GEOG 63 Racial Geographies: Race and the Politics of Place
This course will explore various themes surrounding the ways in which race shapes the way we understand ideas of place. With a focus on Africa and its diaspora, the course looks at the movement of people and ideas inherent in the concept of diaspora and reflects on how people also reshape social worlds that challenge the way we commonly understand the world to be divided (i.e. by political territories like “countries” or by physical geographies like “continents”). The goal of the course is to start with the concept of “Blackness” and unpack the complexity of various other racial and spatial categories like “Sub-Saharan Africa” “Arab North Africa” “the West” and “diaspora.” The three general themes of territory, flows, and space/futurisms, will be explored in relation to the way they are experienced by people in everyday life, therefore the readings will primarily be ethnographic, following African descendant communities in Africa, Europe and the Americas. However, we will tackle these issues through history and fiction writings as well.