Manual Barkan Lecture, 2025
National Art Education Association convention, Louisville, KY 2025
gloria j. wilson
Manual Barkan Awardee
Big ups
So, I have to start by giving big-ups…because a lecture like this, though it may appear to have a single author, is always a composition of many—an assemblage shaped by the refusals, creations, and ever-expanding grammar of Black study and Black aesthetic practice. I remain indebted to the artists, thinkers, and fugitives of the wake whose work moves with me daily, reminding me that Black life is neither an object nor an afterthought but an insurgent world-making praxis. Their capacious refusals, sonic-visual interventions, and unrelenting commitments to Black possibility have carried me to this place, as of March 20, 2025. I am humbled.
Opening: The gravity of race, the weight of history
In preparing for this lecture, I realized I’ve been thinking about Black spatial navigation since my time in graduate school, when I wrote a dissertation titled Center of Gravity: Life History Case Studies of Three Black American Art Teachers Navigating Identity. In that work, I asked: What forces guide a Black-American art teacher to conceive and maintain an artist identity? I remained committed to a narrative that made room for explorations of blackness that insists on liberated modalities of Black life, even in the wake of enslavement’s long afterlife.
Four years later, in 2018, I listened to scholar of race studies at UC Berkeley, John A. Powell, who, in conversation with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, said: "Race is a little bit like gravity—experienced by all, understood by few." That phrase stayed with me. It helped me clarify something I had already been circling in my work. If race is like gravity—an omnipresent force, structuring our movements in ways seen and unseen—then blackness is its proving ground. Subjected to force but also constantly defying it, existing within constraint but always imagining and reinventing something else, something more.
I’ve been searching for the language to articulate blackness beyond the figurative and the representational, beyond the critical race frameworks many have come to embrace, and even beyond what we think we mean when we say justice. Because what would justice mean?
Joy James and João Costa Vargas (2013) ask:
What happens when instead of becoming enraged and shocked every time a Black person is killed in the United States, we recognize Black death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy? What will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least consider) that the very notion of justice .. produces and requires Black exclusion and death as normative?
For some time, I had pivoted from my graduate school orientation toward a focus on racial justice, taking up work to co-found and build Racial Justice Studio at the University of Arizona. And yet, something in me knew that racial justice—at least as popularly conceived—was not the terrain of my inquiry. I had moved away from my original orientation, from the deeper grammar I was searching for.
My current work—this thinking through Black spatial practice, through Black composition—is my way back. It is a return to what had always been there.
Christina Sharpe, in her reading of Dionne Brand’s work (Nomenclature, 2022), calls this a poetics of liberation. “[Brand] does not write toward anything called justice, but against tyranny” (p. xviii). That distinction is crucial in my work as well.
Because this is not an abstraction.
We see it daily in the policing of movement. In the surveillance of Black students in schools. In the limitation of bodily autonomy. In the mapped enclosures of anti-Black violence.
So I’d like to start there. With the concept of enclosure. And with Black constraint and movement as both a condition but also a method of refusal.
A personal and poetic beginning: Where this work comes from
This work—what I have come to name Black Geospatial Praxis (wilson, 2023)—did not begin in an archive or as an academic exercise. It began in the body, in memory, and in poetic verse. My father is from Mobile, Alabama. Part of my upbringing was there. In 2019, the remains of the Clotilda, the last known ship to transport stolen and enslaved Africans to the U.S., were discovered. I remember feeling the weight of my Southern skepticism of that discovery—in that year, 2019—100 years from the arrival of the first of those stolen from their lands.
My prior work with researchers connected to Mobile and to the Clotilda led me to Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, to Torkwase Dyson’s aesthetic grammar of Black movement, and to Katherine McKittrick’s critical geographies. Three Black women intellectuals whose work I am indebted to and who have shaped my thinking; their interventions have given me language for what I had already been circling: Black movement is both a condition and a liberatory method. Black spatial practice is both an inheritance and a strategy of invention. How does one insist life within predisposed death?
But before I theorized the geospatial, I wrote and published lyric historiography. In 2017, I began gathering with Joni Acuff and Vanessa López, finding resonance in our creative practices. That collaboration led me to experiment, to stretch beyond the strictures of the academic essay, to language Black movement in ways that refused rigid categorization.
My first engagements with this terrain were attempts to grapple with the historical and ongoing spatial entanglements of Black life. To ask: What does it mean to be mapped? To be structured into spaces but always escaping them? And to consider, what does it mean to theorize Black movement as an act of composition?
