Black Geographies unveiled: A critical review

Racial elements in Human Geography

Black Geographies is closely aligned with human geography. While human geography has become more attentive to spatial sociality, it is crucial to interrogate the foundational assumptions within the field—especially how the concept of the “human” has historically excluded Blackness and racial difference. As Chris Gibson notes, early human geography classified human beings into “types,” including so-called “races,” a practice abandoned by the mid-20th century but not critically resolved (Gibson, 2020: 90–91). In distancing itself from the overt racism of earlier paradigms, the discipline also “let go” of nature and race from its theoretical framework, often leaving unchallenged the colonial violence and essentialism embedded in earlier logics. Scholars like Mahtani have observed that the absence of critical race thought in social and cultural geography persisted into the 21st century (Mahtani, 2014). Carter further argues that race should be central to the discipline, not just as a subject of study but as a concept that challenges who is considered “human” in human geography (Carter, 2009: 465). This underscores the need for deeper engagement with racial studies, where critiques of racial capitalism, coloniality, and the category of the human offer essential tools for reconceptualizing geographic knowledge.

It is within this critical reassessment of the discipline's epistemological foundations that racial geographies emerged—not merely as a subfield concerned with documenting racial difference in space, but as a radical intervention that exposes how space itself is produced through racial logics. Scholars such as George Lipsitz (2011) and Laura Pulido (2000) have argued that race is not only mapped onto space but actively constructs it. Lipsitz's concept of the white spatial imaginary reveals how racial privilege is maintained through the idealization and production of exclusionary spatial practices, while Pulido's rethinking of environmental racism foregrounds the structural and historical processes—rather than mere distributional outcomes—through which space becomes racialized. This marked a turn away from liberal multicultural frameworks toward structural, materialist accounts of spatial injustice.

Within the evolving field of racial geographies, the specific study of Blackness has emerged as an urgent and necessary focus—not merely as one racialized category among many, but as a foundational analytic for interrogating the spatial operations of race, modernity, and power. As Katherine McKittrick (2006) argues, Blackness generates what she terms “ungeographic” or “demonic grounds”—spaces and modes of knowing that exceed and unsettle dominant geographic logics. These “demonic grounds” challenge the disciplining logics of space and offer alternative epistemologies grounded in Black experience and resistance (McKittrick, 2006: 19). Similarly, Clyde Woods (1998) demonstrates how Black spatiality illuminates the intimate entanglements between racial capitalism and geographic displacement, emphasizing that “the plantation has always occupied a central place in US iconography” (Woods 4). This centrality ensures that the worldview of the plantation bloc continues to exert significant influence in the 21st century (Woods 5). Crucially, this worldview contests the right to space from a Black perspective, highlighting why Blackness is central to the study of racial geographies.

To center Blackness within geography is to confront the discipline's complicity in sustaining ontological hierarchies that render Black life disposable or perpetually out of place. Willie Jamaal Wright and Adam Bledsoe (2019) further this argument by placing Black spatial experience at the heart of racial capitalism's geographic production. They contend that Black geographies reveal the racialized logics of space that underpin capitalist accumulation (Wright and Bledsoe 12). Likewise, Camilla Hawthorne asserts that Blackness is always constituted through specific spatiotemporal configurations, noting that “diaspora is a fundamentally spatial relation” (Hawthorne, 2019: 5). Such a formulation calls for attention to the global and local dimensions of spatial practices and resistance. This critical emphasis on Blackness enables racial geographies to move beyond merely documenting segregation or inequality. Instead, it advances a radical reimagining of space, knowledge, and justice—one that destabilizes normative understandings of place, identity, and the human condition.

Theories in Black studies

When exploring Black Geographies, the foundational theories of Black Studies are crucial. As Wright et al. observe, “Interventions within and beyond geography, although important to geographic understandings of race, sometimes overlook a deep engagement with Black thought and praxis” (Wright et al., 2024: 866). Camilla Hawthorne and Kaily Heitz argue that ignoring deeply rooted power relations—especially the connections between human geography, colonialism, and racism—leads to serious errors, substituting fairness for genuine justice (Hawthorne and Heitz, 2018; Heitz 2022). The civil rights movement of the 1960s, along with feminist activism like the Combahee River Collective and Chicanx movements, paved the way for critical reflections on racial, gendered, and spatial inequalities. These social and political transformations played a significant role in the development of Black Studies.

