Space
by
Summer 2020 was a moment of mass reckoning. The pandemic amplified inequalities already existing across the globe, and the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers reignited a movement for Black lives that has reverberated across North America and well beyond. As we weave a conception of “space,” we sit with the significance of monuments aggrandizing the “founding fathers” of genocide, slavery, and conquest being torn from their pedestals and dragged through the streets. To topple these figures along the same waterways where colonial ships once departed and arrived, on the same streets where Black and Indigenous lives have and continue to be massacred, calls attention to the importance of space, both in how power functions and in how relations between peoples emerge. Our theorizing of space arises from these instances of unrest and upheaval, for space is laden with histories of conquest and resistance that demand our attention. Drawing from Tiffany Lethabo King’s theorizing in Black Shoals, we use the term conquest here as a “grammar and a frame… to register the always already intersectional violence of anti-Blackness, slavery and its afterlife, and genocide at the same time” (2019, 68). While imperfect, we utilize the term BIPOC in...
This essay may be found on page 217 of the printed volume.