This first lyric historiographic piece was submitted to the journal Hypatia in 2019 and published in 2021. Let me read a few lines:
In the wake of the recent “discovery” of remains from the Clotilda (the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to Mobile, AL, USA), I wonder what stories will surface. What if the Mobile river could tell us? Four hundred (400) years have passed since the first Africans were brought to U.S. shores (Jamestown).
What has happened in the wake (Sharpe, 2016) of 35,000 trans(*) Atlantic voyages disasters? What does it mean to be omitted matter?
How has blackness been materially and socially marked in the before, during and afterlives of trans (*) Atlantic enslavement?
How do we aesthetically memorialize an event that continues to unfold? How do we defend the dead?
From there, I began asking: What if Black movement—forced and fugitive—was not just history but method? What if the ship, the hold, the weather, the census, the deed of exclusion—what if all of these were not just evidence of constraint but sites of composition?
I carried these questions with me into another published lyric piece, titled Black* Composition—a work that pushed my inquiries further. Before I named Black Geospatial Praxis, before I formalized this as a framework, I wrestled with it in verse; it was my second attempt at holding the weight of Black spatial entanglements, the repetitions and ruptures, the ways Black life is both mapped, structured and self-liberating.
It was my way of thinking through what it means to exist in the wake of forces that seek to fix blackness in place—on land, in law, in history—and yet, blackness continues to move, continues to compose itself otherwise.
So before I go further into the framework, I want to return to that beginning. Let me read a few lines of Black Composition it is here that I grappled with the question:
What does it mean to live in the wake of an event that has not ended?
This is Black* Composition (wilson, et al., 2022).
What are the aesthetics of liberation?
35,000* Middle Passages.
Geographic inheritances.
Elmina. The door of no return.
Middle. Passage. Womb.
Produces the Black.
Ovaric.
Precious cargo. Shipped. Held in the hold.
Black, within the hold(ing) of the ship.
How, then, does Black create a space out of no space?
What does it mean to be held there?
Black moves, in no space arrangements.
Possibility out from dispossession.
A Blackened composition
Ecological blueprints.
Self-liberation.
Imagine otherwise worlds.
Determined refusal. Nonlinear logics.
Sonic. Haptic. Visual. Kinetic.
Defend the dead.
Compose
If Black Composition was my second attempt to language these questions, then Black Geospatial Praxis was my response—my way of theorizing what Black movement has always done. It is a framework, a method, a way of knowing through movement, through making, through composing otherwise.
The formalization of Black Geospatial Praxis came when I extended these inquiries beyond the poetic and into the critical frameworks of geography, spatial liberation, and Black compositional thought. This was an attempt to build an analytical structure that could hold what I had been circling in poetry.
In the article Black Geospatial Inquiry and Aesthetic Praxis: Toward a Theory and Method (wilson, 2023), I argue that Black movement is not simply a historical phenomenon to be studied, nor is it simply about analyzing space; rather, Black life has always composed itself in excess of its expected conditions. Black life has always constructed liberatory spaces within and against oppressive spatial orders. Sharpe’s wake work, McKittrick’s Black sense of place, and Dyson’s aesthetic narrativization of movement offered the lenses for theorizing this praxis.
Dyson’s work, in particular, provides a crucial lens for thinking through this praxis. In her Hypershape series, she constructs geometric abstractions that narrate the spatial logics of Black life through self-emancipation, each navigating containment and possibility within violent geographies:
Harriet Jacobs, who hid in a tiny attic crawl space for seven years before escaping enslavement, carving out an existence in the unseen, resisting capture through stillness (How is it that those who have been educated in American k-12 schooling are more attuned to The Diary of Anne Frank but not Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs herself?)
Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed himself in a wooden crate to freedom, transforming the containment of a box into a vessel of self-liberation.
Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old boy who, in 1919, refusing the racial boundary that sought to make Black presence in public water a transgression, unknowingly drifted his raft into the whites-only section of Lake Michigan and was stoned to death. His murder, and the white authorities’ refusal to hold anyone accountable, ignited the Chicago Race Riot—a violent assertion of the geographic color line, a reminder that even the fluidity of water could be made into an enclosure.
Dyson constructs geometric abstractions that narrate these Black spatial histories–noting “the shapes that make the Black.” She abstracts these spatial histories into a compositional equation and practice that refuses enclosure, and imagines movement beyond constraint; by imbuing abstracted shape and form with narrative, Dyson subverts notions that abstraction is “non-narrative,” while reconfiguring how we understand Black geospatial existence.
