Black Formations and the Politics of Space

Currently, I am working on a book project based on my doctoral thesis, entitled “Black Formations and the Politics of Space”. The project takes a sensory, relational, and multi-perspectival approach to understanding Black experience in Berlin, highlighting how notions of race and the processes of racialization are transmitted and received through multiple vectors, such as space, images, or embodied encounters. Simultaneously, it is through these same modes of communication that counter-practices of “refusal” emerge. “Refusal” can be understood here as a Black diasporic practice that refuses the status quo and the prevailing narrative of Black life as characterized by perpetual oppression, revealing a more complex process that troubles a single narrative. By drawing attention to the autopoietic practices of the Black diaspora, this work seeks to widen our understanding of Black experience in white-dominant society and to centre practices that refute racial stereotypes and seek to protect the self from the impacts of racist ascription.

We live in turbulent times in which racial politics influence not just everyday life but various aspects of public policy. In this context, this work develops an alternative way of thinking about racialized experience to the models that have predominated to date. These models have necessarily focused on the harm that racism and racial bias inflict, not just on individuals but communities as well, therefore exposing the structural aspects of racism. In this project, by attending to the lived experience of Black people in Berlin, a city with a long history as a site of Black diasporic identity formation and Black rights movements in Germany, we come to learn how incidents of racism and processes of racialization are not just experienced as an abstraction but have lasting physical and emotional repercussions, ones that accumulate over time and become sedimented in the body, in turn shaping the body and informing movement and behaviour. Taking a sensory approach to understanding Black experience reveals the body as a site of impact, and a site at which regeneration materializes; where via the senses, the transformative capacities of practices of “refusal” reveal themselves as techniques that not only hold the body in place but also galvanize, reaffirm, and celebrate Black life. Therefore, “refusal” features as an ever-evolving set of practices developed within the Black diaspora, as means and method to shield the Black body, but also to reclaim and reinscribe a Black presence in Berlin.

By taking a sensory and phenomenological approach, the work seeks to alter our comprehension of Black experience in white-dominant society. As such, it intentionally engages with the project of Black feminist anthropology and seeks to make tangible the different modes of living within and outside of constrictive racial logics, whilst celebrating the import of practices that empower and reaffirm Black diasporic identities that challenge said logics. By juxtaposing “racism” and “refusal,” the book explores the constant tensions involved in navigating embodied experiences of race, processes of racialization, and incidents of racism.