Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search

Open Access padlockePrints

The Transnationalism of the Black Lives Matter Movement: Decolonization and Mapping Black Geographies in Sydney, Australia

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Daniel Barwick, Professor Anoop NayakORCiD

Downloads


Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).


Abstract

© 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.This article responds to recent calls to “provincialize” (Hawthorne 2019) and “pluralize” (Bledsoe and Wright 2019a) Black geographies. We do so by adopting a relational, transnational, and multiscalar approach. Drawing on ethnography with Black Lives Matter activists in Sydney, Australia, we adopt a decolonizing framework to argue that Indigenous knowledges, experiences, and actions can extend the epistemologies and cartographies of Black geographies. The mapping of Black geographies in Sydney reveals three multilayered and intersecting ways through which Black agency, place-making, and resistance are made manifest in transnational Black Lives Matter protests: (1) through invoking “stretched out” geographies, forging shared solidarities between African American high-profile cases of policing injustice and Aboriginal deaths in custody; (2) through counterhegemonic attempts to reconfigure Australia Day as Invasion Day, reclaiming colonized histories that subvert the premise of Australia as a “White nation”; and (3) through conjoining transrural cases of violence toward Aboriginal communities living in peripheral places and then strategically amplifying their concerns through place-based activisms in the global city. Finally, we conclude by arguing that further international accounts are crucial to this emerging field.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Barwick D, Nayak A

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Year: 2024

Volume: 117

Issue: 7

Pages: 1587-1603

Online publication date: 08/07/2024

Acceptance date: 10/04/2024

Date deposited: 16/07/2024

ISSN (print): 2469-4452

ISSN (electronic): 2469-4460

Publisher: Taylor and Francis Ltd.

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2024.2363782

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2024.2363782


Altmetrics

Altmetrics provided by Altmetric


Share