Call Us Alive Someplace: Du Boisian Methods and Living Black Geographies

Examining W. E. B. DuBois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and a collaborative study with Black abstract painter and conceptual artist Torkwase Dyson, both set in the Alabama Black Belt, this chapter traces Du Bois’s reckoning with positivist social science for alternative methods of Black study focused on affirming “Black livingness.” The chapter argues for a Du Boisian methodology in pursuing Black geographies—attention to the political economic and the poetic in rejecting social death as the primary means of characterizing Black life and place-making. The reason for this is about creating an alternative to measuring Black life against white life, rather than Black life on its own terms.