Podcasts by Alex A Moulton
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2023
Recent studies on fugitivity, marronage, and other forms of flight from racial violence and dehum... more Recent studies on fugitivity, marronage, and other forms of flight from racial violence and dehumanization have mapped a historical and spatial archipelago of Black and Indigenous freedom struggles across the Caribbean and the Americas. Narratives of fugitivity recuperate the diverse and widespread practices of resistance and refusal that have always accompanied racial violence in these geographies. While scholars have demonstrated the ongoing-ness of racial violence from the plantation to the present, studies on fugitivity remain largely confined to the historical period of chattel slavery, having the unintended effect of rendering plantation futures hegemonic in the present. In addition, the majority of studies have confined analysis to the “New World” despite the prevalence of fugitive practices in other spaces of colonial and racial capitalist domination. Rooted in Black geographies, this special issue asks what fugitivity—as a historical phenomenon, analytical category, and political practice—adds to our understanding of the production of space and subjects today. As a method, fugitivity travels across disciplinary boundaries and multiple spacetimes, charting the entanglements of geographies of racial violence and the freedom practices of racialized people. The articles in the special issue are unified by a concern for how fugitivity, as a method of knowledge-making, kin-making, and place-making, elude the
enclosure of traditional politics and how collective, rather than individual, resistances forge alternative spaces in excess but never fully outside of dominant geographies.
Antipod Episode 1: Clyde Woods, Dispossession, and Resistance in New Orleans
Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019
In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of ou... more In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of our first season. Hosts Brian Williams and Akira Drake Rodriguez walk listeners through a series of clips from a panel on Clyde Woods’s posthomously published work Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations of Post-Katrina New Orleans, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Brian and Akira comment on the use of Woods’s “blues epistemology” framework to contextualize the ongoing making and re-making of Black geographies in New Orleans. Covering themes from dispossession to displacement to the fallacy of “natural” disasters, this episode challenges traditional notions of urban planning and privileges what Woods’s calls “the visions of the dispossessed.” Clips from this episode are from an “Author Meets Critics” panel at the Community Book Center in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, a space of continuity for pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans residents. The participants in the discussion were: former Woods student and activist-poet Sunni Patterson; Khalil Shahid, Senior Policy Advocate at the National Resource Defense Council; Anna Brand, Asst. Prof at the University of California at Berkeley; Shana Griffin from Jane’s Place, New Orleans’ first community land trust; Sue Mobley, who, at the time of the panel, was the Public Programs Manager for the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane University; and Jordan T. Camp (editor) who at the time of the panel was at Barnard College, and is now the Director of Research at the People’s Forum in New York.
Episode 1 is hosted by Akira Drake Rodriguez and Brian Williams.
The episode was mixed and edited by KT Bender and Brian Williams.
This episode was produced by all members of the Antipod Sound Collective.
Antipod Episode 0: Introduction
Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019
In this episode, the members of the Antipod Sound Collective introduce themselves and discuss the... more In this episode, the members of the Antipod Sound Collective introduce themselves and discuss the origins of Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast.
Papers by Alex A Moulton
Black Lifeworlds: Poetic Black Geographies and Ecologies
GeoHumanities, May 14, 2024
Toward ‘Fugitivity as Method’
ACME: an International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Oct 29, 2023
Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago
Progress in environmental geography, Mar 1, 2024
Environment and society, Sep 1, 2022
Black geographies and Black ecologies are epistemological frameworks that attend to the ideologic... more Black geographies and Black ecologies are epistemological frameworks that attend to the ideological, philosophical, and material portent of Black movements in dialectical, but not deterministic, relationships with the geographies and environments of Black life and struggle. Th is article reviews the Black geographies and Black ecologies literature, showing the convergence of these bodies of scholarship around themes of racial, spatial, and ecological justice. Th e thematic, methodological, and analytical overlaps between Black geographies and Black ecologies are quite apropos for understanding the current realities faced by Black racial-spatial-ecological justice movements; for clarifying the geographies, histories, and ecologies of Black transformation, fl ourishing, and everyday resistance; and for explicating how global environmental crises are rooted in racial capitalism and regimes of racialization (a sociopolitical crisis).
