A Black Geographic Reverie & Reckoning in Ink and Form

This chapter uses art as a container for Black collective inquiry and art as Black geographic praxis. It describes a collaborative project that brought together three works: a mixed-process collage print, a corresponding book with new writing from six Black scholars and writers, and a digitized film excerpted from the author’s aunt’s archive. In this work, research, family archiving and conversation, and art create a bird’s-eye view that expands over Black life and geography. Black citational practice, written and lived between the body, place, and page, is spatialized through craft and collaboration in homage and reverie. The alluvial nature of Black collective thought and humans’ physical relationship to land, water, and sky are brought into form as atlas, blueprint, and evocation. Black imaginaries are seen through a telescope that collapses past and present in experimental research, magnifying undersung activist histories and Black families in their everyday.