Thus, to fully grasp the interdisciplinary nature of Black Geographies, it is necessary to recognize that its theoretical framework is not only informed by social science methodologies, but also deeply rooted in Black studies, particularly the literary, philosophical, and feminist traditions. As Katherine McKittrick emphasizes through her poetics, Black Geographies is already fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing on literary texts, autobiographies, historical memory, and embodied experience as epistemological sources. In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, McKittrick situates geography within Black feminist thought, arguing that Black women's spatial experiences are not merely supplementary but foundational to reimagining space, place, and scale. Her method of weaving together Sylvia Wynter's decolonial critique (McKittrick, 2015; McKittrick et al., 2018), Toni Morrison's literary imagination, and Saidiya Hartman's archival storytelling reflects how Black Geographies is not only a site of empirical inquiry but also a space of creative and critical rethinking. This poetics is not an esthetic embellishment, but a form of political theorizing that challenges the disciplinary boundaries of geography and reframes spatial knowledge through Black lived experience. In doing so, McKittrick and others disrupt the assumption that spatial theory is race-neutral or only sociological, foregrounding instead how literary modes of knowledge production—narrative, metaphor, affect, memory—are essential to theorizing Black spatiality. Christina Sharpe analyzes expressions in Black culture, such as poetry, novels, and visual arts, and how they serve as important means of articulating Black experiences and resisting racism (Sharpe, 2016). Her work primarily explores the role of memory in constructing Black identity, analyzing how education and public memorialization combat forgetting and the distortion of history. Sharpe's research indicates that cultural works not only document Black history but also serve as critiques of the present and imaginations of the future.

Since “Black geographies requires that practitioners be led by a Blackened consciousness, a way of seeing and knowing the world informed by the condition and experiences of Black being” (Wright et al., 2024: 868), some representative African American theorists and thinkers have also discussed the importance of black geospatial spaces in their writings, essays, speeches, etc., providing supplementary theoretical support for Black studies and Geographies. For example, bell hooks, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, deeply explores how the black homeplace is not only a place of resistance for black women but also a space for rebuilding and consolidating identity. In another work, Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance, home is also depicted as a space for self-recovery. Contemporary black author Toni Morrison has also profoundly pointed out that racialized geography is pathological, leading to the dehumanization, fragmentation, and madness of unfree peoples (Gilroy, 1993a). In the anthology she edited, Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power, she further proposes the phenomenon of blacks being continuously interpreted by historical racial landscapes (Morrison, 1992). At the same time, she also proposes how memory interacts with black geospatial spaces to construct individual and collective identities (Morrison 1987). Through the works of these theorists and thinkers, we can see the closeness of geographical space and racial analysis. Racial theory provides an important perspective for understanding how space affects the identity and life experiences of blacks, and how blacks survive, struggle, and express themselves in geographical space.

Black Geographies should not be seen merely as a subfield of racial or ethnic geography, but as a distinct intellectual tradition rooted in Black experience, struggle, and ways of knowing. As Jamaal Wright puts it, “within the corridors of Black social life are the germs of Black geographic thought” (Wright 868). Rather than simply mapping spatial inequality, Black Geographies highlights how Black communities theorize space through lived experience, memory, and resistance. This lineage extends to early interventions like Robert Blauner's “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt” (Blauner, 1969), which, influenced by Eldridge Cleaver's “The Land Question” (1968), framed segregated Black ghettos as forms of internal colonialism. Later, Joe Feagin's theory of systemic racism (Feagin, 2006) showed how “white social spaces” reproduce racial privilege through institutional and intergenerational structures. These are not just physical spaces but social formations that regulate belonging, movement, and power. Thus, Black Geographies critiques racialized space while reimagining spatiality from Black life-worlds. Through everyday practices, cultural memory, and artistic expression, Black communities generate geographic knowledge that disrupts dominant spatial logics. Rooted in Black studies, the field centers Black creativity and thought as vital to theorizing space itself.

