Description
The emerging field of Black geographies has become increasingly prominent within its own disciplinary boundaries but has yet to gain significant attention within International Relations (IR). However, IR has recently engaged in similar questions and there are multiple points of contact between spatial IR work and Black geographies. This paper will put these literatures in conversation and draw out opportunities for conceptualising the shifting, entangled scales of Black geographies, which have arisen through debates on the Anthropocene. Whilst much of the Black geographies work is grounded in specific struggles of place, particularly urban context in North America and Europe, IR is more concerned with politics at the national and global levels. I wish to draw these strands together with recently works that address race and the Anthropocene, to consider planetary Black geographies, which force us to simultaneously work at multiple scales, whilst questioning the ontological assumptions that underpin our conceptions of the spaces. I will argue that planetary Black geographies allow for an other-than-human space, one which is not necessarily enabled by the threat of climate change, but by the traumas of empire and the conceptual underpinnings of modernity. Through understanding the production of Blackness through the needs of the ‘human’ we can conceive of an untethered form of subjectivity that which is neither full embedded in a relational local sociality, nor in a cybernetic ecological system, but rather is diffused through a nomadic, errant subjectivity. This is a planetary space that sits uneasily with contemporary conceptions of global politics, but also expands outwards, both spatially and conceptually, from much of the work in Black geographies, creating new cross-disciplinary lines of flight.
