⎯⎯Projects⎯⎯

Black scholars have long recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, and anti-/post-colonialism that are inherently geographical. As we currently navigate a world in which we are seeing unprecedented levels of income inequality, food insecurity, austerity, ostentation, excess, and abject scarcity, it is hard not to recognize Black people experiencing pervasive states of crisis, as opposed to moments of crisis. Black life happens amid the crimes of apartheid and Jim Crow, war, and land loss. Temporality and spatiality, blackness includes realizations that and narratives about the “same things” keep happening to Black people repeatedly, in ways highly local and in different locations around the globe. In other words, what has been called a crisis represents an enduring condition of Black life. What does it mean, culturally and materially, for crisis to be quotidian? How do states of Black crises, across land, time, and jurisdictions, represent connected but distinct islands of predicament?

With the “Black Archipelago” initiative, we hope to explore connected but distinct challenges that have threatened and been contested by equally distinct and linked strategies of Black self- and community determination. We see “Black Archipelago” describing islands of affinity and belonging as well as islands of predicament. The Black Archipelago 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 public lectures, workshops, and collective opportunities to write and think together, we aim to 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. We want to gather and innovate applied research in Black Studies.

We cast geographical locations and their Black populations spatial and embodied solutions to imposed and serial crises rooted in the inequitable distribution of social, political, and environmental hazards. What have elsewhere been called “Black Geographies” have both been made by and have challenged patterns of unequal housing and lending practices, extraction and chronic underdevelopment. As a term, however, “Black Geographies,” doesn’t, on its own, emphasize connectedness or the distinctiveness of specific Black spatial situations. Island chains stand as unique geographic formations that, in history, have been demarcated imperially, fortified militarily, and exploited economically. They’ve also given rise to culturally related and linguistically distinct peoples of indigenous and African descent.
 
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. White supremacy has attempted to confine Black lives – whether urban or rural – behind walls of divestment, violence, and infrastructures of extraction. The ensuring islands of predation were designed to be plundered, again and again. Yet, just as recurrently, Black people refashioned predatory spaces into provisioning places.  Rather than falling into cycles of isolation they connected their scattered hardships into a Black Archipelago – a diasporic place where ideas, culture, and family (blood and chosen) keep crisis from becoming annihilation.

The Archive of Urban Futures (“the Archive”) is a collaborative project with Moms 4 Housing, generously supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place program. The Archive focuses on questions of history, value, the right to place, and memory and erasure in Oakland, California. The Archive will take the form of a database of material about Oakland and visions of and for its future over time, as well as related activities including community-based workshops, institutes, and art/exhibitions.

The Archive is an effort to anticipate possibility by assembling histories of Oakland that are not reducible to its already well-documented experiences of racialized inequality and dispossession, while at the same time we recognize the ways that racism is always and already a productive enterprise. Or, as Saidiya Hartman (2008) writes, “to imagine what cannot be verified…to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance” (p. 12). Engaging historically displaced, dispossessed, and disenfranchised urban communities as interpreters and investigators disrupts what counts as knowledge and allows for an expansive reading of archival data into alternative historical narratives – surmising not only what happened in the past, but also what could have been.

The work of The Archive was featured in the Oakland Museum of California’s (OMCA) Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain exhibit.

Selected Press for Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain:

KQED
‘Black Spaces’ at the Oakland Museum Meditates on Displacement and Reclamation

NBC Bay Area
‘Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain': New exhibition at Oakland Museum of California

The Oaklandside
‘There are Black people in the future’: Oakland Museum exhibit documents displacement and resistance

SFist
Field Notes: 'Black Spaces' at OCMA, East Bay Skyline Trail Hike, and Tenderloin Museum Turns 10

UC Berkeley News
UC Berkeley student collective Archive of Urban Futures shines at new OMCA exhibit

The Guardian
‘Our dreams were shattered’: the Black Californians forced from the city they built

East Bay Times/Mercury News
Former residents remember Russell City after historic passage of reparation fund: Museum exhibit examines the triumph and tragedy of Russell City’s history

The Daily Californian
Exhibit by campus students, faculty uncovers Black history in Oakland

SF Chronicle
'Black Spaces' at OMCA traces the past and future of Black communities in the East Bay

East Bay Express
Black spaces speak: Stories of resilience and future-building echo through the East Bay at Oakland Museum's latest exhibition