Anna Brand: Abolitionist Archive | Public Land, Public Space, Public Discourse
Free and open to the public
Drawing on research and engagement with New Orleans’s racial landscapes and thinking with Saidiya Hartman’s methodological intervention of critical fabulation, Anna Brand’s talk draws on research that conceives of Black residents’ abolitionist praxes as an archive of love letters sent to the city’s deltaic future.
Sent across time and space, each letter in this abolitionist archive details daily reconfigurations, tactile practices, and spatial arguments against the spatial and legal regimes of whiteness. Each letter makes clear how whiteness is sutured to the urban landscape through planning and design regimes steeped in compounding assemblages of anti-Blackness. Freedom, these letters insist, takes place literally and metaphorically on the sidewalks, stoops and streets of Black geographies across the city, even as these spaces have been regulated, designed, and surveyed to limit the freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002) of Black residents.
As an archive, the letters conceptualize freedom as a capacious spatial imaginary, insisting that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, “freedom is a place.” By opening up the analytical and creative capacity of the archive of everyday yearning toward the afterlives of abolition, this research engages the disciplinary distance between Black geographical thought and urban planning and design. Through the work of creative assemblage and critical fabulation, it examines abolitionist practices and spatial imaginaries as a set of desired tones that demand a different future. Simultaneously, this research engages with the possibilities of landscape drawing and assemblage as a means through which the tactile dimensions of anti-racism might be conceptualized as new spatial trajectories and grounded possibilities.
About the Series
Public Land, Public Space, Public Discourse, presented by the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, aims to spark critical thinking about how perceptions of public space and land impact our disciplines. Academics, practitioners, writers, and thinkers will bring a range of perspectives to a semester-long discussion of public realms.
About the Speaker
ACCESSIBILITY
The auditorium is wheelchair accessible. If you require accommodations to fully participate in this event, please contact Christina Hausle at least 10 days prior to the event.