UC Berkeley

At the center of this dissertation is a commitment to understanding the political, economic andgeographic dynamics of black belonging in the Americas. The challenge in articulating black belonging is one of specifying and recognizing claims to land. Given native organizing for “Land Back!”, what then is the responsibility of black placemaking and black land claims to these already existing indigenous geographies? While answers to this question have mostly been characterized by an incommensurability between black and native studies, my dissertation seeks to better articulate how blackness can be undergirded by understandings of settler colonial racial and geographic formations. I develop a theory of black racial formation in the Americas based on frontier geographies and settler racial antagonisms. Blackness in frontier spaces differs from the violence that produces blackness on the plantation. Though much of black geographies scholarship prioritizes the plantation in the U.S. South and view the plantation as an organizing force of antiblackness in urban spaces throughout North America, I consider black geographies without the specter of the plantation. If the plantation is removed from its position as a universal geographic representation of blackness in the Americas, what other historical geographies give way to a black sense of place? And what other forms of black social worlds are possible in these plantation alternatives? Using archival and ethnographic methods I ask how geographic alternatives to the plantation shape black life and black claims to place in the state of Minnesota.