Critical absorption

The emergence of Black Geographies marks both a critical engagement with traditional geography and a generative expansion of Black Studies. While drawing on established theories, it directly addresses their limitations in confronting race, aiming to develop integrated approaches that bridge disciplinary gaps. As Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis argue, mainstream geography has often overlooked its entanglements with colonialism, slavery, and imperialism. Even when radical geographers acknowledged these histories, their work was often treated as an “ex-post-facto justification,” failing to confront geography's foundational complicity with racism (Hawthorne and Lewis, 2023: 2). By the mid-20th century, geography's focus shifted to economic inequality, further marginalizing race as an analytic category (Domosh, 2015, 2017). This has created a theoretical vacuum—one that Black Geographies seeks to address by drawing from Black Studies.

At the same time, Black Studies must also turn toward geography to fully grasp how spatial structures mediate Black life. Katherine McKittrick, a foundational figure in Black Geographies, insists that “Black matters are spatial matters” (McKittrick, 2006: xii), and that racial critique “shapes but does not fully define the Black world” (McKittrick, 2011: 947). This framing recasts racism not only as social oppression but as spatial domination. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, racism functions by “fix[ing] Black bodies in a corner of the universe so that white bodies can be safe in other corners” (Coates 2017: 37). Thus, spatial analysis becomes central to understanding both racialized dispossession and Black practices of resistance and world-making.

In this sense, Black Geographies is not only a corrective to geography's racial blind spots but also a spatial extension of Black Studies. As Hawthorne and Lewis note, the field “positions itself as an intervention not only into Black studies but also into the discipline of geography” (2023: 6). It offers new theoretical frameworks and methods that both deepen understandings of Black life and challenge the epistemological boundaries of human geography itself.

Atlantic mobilities and cultural identity formation

Black Geographies, as a field shaped by diasporic experience and historical displacement, finds one of its most powerful expressions in the trans-Atlantic and Mediterranean regions. The concept of fluidity here refers not only to literal oceanic crossings but to the epistemic, cultural, and political mobility that disrupts fixed spatial logics. Rather than treating Black mobility as a deviation from spatial normativity, Black Geographies repositions mobility as a constitutive logic of Black spatial experience and identity formation.

Rather than treating Black mobility as a reactive or exceptional phenomenon within otherwise stable geographies, Black Geographies reframes mobility itself as foundational. It is not what interrupts geography—it is what constitutes it. As Case Watkins and Judith A. Carney (2022) demonstrate through a methodologically plural study that draws on oral histories, GIS, and archival research, the spatial formations produced by the trans-Atlantic slave trade continue to shape diasporic Black communities. Thus I consider that their work highlights not only the material legacies of displacement, but also the epistemic openness that affords the fluidity of method that characterizes much of Black geographic thought.

Katherine McKittrick (2006), writing from a Black feminist perspective, further deepens this argument by foregrounding what she calls “demonic grounds”—spaces marked by violence (slave ships, auction blocks, attics) that nevertheless become sites of resistance and radical memory. For McKittrick, these are not merely literal locations but conceptual disruptions of the geographic order. They challenge what she terms “transparent space” and offer what she provocatively names “ungeographic” ways of knowing: insurgent spatialities that emerge precisely from the margins of cartographic legibility. This insistence on the conceptual and cultural dimensions of spatial fluidity aligns closely with Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993b), which theorizes diasporic Black identity as always already transnational, hybrid, and mobile. Gilroy's intervention is not simply to identify cultural connections across borders, but to unsettle the very idea of rootedness as a precondition for community or belonging. In doing so, he opens up a critical geography of cultural circulation—one that is distinctly resistant to fixity.

Moving beyond the Atlantic frame, recent scholarship expands this logic of fluidity to encompass other geographic and political formations. Brittany Meché (2022), for instance, examines the production of environmental insecurity in the West African Sahel, showing how the mobility of global security regimes—and the narratives they bring—reshape African geographies through the logics of militarization and surveillance. Similarly, Jemima Pierre (2012) challenges the assumption that African spaces lie outside global racial hierarchies. Her work on postcolonial Ghana shows how practices like skin bleaching and heritage tourism are shaped by racial capitalism, revealing how race is spatialized both locally and globally. Camilla Hawthorne (2023) takes these insights to the Mediterranean, offering a sharp intervention against the tendency to reduce Black geography to Atlantic paradigms or plantation geographies. Her concept of “Black Mediterranean Geographies” foregrounds the contemporary experiences of African and Afro-descendant migrants navigating the racialized border regimes of southern Europe and North Africa. Importantly, she resists the binary of movement and stasis, arguing that diasporic life unfolds through “non-linear entanglements” of displacement, refusal, and community-making. As she notes, “the Black Mediterranean is not a bounded place, but a set of relations” (Hawthorne, 2023: 24).

