’s knowledges and experiences are for understanding the condition of being human.
In your article, you claim that antiblack police violence is (and should be) a significant concern for those studying Black ecologies. Why isn’t policing discussed much in struggles for environmental justice?
If we understand Black ecologies as part of the environmental justice struggle, then the answer is that policing has certainly always been a concern for the environmental justice movement. The Black environmental justice movement, connected to the Civil Rights Movement, has always been aware of and critical of the brutality of policing and its role in quelling protests, as part of a broader protection of the state. The images of the North Carolina PCB Protest of 1982 in Warren County, where a predominantly Black community gathered to block disposal of polluted of soil in their community, are images that are identical to images from any of the Civil Rights Movement’s protests. If you look at contemporary protests for better water in Flint, Michigan or Jackson, Mississippi or the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests to protect Indigenous land and water, the same is true; environmental warriors and protectors, much like the warriors for civil rights and the end of social justice, are met by the raw violence of police. So, policing as a concern has always been there as something environmental justice organizers discuss and plan for.
Part of the point we are trying to make in our article is that more work is needed to continue showing how the state’s chokehold on Black life manifested in deadly police encounters with Black folks during a traffic stop are connected to the suffocating realities of polluted air that impairs Black health and life prospects in contaminated communities. The violence of criminalization and incarceration is related to racial residential segregation that keeps Black people in dilapidated public infrastructure with lead pipes and lead paint, in food deserts reproduced by systematic disinvestment. Uneven exposure to environmental harm is connected to uneven concentration of surveillance, gentrification, and violent policing. There is amazing work already on this by folks like Bill McClanahan, David Pellow, Laura Pulido, Julie Sze, Dorceta Taylor, Sylvia Wynter, and Melanie Yazzie and so others.
You write that Black communities experience “uneven exposure to environmental catastrophes”. How can the practice of “mapping Black ecologies” address this?
The practice of mapping Black ecologies entails careful tracing of the historical, political, and economic factors and processes that reproduce differential exposure to environmental hazards, and which therefore mediate uneven outcomes. For Black people these outcomes tend to be disastrous relative to the outcomes for white people in general. Black ecologies examine how these exposure and experience of environmental catastrophe are connected to colonialism, slavery, and contemporary racialized economic and social marginalization, and therefore point to the continuities in forms of anti-Blackness. More importantly, the practice of mapping Black ecologies show how Black people build and maintain communities in the wake of anti-blackness. As such Black ecologies does not minimize the ravages of anti-blackness, but does not let that narrative mask the persistence of Black resistance, survival, creativity, and connection. Black ecologies is a kind of ethical practice that takes care in how the story of Black peoples relationship to environmental harm, inequality, and environmental futures is told.
A lot of organizers, artists, and academics can often point to books that helped radicalize them. Are there any books that radicalized you? How so?
Inge: Yes, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Steve Biko’s I write what I like (1978) were texts that I came across during my undergraduate in South Africa and which played a role in shifting my consciousness. These books made me more acutely aware of the histories of colonialism and apartheid. I think that Fanon’s work is one of the few texts that I have read so far that conveys the emotional and psychological impacts of colonialism in the way that it does. It’s an empowering book that offers a lot to think about and sit with and it’s also a manifesto for decolonial thought and practice.
Alex: Capitalism and slavery (1944) by Eric Williams was profoundly influential for me as someone growing up in the Caribbean and interested in understanding the history of capitalism and the plantation economy. The book challenged the narrative of emancipation being the result of benevolent abolitionist, a moral awakening. Rather as Williams shows, just as economic rationalizations drove slavery, economic factors informed decisions to abolition slavery in the British Caribbean. The relationship between racism, slavery, capitalism, and social change that Williams elucidates is a provocation to think more broadly about the histories we accept. The book asks that we place value on revolutionary actions that challenge political economies of economic extraction, social oppression, and environmental destruction. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) was important for me for similar reasons.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these works in your future scholarship?
Inge: Koni Benson is a historian, organizer, and educator based in South Africa and recently (2021) published a graphic non-fiction history titled ‘Crossroads: I live where I like’ with illustrations by André and Nathan Trantraal and Ashley. E. Marais. This book traces a forty-year history of women-led struggles against the demolition of a space, called Crossroads, located in Cape Town, South Africa. The book narrates the women’s successful campaign to save their community of shack dwellers. I am personally interested in the way that Benson draws on original archival research and oral history interviews to tell this feminist history of collective organizing. This book was also produced in collaboration with activists which is a way of producing knowledge that I hope to implement in my own scholarly practice.
Alex: Scammer's yard: The crime of Black repair in Jamaica (2020) by Jovan Scott Lewis is a book that I will keep recommending because of carefully it unpacks the realities of post-colonial life in modern Jamaica by centering the Advance Fee Fraud scam (lottery scam). The way Lewis analyzes informality, criminalization, and the politics of reparation has broadly applicable insights for Black people across the African diaspora. I recently got Biko Mandela Gray’s Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject (2022), and while I have not finished it yet, I would recommend it.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.