Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, author of
Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of
Today Like Yesterday, Tomorrow Like Today: Black Geographies in the Breaks of the Fourth Dimension
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Published:October 2023
Anna Livia Brand, 2023. "Today Like Yesterday, Tomorrow Like Today: Black Geographies in the Breaks of the Fourth Dimension", The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, Camilla Hawthorne, Jovan Scott Lewis
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This chapter explores Black place-making as the life-giving work of making freedom geographically. In contrast to white Cartesianism, it considers Black life and landscapes as intrinsically linked to ancestral temporalities, acts of resistance, and everyday inhabitance. Through a study of post-Katrina New Orleans and a critique of urban planning visions for rebuilding the city, this chapter first examines how urban planning works as whiteness to delineate a future without Black geographies. The majority of the chapter explores how thinking in the fourth dimension, at the intersection of space and time, can help secure and emplace an incommensurate Black future that is unfettered and dense with love. To consider Blackness as geographically and temporally expansive, the chapter pairs image and text to render a Black landscape as it might be drawn from the perspectives of the porch and second lines, where all geographies are Black and Black residents are home.
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