Together, these scholars move beyond documenting Black mobility to theorizing fluidity as a core analytic of Black Geographies. Through this lens, space emerges not as a neutral backdrop but as a terrain shaped by rupture and resistance. Black Geographies thus offers not a fixed cartography, but a critical method—one animated by the lived experiences of dispossession, migration, and survival. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, more than a physical crossing, was a spatial and temporal rupture that reshaped identity. Fluidity, in this context, signals both geographic movement and the unsettling of spatial logics, disciplinary boundaries, and normative notions of belonging.

Fluid land relations and regional reimaginings in Black Geographies of America

If the Atlantic constitutes a geography of rupture, marked by forced displacement and diasporic fracture, then “land” in Black Geographies signals an ambivalent geography of return—not one of possession, but of remembrance, refusal, and reimagined belonging. Rather than approaching land through the dominant frameworks of state sovereignty or private property, Black Geographies theorizes what might be called fluid land relations—relations that foreground ancestral memory, sociality, and political struggle over fixity and enclosure. In this framing, land becomes not a commodity, but a relational space of care, contestation, and future-making. Likewise, scale is no longer a simple hierarchy of nested territories (local–national–global), but a relational and affective structure, shaped by diasporic movement, dispossession, and transgenerational resistance.

Recent scholarship across American regions reflects this theoretical shift. In the U.S. West, Black Geographies engages with land claims, reparations, and indigenous sovereignty, challenging the colonial legacies embedded in spatial regimes. Jovan Lewis's work, particularly in Violent Utopia (Lewis, 2022b), refuses to reduce Black land claims to liberal property logics. Drawing from his involvement in California's Reparations Task Force (Sanders, 2023), Lewis connects contemporary reparations initiatives—such as those addressing the Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa—to broader grassroots and decolonial land reclamation movements. This redefinition aligns with Indigenous-led efforts like the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and its Shuumi Land Tax (Singh, 2019), which operationalize fluid land relations by asserting non-transactional, reciprocal ties to place—relations grounded in care, mutual responsibility, and ongoing negotiation rather than fixed ownership. Tianna Bruno (2024) extends these frameworks by examining how Black and Indigenous ecologies operate as acts of resistance to environmental violence. This relational thinking also shapes urban cultural geography. This relational thinking also extends into urban cultural geography, where land is reimagined through everyday esthetic and affective practices. In Oakland, for instance, Kaily Heitz foregrounds how Black communities mobilize “vibe” (Heitz, 2021) and public art (2022) as spatial interventions—acts that, much like rural land reclamation, resist gentrification, reassert communal ties to place, and sustain fluid land relations within contested urban landscapes. These contributions demonstrate that in the U.S. West, land is not merely about restitution or territorial rights—it is a site of ongoing meaning-making, situated within wider structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.

Turning to the U.S. South, the plantation land emerges not just as a historical institution but as a persistent spatial formation that continues to structure Black life. Clyde Woods's theorization of the “plantation bloc” underscores how Southern political economy and geography remain tethered to racialized systems of labor and land (1998). Building on this, scholars such as Nik Heynen have explored the possibilities of abolition ecology on Sapelo Island, reframing the plantation not only as a site of domination but as a potential commons (Heynen, 2021). In urban contexts, Bobby Wilson reveals how cities like Birmingham reproduce apartheid-like geographies through the spatial management of Black labor and mobility (Wilson, 2019). These interventions converge on the insight that the Southern landscape—rural and urban alike—operates as a terrain where race, land, and capital collide, but also where practices of refusal and reinvention take root.