Journal of extreme events, Mar 1, 2019
The 2017 hurricane season caused widespread devastation across Central America, the Caribbean and... more The 2017 hurricane season caused widespread devastation across Central America, the Caribbean and the SouthEastern United States. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria were among the most intense Atlantic hurricanes and the costliest for the Circum-Caribbean region. For the small islands of the Caribbean, the hurricanes highlighted the acute vulnerability to climate change. The scale of physical ruin and level of social dislocation, however, do not just reflect the outcomes of a natural hazard. Continued structural dependency and outright entanglement in colonial relationships complicated recovery and coordination of aid to affected communities across the region. We argue that the experiences and outcomes of hazards like Harvey, Irma and Maria therefore invite examinations of persisting colonial power dynamics in discussions of climate hazard. Using Foucauldian theory for such an examination, we problematize simply championing resilience, without noting the possibilities for its use as a biopolitical regime of governing life. Such an appraisal, we suggest, might clarify a path toward reparations and climate change justice.
Caribbean quarterly, Apr 2, 2020
ALMOST HOME IS AN ENTHRALLING EXAMINATION of the pursuit for belonging, the contradictions of bla... more ALMOST HOME IS AN ENTHRALLING EXAMINATION of the pursuit for belonging, the contradictions of black kinship and the contestations of colonial institutions. Ruma Chopra exposes the fraught nature of black mobility and freedom as it sits in uneasy tension with the aspirations of the British colonialists in Jamaica, Canada and Sierra Leone. The picture that emerges is one of the Trelawny Town Maroons as highly strategic actors who negotiated the colonial apparatus of government through conflict, accommodation, and connivance. This is an important contribution to the historiography of the British empire, African-American history, Maroon studies and the emergent work in Black Geographies. Chopra draws on an extensive archive of the Maroons' story both to ensure richness and to demonstrate one of the central themes of the book: Maroons commanded the attention and reflection of the British empire. Maroon existence proved the empire was pregnable rather than a fait accompli. In the introduction we learn that the Maroons signed treaties with the British in 1738 and 1739 that "established the Maroons as useful neighbours" (15). As Chopra shows, though, while the Maroons would at first seem compliant with their role of propping up the plantation economy, they were less ready to accept an inferior racial positioning. War broke out following what Maroons perceived to be an especially demeaning event: the beating of two Trelawny Town Maroons "by a slave overseer the Maroons had previously captured as a runaway; adding insult to injury, the Maroons overheard nearby slaves making jeering remarks" (22). By insisting on these details Chopra highlights the fraught position of the Maroons within a racist colonial system that made their position volatile and their loyalties questionable. The chapter "Bloodhounds" shows the inconsistencies of the perceived social and moral position of the Maroons. As a last resort to ferret out the Maroons from their haunts and retreats, the colonial government brought in Cuban bloodhounds. Yet, as Chopra shows, the coincidence of these devel
Race, Land and Freedom
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2020
Colonial and racial regimes of property - including territorial dispossession and slavery - conti... more Colonial and racial regimes of property - including territorial dispossession and slavery - continue to haunt the present. These racialized geographies have often been considered through the analytics of “landscape”, which considers the construction, reproduction and consumption of the imaginaries of race and nature attached to particular places. Landscape, therefore, acts as a key technology of racialization and property control through representations of the relationship between people and land. In this chapter, we call for sustained attention to the politics of land in studies of racial capitalism. Land, we argue, is central to historical geographies of racialization, and a key site of struggle over racial property regimes, often with visceral bodily and ecological consequences. The white, self-owning, land-owning subject at the presumed center of capitalist modernity is a product of colonization and enslavement--as racialized systems of owning and controlling land and people. For us then, grounding the theoretical discussions of racial capitalism in the materialities of race and land introduces new questions about the relationships between survival, community, and belonging. Control over land often underwrites the control over life and labor; but such control alone is not sufficient to produce freedom, nor just and sustainable futures. We engage with Black mobilizations for land and freedom in Jamaica and in the southern United States to reveal the limits of land ownership under racial capitalism and point to land ethics which provide alternatives to liberal freedoms. Attending to the materiality of race and land in conceptualizing racial capitalism, we argue, opens opportunities to identify and better understand the factors that might constitute liberation in grounded struggles.
