BLACK IN GEOGRAPHY X RACE TALKS: Green Violence, Abolition Geographies and Black Repair

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• Professor Maano Ramutsindela (University of Cape Town), Assistant Professor Camilla Hawthorne (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Assistant Professor Kevon Rhiney (Rutgers University)
• Friday 11 March 2022, 16:00-17:30
• Zoom.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact mtm62.

Join our three fantastic panelists as they explore the intersections between environmental geographies and the future of Blackness, from how green violence enforces anti-Black racial hierarchies through to the need for Black repair and the abolitionist potential of the Black Mediterranean.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/black-in-geography-x-race-talks-tickets-292304609957

Professor Maano Ramutsindela: Green violence and the place of blacks in the world In this presentation Professor Ramutsindela draws on recent and ongoing debates on green violence and from experiences in Africa to make two provocations. The first is that the violence of conservation has a demographic character, which reinforces racial hierarchies at a global scale. These hierarchies are rendered invisible by conservation discourses and narratives. The second provocation is that conservation spaces are not only violent but also provide a platform on which black people and indigenous groups are routinely dehumanized. Professor Ramutsindela uses these provocations to think about environmental geographies of the Majoritarian world.

Bio: Professor Ramutsindela is a human geographer whose interests lie in political geography and political ecology; particularly borders, regions, land reform, and transfrontier conservation. He uses these four themes to engage with broader debates on the conceptions and institutionalisation of borders and their (im)materiality, territorial politics, regionalisms, and society-nature relations. His latest book (with Frank Matose and Tafadzwa Mushonga) is The Violence of Conservation in Africa (Edward Elgar, 2022).

Professor Camilla Hawthorne: Abolition Geographies from the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean In this presentation, Professor Hawthorne considers how the Black Mediterranean complicates universalizing narratives that read Blackness solely through the geographies of racial slavery and the plantation. She will reflect on the fraught but necessary diasporic work of translating Blackness across distinct yet interconnected global geographies and histories of racial formation. Professor Hawthorne will then conclude with some lessons the Black Mediterranean offers for abolitionist, antiracist, anticolonial, and no-border struggles unfolding across the world in this political moment.

Bio: Camilla Hawthorne is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on Black geographies and the racial politics of migration and citizenship. She is a co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and the author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press 2022).

Professor Kevon Rhiney: Black Repair Professor Rhiney’s talk draws on Jovan Scott Lewis’ rich ethnographic study of lottery scammers in Jamaica and the ethical logic they use to justify scamming as a form of reparations, to think about the limits of Black reparative claims. Specifically, he draws on various theorizings of Black insurgent life to explore the inherent challenges in engendering a radical politics of change premised around principles of repair, alterity, and fugitivity. Ultimately, Professor Rhiney argues that theorizing Blackness and by extension, Black repair, necessitates exploring questions of the unimaginable, the liminal, and the otherwise.

Bio: Kevon Rhiney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Rutgers University. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford and taught for several years at the University of the West Indies (Jamaica). His research is situated at the nexus of critical development studies, human-environment geography, and political ecology. Kevon is a British Commonwealth Fellow, development section editor for Geography Compass and recently served as a contributing author for the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C.

Race Talks is a bi-weekly seminar series that investigates processes and histories of race and gender making. Race Talks is attuned to the ways in which universities as institutions are animated by histories of colonialism, which in turn shape the organisation of knowledge production as well as citational practices. In view of this fact, we are particularly committed to inviting scholars of colour in a feminist effort to honour the radical intellectual work that emerges from the margins. Organised by Dr Kerry Mackereth, Christina Gaw Research Associate in Gender and Technology, University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and Ola Osman, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. Please direct any queries to Kerry at: kam83@cam.ac.uk.

If you would like to hear more about Race Talks events, please email Vincenzo Paci, Centre Administrative Assistant, vmp34@cam.ac.uk and ask to be placed on the mailing list.

The Black in Geography seminar is a series organised by students in the Geography department at the University of Cambridge. The series invites Black geographers (lecturers and students) to speak on Blackness, foregrounding Black voices and experiences in a discipline rooted in coloniality and normative whiteness. The seminars are informal and are not recorded, to create a safe space for open discussion. Organisers: Frédérique Fardin (flf25@cam.ac.uk), Matipa Mukondiwa (mtm62@cam.ac.uk) and Ed Kiely (emk31@cam.ac.uk).

This talk is part of the Black in Geography student led talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Black in Geography student led talks
• Department of Geography
• Zoom

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