This logic of refusal is sharpened in land-based practices that foreground autonomy and resistance. In the Mississippi Delta, cooperative economies function not merely as alternative markets but as place-based critiques of plantation logics, challenging the racialized structures that continue to organize land and labor (Freshour and Williams, 2023). For Williams (2017, 2023), such practices exemplify Black ecological traditions that operate simultaneously as survival strategies and as epistemological interventions into dominant environmental thought. In Jamaica, informal settlements or “capture lands” enact a decolonial spatial praxis, reconfiguring the plantation from a site of extraction into one of autonomous dwelling (Goffe, 2024). In the postbellum U.S., Legal Black settlements often founded by fugitive communities, likewise contest linear narratives of abolition, asserting longer histories of spatial autonomy (Purifoy, 2023). Meanwhile, memory and affect further animate these geographies: the symbolic residues of sugar plantations (McInnis, 2019) and the racialization of swamplands as dangerous or wasted space (Vickers, 2022, 2024) reveal how the environment itself becomes an archive of both violence and endurance. What emerges here is a landscape simultaneously shaped by racial violence and enlivened by Black struggle, care, and world-making. Rather than offering a static map of dispossession, these works collectively propose a relational and insurgent way of thinking about land—one that attends to fluidity, layered histories, and everyday modes of spatial reimagination.

Fluid non-material space and embodied esthetic emplacement

Black Geographies urges a rethinking of space—not merely as a material or political domain, but as a dynamic, affective, and imaginative process. Rather than being defined solely through physical boundaries or territorial control, space is understood here through non-material registers such as sound, image, emotion, fashion, posture, gesture, and visual performance. These immaterial dimensions constitute vital terrains of Black spatial practice, where the politics of place emerge from embodied expression, esthetic articulation, and everyday acts of cultural resistance. Within this conceptual shift, fluidity operates as a generative analytic, capturing the ways Black communities inhabit and reconfigure space through ephemeral gestures, affective ties, and artistic forms that resist spatial fixity.

A foundational entry point into non-material spatiality is blues epistemology, which conceives of music as a spatial grammar for narrating Black survival, struggle, and cultural memory. Clyde Woods (1998) first theorized the blues as a counter-cartography of Black working-class consciousness in the Mississippi Delta—a form of spatial knowledge that emerges in and against the afterlife of the plantation. His work shows how the sonic becomes a means of refusing the racial-capitalist spatial order, mapping alternative geographies rooted in cultural endurance. Building on this, Lindsey Dillon (2023) extends the framework of blues geographies by emphasizing their affective and imaginative dimensions—how the blues carries emotional histories, sustains collective memory, and creates new spatial possibilities beyond extractive or dispossessive systems.

This affective register resonates with Tina Campt's (2017) theorization of “listening to images,” where Black expressive forms—especially sound and photography—become quite yet forceful spatial interventions. Her concept of felt sound emphasizes frequencies of Black life that register not through loud confrontation, but through quiet repetition, sonic vibration, and everyday presence. Campt expands the field of non-material emplacement by foregrounding how affect and resonance operate as spatial tools for survival and expression in the face of erasure.

The non-material dimensions of space also find rich articulation in Black queer geographies, where embodiment, desire, and relationality serve as central mechanisms of spatial production. Darius Scott (2019) explores how intimacy between Black queer men disorients dominant spatial expectations; LaToya Eaves (2020) emphasizes emotional attachment to place and non-normative kinship structures; Aaron Mallory (2023) examines how queer refusal and homemaking practices generate new spatial imaginaries. Willie Jamaal Wright and Bledsoe (2019) argues that Black queer spatialities fracture the coherence of Southern regionalism, producing spaces that are mobile, affectively thick, and resistant to linear mapping. Together, these perspectives insist that fluidity in Black queer life is not metaphorical but materially enacted through affective and esthetic modes of dwelling.

This spatial rethinking extends into urban geographies, where Black esthetic expression becomes both a tactic of resistance and a mode of visibility. In her studies of Washington, DC, Brandi T. Summers (2019, 2020) introduces Black esthetic emplacement to examine how sound, style, fashion, and posture operate as spatial claims within contexts of gentrification and displacement. She shows how the #DontMuteDC movement, through go-go music and embodied street esthetics, transforms esthetic performance into territorial presence—asserting place through rhythm, visibility, and collective participation. Here, the non-material becomes a political intervention against spatial erasure.

Further expanding this conceptual terrain, Katherine McKittrick (2006, 2011) theorizes a Black sense of place that emerges through practices of naming, walking, and dwelling—everyday acts that challenge the erasures imposed by dominant spatial logics. These micro-practices, often dismissed or rendered invisible, are central to how Black communities remake space through language, memory, and embodied repetition. In a similar vein, Robin D.G. Kelley (2002) emphasizes the role of radical imagination—expressed through music, poetry, and dreams—as a mode of spatial insurgency. His concept of “freedom dreams” envisions the creation of alternative worlds from within structures of constraint, refusing the inevitability of spatial marginalization.