Black geospatial praxis: A Theory-method of movement and making
So, when I talk about Black Geospatial Praxis, I’m thinking through three interwoven dynamics—three ways Black life has continually negotiated space, not just as a site of constraint but as a method of making and moving.
First, there are the cartographies of constraint—the ways Black movement has been enclosed, disciplined, and regulated across time. From the transatlantic slave trade to redlining, from plantation geographies to contemporary school policies that police Black bodies, space has long been weaponized against Black life.
But refusal has always been part of the story. What I call aesthetic refusals—the ways Black art, music, and creative practices disrupt spatial constraints and carve out new possibilities. This is why Dyson’s work is so crucial—it helps us see how abstraction and form themselves can function as a spatial critique.
And then there’s compositional practices—the ways Black people aren’t just resisting but actively making, composing, and reimagining spatial orders. Black movement, Black cultural production, and Black ways of being are not just responses to oppression; they are acts of world-building. They create new ways of knowing, new ways of existing in relation to space and time."
This is why I turn to the concept of refusal (Campt, 2019). In this case, refusal is not simply saying “no.” It is an insistence on another way. It is an assertion of sovereignty, an insistence that Black life cannot be fully accounted for within the systems that seek to contain it.
And so, I extend this work by thinking through an example—an aesthetic refusal in motion.
The Aesthetics of Refusal: Solange’s Don’t Touch My Hair
In my most recent work, A Black sense of place: Aesthetic refusals and the ontological break from colonial being, also to be published in Studies (in press, 2025), I begin to think through Black geospatial praxis and composition by thinking with Solange Knowles’ lyrical and visual performance of Don’t Touch My Hair.
Before I move directly into a reading of the video and verse, I want to ground us in a scene—one that has been repeated across time and space. I want to begin with a moment of interruption. A moment where the presence of blackness in space becomes marked, becomes problematized. A moment of refusal, and the weight that refusal carries. To understand what refusal looks like, what it means to be summoned into compliance, I want to bring us into a moment of Black life being made legible only through its perceived disruption.
Consider this scene: The beads adorning the twins’ braided strands click softly as they walk down the hallway. Moments before the interruption, the girls were taking part in a playful exchange of the dozens in the cafeteria with their classmates. Deanna and Mya, now hold slips of paper–summons’ to the office. Along the way, lockers line the walls—standard, institutional blue. The fluorescent lights above cast a stark glow, their neutrality belied by the charged atmosphere. Their plaits, suspended ontologies, are made into symbols of disruption. The slips in their hands name them "noncompliant" with the dress code. Their faces, unreadable—serious, perhaps resigned. What do we see in their faces? How do we observe their hands, resting on these slips, holding the weight of them, which also belie the quiet dexterity of the hands which crafted the braids themselves?
This moment is part of a long and ongoing ledger—a record of Black life being annotated, disciplined, and controlled. And Deanna and Mya are not alone.
Because if Black geospatial praxis is about movement—about the ways Black people navigate, resist, and recompose space—then it must also account for the ways that movement is disciplined. The ways that even the smallest gestures—how one walks, how one wears their hair, how one takes up space—can become grounds for restriction, surveillance, and punishment.
We have seen the weight of discipline. The weight of the summons. The ways Black life is made hypervisible only through its perceived disruption.
And yet, Blackness is never simply a site of constraint—it is always also a site of making.
It seems to me that Knowles’ Don’t Touch My Hair functions as a spatial intervention—a refusal of capture, a reclaiming of presence. Here, blackness is not simply reacting to racial constraint; it is choreographing its own movement.
Her declaration is not simply about hair. It is about the long history of Black bodily regulation. It is about what it means to exist in a world that insists on touching, altering, and disciplining blackness into compliance.
It is a refusal of the colonial gaze.
Her video is not just a series of images—it is a choreography of liberation. Her movements, the ways her hair sways, the way the camera lingers on Black collectivity, the way the beads click in rhythm—this is a refusal of hypervisibility on someone else’s terms.
We have seen this refusal before.
We have seen it in the stories of Deanna and Mya Cook, whose braids were marked as violations.
In Faith Fennidy, turned away from her Catholic school in New Orleans because her hair, the very texture of her being, did not belong.
In Andrew Johnson, forced to choose between his locks and his wrestling match, a referee cutting away his hair as teammates watched.
In DeAndre Arnold, told he could not graduate unless he cut his hair, erasing a part of himself for the sake of a dress code never meant to make him legible.
