Finding and Mapping Black Women in the Interstices

Abstract

Why mapping? Maps are active, ongoing processes of documenting place and space because geographies, and the histories they carry, change over time. Terrains, boundaries, and communities shift. We map landscapes as they appear, and we map landscapes to plan for new spaces. We map to record, to preserve what is “here now” before “now” becomes the past. Maps can fix things in place, but they can also map out routes—the throughways and byways for people to traverse spaces. Maps, then, are archives of spaces from which we can storify all manner of human experience. They help us to see what was, what is, and what can be. Mapping how Black lives shape places and make spaces (through movement and fixity) spatializes Black experience; it documents Black geographies. The essays within map Black women by tending to the recovery of their practice and theory. Each explores the work to be done when places like archives, museums, courthouses, and neighborhoods do not bear witness to the joys, horrors, quotidian experiences, and endurance of Black life. The authors probe and answer how Black women moved through and beyond systemic barriers and physical dangers while placing themselves at the center of change through their work and writing. Each essay maps a way to build archival and theoretical spaces to interrogate all the ways in which a Black woman might navigate, as Anna Julia Cooper said, “when and where”1 she enters contested spaces. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2023.2222484