Taken together, these scholars demonstrate that fluidity is not only an interdisciplinary concept but a spatial methodology—one that apprehends space as lived, mobile, and continuously remade. Whether through sound, desire, fashion, memory, or stillness, Black communities enact geographies that resist containment and create alternative spatial relations. These immaterial geographies do not simply supplement material spatial struggles; they constitute them. As such, they reposition Black Geographies from a mode of mapping inequality to a methodology for theorizing space as a creative, relational, and insurgent act of becoming.

Fugitive geographies and the critique of racial capitalism in Central and South America

Black Geographies insist on spatial imaginaries that are not bound by state borders or static territorial definitions. Central to this rethinking is the concept of fugitive geographies—spatial practices that evade, disrupt, and reconfigure dominant racial-capitalist orders. Understood through the analytic of fluidity, fugitivity names a spatial mode that is mobile, relational, and improvisational. It foregrounds how Black communities inhabit space through refusal, concealment, and alternative modes of presence. These practices are not marginal but foundational to Black spatial production—emerging from the afterlives of slavery and persisting across the Americas in defiance of racial capitalism's violent geographies.

One of the most generative expressions of fugitive geographies is found in the history and theory of maroon settlements, which stretch across the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. These spaces—formed by Africans who escaped slavery—were not merely hideouts but organized, enduring infrastructures of autonomy and resistance. Adam Bledsoe (2017) emphasizes how maroons enacted “Black spatial agency” by building infrastructures of self-determination. Extending this into contemporary contexts, Celeste Winston (2023) frames “freedom-making practices” through the concept of maroon geographies, focusing on seven early Black communities in Montgomery County, Maryland—Sandy Spring, Haiti, Sugarland, Ken-Gar, Lincoln Park, Scotland, and Tobytown—which sustain generational legacies of fugitivity and autonomy, such as oral histories recounting underground routes used to shelter fugitives from slavery. These everyday acts of refusal demonstrate how Black placemaking in these communities constitutes a distinctive geographic method. Similarly, Cheryl LaRoche (2013) traces the Underground Railroad as a tactical geography—forests, rivers, and homes becoming nodes of mobility and concealment. Together, these examples demonstrate how fugitive spatial practices carve out alternative modes of Black presence and mobility—ones that evade colonial domination, exceed the bounds of formal state space, and imagine geographies of collective autonomy and survival.

In South America, particularly Brazil and Colombia, maroon societies such as the quilombos and Palenques have long challenged the plantation economy's spatial logic. Beatriz Nascimento (2021, 2023) reconceptualizes quilombos not as isolated historical events but as living geographies—fluid, collective formations of relational autonomy that persist into the present. Similarly, scholars have analyzed San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia as a site of Afro-diasporic knowledge, where language, music, and ritual maintain geographic autonomy in the face of modern state encroachment. These South American cases expand the scope of Black fugitive geographies by demonstrating how fluidity also describes temporal continuity and diasporic survival.

Beyond physical relocation, language and cultural expression serve as immaterial fugitive practices. Diana Negrín (2023) theorizes oral traditions and Indigenous languages as decolonial spatial tools, where voice and narrative structure geographies of belonging. These linguistic geographies intersect with Afro-Latin traditions to affirm space as an affective and epistemic terrain—fluid, mobile, and always contested.

Crucially, fugitive geographies are not only reactions to oppression but critiques of its systemic foundations. Racial capitalism appears here not merely as an economic system but as a spatial project—one that configures Black bodies as fungible and space as extractable. Jovan Scott Lewis (2022a) reframes capitalism as a geography of structural disposability, while his earlier work (Scammer's Yard, 2020) analyzes Jamaican lottery scams as acts of “vernacular reparations”—unofficial, morally ambiguous attempts to reclaim value from a global system predicated on the historical theft of Black labor and wealth. Caroline Sage Ponder (2021) explores how urban debt becomes a spatial instrument of racial control under neoliberal governance. These critiques reveal how the logics of extraction, accumulation, and dispossession shape the lived spatialities of Black communities across the Americas.

Further critical elaboration comes from thinkers such as Tiffany Lethabo King (2016) and Shannon Winnubst (2019) who interrogate how multicultural discourses obscure the foundational violence of racial slavery and colonial expansion. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and C. Riley Snorton, they trace how fungibility persists under the guise of liberal inclusion, embedding anti-Blackness within the spatial logics of diversity and biopolitical governance.

