Editors’ Introduction

In Volume 57, Issue 1 of the Southeastern Geographer, we are pleased to offer readers a special issue on “Black Geographies in and of the United States South” guest edited by Adam Bledsoe, LaToya Eaves and Brian Williams, with a commentary by Katherine McKittrick. The special issue showcases conceptually innovative research grounded in a Black Geographies perspective on the racialized production of physical, political and imagined space(s).

This issue goes to press two days after a deeply divisive American Presidential election has made it much harder to deny the racism and xenophobia that have threaded through the fabric of the United States for centuries. The Southeastern Geographer has a long record of engagement with race, racism and xenophobia through scholarship on urban segregration, Jim Crow policies, contestation over Confederate memorials, struggle over the Confederate battle flag, regional tourism, immigration and many other empirics. Review of the 55 year archive of the journal through Project MUSE (ProjectMUSE.com) suggests that the Southeastern Geographer may have a higher proportion of work wrestling with race and racism than any other geography journal publishing today. (A thematic resource list of these papers can be accessed from sedaag.org). Conceptual and analytical approaches to race and racism in geography have changed significantly over the years, growing more critical, theoretical and supple over time; these developments are readily on view in the pages of this journal.

Against this scholarly backdrop, the Black Geographies scholarship offered in this issue of Southeastern Geographer pushes the critical edge further ahead. Our hope is that these papers stimulate ever more nuanced and critical engagement with some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Canadian geographer Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University) and the late Clyde Woods (UC Santa Barbara) outlined the conceptual apparatus of Black Geographies in an edited volume published in the aftermath of the 2005 superstorm Hurricane Katrina. The lens of Black Geographies counters the ways in which predominantly white-authored scholarship tends to render black spaces and spatial practices as somehow deficient, and guides more open-ended inquiry into Black constructions of spaces that recognize complex spatial survival and resistance strategies in changing conditions of racial bias.

The papers in this issue of Southeastern Geographer each contend with historical/ geographic conditions in and of the American South. We leave it to the guest editors to introduce each paper in relation to the aims and intentions of the special issue, but wish to underscore two key themes emerging from this project. First, as recent turbulent and tragic events in cities across the United States clearly demonstrate, racism is a national, not a regional problem. At the same time, Southern states figure complexly in broader understandings of racialization. The textured array of research showcased here complicates the role of southern histories and geographies in relation to broader narratives of Black Geographies.

Second, critical perspectives on race and racialization are vital to the ongoing enrichment of academic geography. The guest editors offer the journal’s readership the stimulating opportunity to envision how critical research agendas centered on a Black sense of place might push the proverbial envelope of critical race research in geography.

It has been a great pleasure to work with the editors and authors whose work makes this an especially memorable issue of the journal. We hope that readers will find the work gathered here to informative and invigorating, as have we.

Lastly, during our tenure as co-editors, we aim to balance annual special issues between research in human geography and research in physical geography. To that end, we have a special issue focused on submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) in the southeastern coastal zone in the works for next year. As always, we invite proposals for cross-cutting special issue topics.