They are echoes of a long and ongoing refrain. A history of constraint that insists Black presence is a problem, that Black autonomy must be regulated, that even the way one wears their hair can be grounds for discipline.
The school’s dress codes policies are not neutral; they are the latest inscriptions of an old logic, the logic that polices blackness under the guise of professionalism and compliance.
And Solange refuses.
When she sings the words, “What you say to me? What you say to me?” she is not just asking a question—she is demanding an aesthetic and spatial reckoning. The video stages a conversation between blackness and space, between the individual and the collective. It composes new ways of moving, of occupying space, of resisting the logics that seek to contain Black life.
I read this as a geospatial practice and understand her logic as an aesthetic refusal, not simply as gesture, but as methodology of liberation.
Legislating resistance: The CROWN Act and the limits of recognition
The demand for autonomy has necessitated legal interventions—attempts to name and address the violence of dress codes and other mechanisms that police Blackness. The CROWN Act—passed in some states, stalled in others—is one such intervention.
But this is why Black Geospatial Praxis extends beyond policy. Because refusal is not just about legality—it is about the insistence on being, on making, on composing otherwise.
Reclaiming play and the sovereignty of space
This tension—between constraint and composition, between restriction and refusal—appears in another space, one that has long been contested: the swimming pool.
For Black communities, pools have been spaces of racial violence and exclusion, sites where leisure is met with policing, where presence is read as a threat.
And yet, in Don’t Touch My Hair, the swimming pool becomes something else. It is no longer a site of violence, but of sovereignty. The pool, once a marker of exclusion, becomes a space of reclamation, populated by Black women in communion, bodies swaying freely.
It is an act of reinhabiting space. Of refusing the histories of exclusion that would say this space is not for us.
Solange’s refusal, then, is not only a rejection of white gazes but a broader disengagement from the terms of participation itself. In this way, Don’t Touch My Hair is not just a song—it is a geo-spatial manifesto. A choreography of refusal. A blueprint for reimagining space on our own terms.
The school, the ship, the arts: Considering a Black sense of place
Returning to the scene:
In the cafeteria, Deanna and Mya laughed with their classmates, surrounded by what I would call their “fictive kin” (Wilson, 2018, p. ) A sanctuary. A fleeting space of refuge.
And yet, moments later, that refuge was disrupted.
Their summons—like the ledger of the ship, like the colonial laws that preceded it—insisted that they be regulated, that their hair, their very being, was a disruption.
Here, I return to Christina Sharpe’s articulation of Black existence in the wake. The school, like the ship, is a geography of racialized discipline. A space where Black life is hypervisible only through its perceived deviance.
And yet, what do we see when we turn to the aesthetics of refusal?
We see an insistence on occupying space otherwise. We see the ways Black people always create sanctuaries—cafeterias, classrooms, pools—where survival and joy can be found even within the structures of constraint.
Refusal is what Black people: artists, thinkers, and their communities beyond have always done.
To compose, to create, to live otherwise.
Black life has never simply been about surviving constraint.
It has always been about invention for living.
{ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS }
The following alphabetical list is incomplete:
Beloved; Ruha Benjamin; Dear science and other stories; The blue clerk; Dionne Brand; Tina Campt; Derrais Carter; The Dark Laboratory; Julie Dash; Don’t Touch My Hair; Daughters of the Dust; Dear Science: And Other Stories; The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred; Torkwase Dyson; Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Tao Leigh Goffe; Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Saidiya Hartman; In the Wake: On blackness and being; Imagination: A manifesto; Listening to Images; Tiffany Lethabo-King; Wayward lives, beautiful experiments; Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book; A Map to the Door of No Return; M Archive: After the End of the World; Katherine McKittrick; Toni Morrison; Nomenclature; Origin of Others; M. NourbeSe Philip; Chanda Prescod-Weinstein; The position of the unthought; Scenes of Subjection; Christina Sharpe; Spill; Hortense Spillers; Solange Knowles; Theory; Sylvia Wynter; ZONG!
References
Brand, D. (2022). Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Duke University Press.
Dyson, T. (n.d.). About. https://www.torkwasedyson.com/about1
Vargas, J. C., & James, J. A. (2013). Refusing Blackness-as-victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black cyborgs. In G. Yancy & J. Jones (Eds.), Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical contexts and contemporary manifestations of racial dynamics (pp. 193–204). Lexington Books.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press.
wilson, g. j. (2023). Black geo-spatial inquiry and aesthetic praxis: Toward a theory and method. Studies in Art Education, 64(2), 113-131.