Journal of Political Ecology, Nov 2, 2021
Franz Fanon poignantly argued that trauma is both an act and a memory of wounding that haunts sub... more Franz Fanon poignantly argued that trauma is both an act and a memory of wounding that haunts subjects of violence. Addressing geographies of trauma, and the way that trauma is treated in the discipline of geography, is a matter of both theoretical and practical importance for critical human-environment scholars. However, discussions about uneven and ongoing geographies of trauma and violence-particularly in ways that enroll researchers themselves as agents within these landscapes-have been limited among political ecologists. When broached, these conversations are sometimes short-circuited by post-racial liberalism, whiteness or Eurocentricity, and academic respectability politics. This risks the continuance of logics that separate "researchers" from "communities" and lionize representational commitments to justice over material practices of transformation. In this article, we interrogate some of the theoretical and personal implications for political ecologists working with the legacies of dispossession, disruption, displacement and death. We draw on a wide collective of scholarship on haunting, hope, and geographies of trauma as well as our current work as geographers and educators. In the process, we build an argument for an approach that encourages unsettling, uncomfortable, and generative conversations about and beyond trauma. We end with three suggestions for engaging more substantively with the traumatic fallout that has long been at the center of political ecology.
Forum in Honor of Dr. Bobby M. Wilson, a Geographer of the American South: Introduction
Southeastern Geographer
Bobby Wilson’s Black Perspective on Geography and Clark’s Graduate School of Geography
Southeastern Geographer
Environment and Society
Black geographies and Black ecologies are epistemological frameworks that attend to the ideologic... more Black geographies and Black ecologies are epistemological frameworks that attend to the ideological, philosophical, and material portent of Black movements in dialectical, but not deterministic, relationships with the geographies and environments of Black life and struggle. This article reviews the Black geographies and Black ecologies literature, showing the convergence of these bodies of scholarship around themes of racial, spatial, and ecological justice. The thematic, methodological, and analytical overlaps between Black geographies and Black ecologies are quite apropos for understanding the current realities faced by Black racial-spatial-ecological justice movements; for clarifying the geographies, histories, and ecologies of Black transformation, flourishing, and everyday resistance; and for explicating how global environmental crises are rooted in racial capitalism and regimes of racialization (a sociopolitical crisis).
Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 2022
Black geographies and Black ecologies are epistemological frameworks that attend to the ideologic... more Black geographies and Black ecologies are epistemological frameworks that attend to the ideological, philosophical, and material portent of Black movements in dialectical, but not deterministic, relationships with the geographies and environments of Black life and struggle. Th is article reviews the Black geographies and Black ecologies literature, showing the convergence of these bodies of scholarship around themes of racial, spatial, and ecological justice. Th e thematic, methodological, and analytical overlaps between Black geographies and Black ecologies are quite apropos for understanding the current realities faced by Black racial-spatial-ecological justice movements; for clarifying the geographies, histories, and ecologies of Black transformation, fl ourishing, and everyday resistance; and for explicating how global environmental crises are rooted in racial capitalism and regimes of racialization (a sociopolitical crisis).
