Black Lifeworlds: Poetic Black Geographies and Ecologies

Abstract

The two poems that are submitted collectively as “Black Lifeworlds” are interventions in nature-society discussions. They are specifically concerned with the radical challenge that Black Geographies and Black Ecologies make vis-a-vis scholarship and discourse that are silent on the role of race in the production of space and nature. The first poem challenges racial discourses that relegate antiblackness to the colonial and antebellum period compared to a post-racist present. Through allusion to the Great Migration, the poem traces the agitations of Black mobilities. The second poem responds to the racist ecology and natural history of a European Union official, who lamenting migrants as threats to a sublime Europe, described the non-European world as a jungle. The second poem offers a counter-environmental history that rebukes European amnesia about colonial ecological violence.