The Black Geographic Narratives of Haitian and Haitian American Youth

Abstract

The resurgence of anti-Haitian racism and xenophobia in the 2020s requires thoughtful responses from literacy educators and researchers. This study relies on the fields of Black Geography and Sensuous Geography to investigate Haitian and Haitian American (H/HA) youth placemaking practices and geographic literacies that contest colonial definitions of Haiti as an inferior location. In this article, I introduce Black geographic narratives, which are written autobiographical texts that exhibit imaginative placemaking practices, figurative mapmaking, and geographic knowledges that reconfigure Haiti’s geopolitical subjugation. This study finds that H/HA youth creatively employed food, the senses, historical retellings of Haiti, and Haitian myth busting as unique placemaking devices in their writing. Overall, the exploration H/HA youth’s geographic narratives brings fresh attention to this understudied group of learners, infuses Black geographic thought into writing instruction, and forefronts the specific ways Black transnational youth use writing as anti-colonial projects.