Across these strands—fugitive settlements, linguistic sovereignty, racial capitalism, and decolonial critique—Black Geographies in Central and South America conceptualizes place not as a bounded territory, but as a site of historical struggle, affective memory, and radical refusal.

Black geographical perception across time and space

Recent developments in Black Geographies have emphasized that spatial experience is not limited to physical movement or location, but also includes perception, temporality, and imagination. These dimensions—how Black individuals sense, interpret, and narrate space—are deeply shaped by racialized histories and structural inequalities. Engaging with scholars such as Katherine McKittrick, Michelle M. Wright, and George Lipsitz, this section explores how Black spatial perception operates through what this article terms “fluidity”: the shifting, relational, and imaginative engagements with space that resist fixity and open new horizons of thought and action.

As Katherine McKittrick asserts, “Black life is necessarily geographical” (2006, xiii). Yet geography has historically been structured by discourses and practices that render Black life unplaceable or outside normative spatial logics. McKittrick's concept of “demonic grounds” foregrounds how Black women's lived spaces—attics, auction blocks, and margins—hold epistemological value, not despite but because of their exclusion from dominant geographies. Drawing from this insight, Shauna Knox's The Black Subaltern (2024) explores how Black immigrants in the U.S. navigate dislocation through embodied and narrative practices. These stories reveal how spatial disorientation becomes a site of identity-making, political recognition, and affective presence.

Building on these sensory and affective insights, Kayla Fike and Jacqueline Mattis (2024) use interviews with young Black women to analyze how spatial perception is shaped by race, gender, and social context. Their findings suggest that Black women's relationships to urban space are marked by hyper-awareness and emotional labor—conditions that reshape both personal geographies and urban imaginaries. Stefanie Benjamin et al (2024) extend this analysis to mobility, showing how Black women, LGBTQ + individuals, and disabled Black travelers navigate the tourism industry's exclusions and violences. Amy Weigel et al (2024), focusing on segregation-era travel, illustrate how racialized mobility produced parallel geographies of exclusion and safety, turning displacement into practices of autonomy and spatial knowledge.

These contemporary engagements with mobility echo broader theoretical questions about time and historical belonging. Michelle M. Wright's Physics of Blackness (2015) critiques the “Middle Passage Epistemology” that frames Black identity through a continuous, origin-centered timeline. Instead, she proposes a “spacetime” framework that understands Blackness as produced through specific moments, places, and identifications. As Wright explains, “Constructs of Blackness are produced through history, culture, and ancestry… however, this linear spacetime… at times excludes those who… perform themselves as Black but do not share that linear timeline” (14). This shift foregrounds discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity—key dimensions of the fluidity this article proposes.

Theorists like Lethabo King and Edward Brathwaite further develop oceanic models of Black temporality and space. King (2019) introduces the notion of “shoals”—liminal, shifting spaces between land and sea—as sites of fugitivity, opacity, and Black survival. Brathwaite's “tidalectics” (Brathwaite, 1973) offers a rhythmic, non-linear conception of diasporic memory, privileging return, resonance, and relationality over linear progress. These fluid spatialities challenge the colonial desire for fixity and instead emphasize motion, instability, and refusal.

Imaginative geography, developed by John Wright (1947) extends this framework into the cultural realm. George Lipsitz builds on this to argue that Black spatial imagination is structurally distinct from the white spatial imaginary. He notes that “struggles for racial justice require more than mere inclusion into previously excluded places. They also necessitate creation of a counter social warrant with fundamentally different assumptions about place than the white spatial imaginary allows” (Lipsitz 54). This critique is echoed in Christina Sharpe's In the Wake (2016), where Black expressive culture—poetry, photography, narrative—emerges as a key medium for articulating and resisting the ongoing spatial violence of anti-Blackness. Taken together, these scholars demonstrate that Black geographical perception is not merely reactive or representational. Rather, it is constitutive of alternative spatial knowledge: shaped by movement, memory, embodiment, and refusal. By engaging with these scholars and emphasizing fluidity as an analytic, this section argues that Black Geographies offers a dynamic model of spatial perception—one that disrupts linear narratives, resists cartographic capture, and reclaims geography as a site of liberation.