Southeastern Geographer, 2022
This forum curates comments and reflections originally developed for a panel convened to remember... more This forum curates comments and reflections originally developed for a panel convened to remember and honor the life and work of Dr. Bobby Wilson (Figure 1), who passed away in August of 2021. The panel took place on Monday, November 22 in Florence, AL at the 2021 annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers (SEDAAG). It is customary in our discipline to create these moments at conferences and in publications to mark the passing of important and admired colleagues. Indeed, while our discipline is an intellectual exercise-it is also a set of social, emotional, and memorial practices. Graduating with a Ph.D. in geography from Clark University, Bobby Wilson served on the faculty at the University of Alabama-Birmingham from 1974 to 2002. He later joined the faculty at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he also served as Head of the Department of Geography and retired. Dr. Wilson's work has shaped the field of geography in indelible and lasting ways. Of particular note are Dr. Wilson's contributions to Black Geographies scholarship, research on the political economy of development in the US South as it intersected with the Black civil rights movement. He was at the forefront of advancing a Marxist analysis and arguing passionately for incorporating a critical understanding of socially constructed racial divisions and what he termed "race-connected practices" into a historical materialist approach. In particular, Dr. Wilson argued for examining how the South's racialized path to industrialization diverged from classical models of American capital accumulation that tended to ignore subnational regional analysis. It was through Dr. Wilson's many publications and presentations on the social and economic geography of Birmingham, Alabama in which he demonstrated this pioneering theorizing of the intersection of industrialization, racism, and civil rights in the Southeast. Birmingham-although highly consequential to the struggle for racial equality as well as a key node in the southern economy-had not received the attention it should have until Dr. Wilson's work. Moreover, Dr. Wilson's articles on Birmingham represent some of the first critical treatments of race in Southeastern Geographer, now a journal known widely for publishing Black Geographies scholarship. Dr. Wilson's research on Birmingham would lead to two landmark books published in 2000 by Rowman & Littlefield: Race and Place in Birmingham: The Civil Rights and Neighborhood Movements and
Southeastern Geographer, 2022
Can Geography, as a set of concepts and tools, be of relevance in solving the problems of the Bla... more Can Geography, as a set of concepts and tools, be of relevance in solving the problems of the Black American community?" This is the question that Bobby Wilson and Herman Jenkins posed as the opening sentence for their 1972 essay in Antipode.¹ In the essay, Wilson and Jenkins (1972) discussed the symposium titled "The present and future state of geography: Some black perspectives" that was held March 9-11 in 1972 at Clark University. The symposium had been organized by Donald Deskins, Jr., urban geographer and sociologist, whose efforts to increase Black geographers included his leadership of the American Association of Geographers' (AAG's) Commission on Geography and Afro-America (COMGA). Wilson and Jenkins noted that the question they posed was one often raised in discussions by them and other Black students in the Graduate School of Geography (GSG) at Clark University (Kobayashi 2014). They index the pervasiveness of the question to the theses and dissertations addressed to the question of race, and the fact that most of the antiracist research and work critical of segregation was being done by graduate students who were in the COMGA Program (Choi 2018). Wilson and Jenkins (1972, 42) related that the question posed was "implicit in the conflicts that sometimes occur between the Black students and departmental faculty and administration." These conflicts had much to do with the Black students' presence at Clark, a predominately white institution. Even as Saul B. Cohen was attempting to increase Black American graduate student enrollment through the AAG's COMGA Program and Clark's own Teachers Teaching Teachers (Triple T) Program, faculty across Clark's campus openly expressed support for Jim Crow policies and scientific racism (Choi 2018). Wilson and Jenkins (1972, 42) noted what they saw as the main question facing Black academics entering geography, then a very new profession for them: "should black geographers address themselves to the profession as an organized group or as individuals?" As they remember it, this question permeated all the sessions at the symposium just as it did the daily lives of Black students at Clark. Wilson and Jenkins saw two schools of thought: one that argued for intra-racial unity as the basis of a Black social consciousness that would drive social change; and another organized around a philosophy of individualism that rationalized internalized antiblackness. They expressed frustration with some Black geographers, who based on "perceived status (real or fancied) in the geographic establishment" saw "themselves as something akin to plantation straw bosses resisting attempts by malcontent field hands to change the pattern of things" (Wilson and
