Global Black Geographies: Tracing a Wayward ‘Method’

ABSTRACT

This Special Section utilises Saidiya Hartman's (2019a) notion of waywardness as a method to account for certain under‐theorised expressions of global Black geographies. Arguing that much of the current focus in Black Geographies scholarship centres on the Global North, almost to the exclusion of other voices, it deploys the idea of ‘the wayward’ to investigate how ‘global’ conversations about Blackness unfold in diverse locations. The introduction/editorial contextualises ‘the wayward’, suggesting that it offers a likely method for considering other expressions of Blackness which unveil these multiplicities. Three individual case studies and a roundtable make up the rest of the discussion. The roundtable, which takes its cue from the reading practice of a transnational digital collective, the Global Black Geographies Collective, outlines an approach for (re)considering the scholarship and ideas of classic Black scholars and theorists from a ‘global’ perspective. Regarded an essential component of the methodology of ‘the wayward’ in how it brings together diverse geographies of Blackness within one forum, the overall aim of the special section is to offer possible insights into how these groups mobilise in community to disrupt the centred thinking of Global North ideas about Black geographies.