Towards the arboreal side-effects of marronage: Black geographies and ecologies of the Jamaican forest
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
The English colonial plan of converting Jamaica into a settler colony was challenged by the Maroo... more The English colonial plan of converting Jamaica into a settler colony was challenged by the Maroons who established communities in the interior of the island. Living in the forests at the edge of the expanding plantation system, Maroons were feared by aspiring white settlercolonists. The zone where the plantation and white settlements met the Maroon de-facto territory became a frontier zone, where race, belonging, and freedom were contested. The Maroons inspired Black revolt and dreams of freedom, but after signing treaties ending their war against the English in the mid-18th century, the Maroons became dreaded by non-Maroon Blacks in Jamaica. Fear of the Maroons had productive and protective effects on the physical environment; the conservation of much of Jamaica's interior was one of these effects. The paper uses colonial era admissions of this fear as openings for showing how Jamaican conservation was shaped by the Maroons as spatial actors. The paper proposes conceptualizing...
Race, Land and Freedom
The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography, 2020
Colonial and racial regimes of property - including territorial dispossession and slavery - conti... more Colonial and racial regimes of property - including territorial dispossession and slavery - continue to haunt the present. These racialized geographies have often been considered through the analytics of “landscape”, which considers the construction, reproduction and consumption of the imaginaries of race and nature attached to particular places. Landscape, therefore, acts as a key technology of racialization and property control through representations of the relationship between people and land. In this chapter, we call for sustained attention to the politics of land in studies of racial capitalism. Land, we argue, is central to historical geographies of racialization, and a key site of struggle over racial property regimes, often with visceral bodily and ecological consequences. The white, self-owning, land-owning subject at the presumed center of capitalist modernity is a product of colonization and enslavement--as racialized systems of owning and controlling land and people. For us then, grounding the theoretical discussions of racial capitalism in the materialities of race and land introduces new questions about the relationships between survival, community, and belonging. Control over land often underwrites the control over life and labor; but such control alone is not sufficient to produce freedom, nor just and sustainable futures. We engage with Black mobilizations for land and freedom in Jamaica and in the southern United States to reveal the limits of land ownership under racial capitalism and point to land ethics which provide alternatives to liberal freedoms. Attending to the materiality of race and land in conceptualizing racial capitalism, we argue, opens opportunities to identify and better understand the factors that might constitute liberation in grounded struggles.
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2021
Harvesting wild food is an important coping strategy to deal with food insecurity in farming hous... more Harvesting wild food is an important coping strategy to deal with food insecurity in farming households across the Caribbean. The practice is tightly connected to the region's unique agrarian history, food heritage, traditional cuisine, and local knowledge of wild or semidomesticated plants. In Jamaica, small-scale farmers are the chief stewards of agrobiodiversity, and their food security and well-being are often dependent on wild food harvest. Yet, there is a paucity of empirical research on the relationship between wild food use, food security, and biodiversity conservation. In this paper, we use the knowledge and lived experience of rural farmers in a remote community (Millbank) at the edge of the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park (BJMNP) to explore the relationship between wild food harvest and food insecurity within the context of protected area management. Specifically, we seek to (1) characterize different patterns of wild food harvest; (2) examine the relations...
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Podcasts by Alex A Moulton
enclosure of traditional politics and how collective, rather than individual, resistances forge alternative spaces in excess but never fully outside of dominant geographies.
Episode 1 is hosted by Akira Drake Rodriguez and Brian Williams.
The episode was mixed and edited by KT Bender and Brian Williams.
This episode was produced by all members of the Antipod Sound Collective.
Papers by Alex A Moulton