Yale Architecture Forum
Elleza Kelley
Flight Lines: A Poetics of Black Space
Black spatial praxis is the theory, critique, and production of space under the duress of racial enclosure. Black people have always experienced, interpreted, transformed, produced, and represented space—sometimes as architects, designers, planners, and cartographers, but more often as a people “outside” of formal planning and building practices; as a people long considered “ungeographic,” as Katherine McKittrick writes. I will discuss my forthcoming book, Flight Lines: A Poetics of Black Space, which examines how visual art and literature serve as repositories for black spatial praxis. Reading African American cultural production from the 19th century to the present, I trace an interface between black aesthetics and black geographies that compels us to study space beyond the enclosures of discipline and media.
Elleza Kelley is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English at Yale University. Her scholarly and public writing can be found in Antipode, ACME, ISLE, Souls, The Yale Review, The New Inquiry, Cabinet Magazine, Deem Journal and elsewhere.
Architecture Forum is a PhD-led symposium jointly organized by the Departments of Architecture and History of Art, providing an inclusive platform for scholars to present and debate new research on the history of the built environment. This year’ forum is co-convened by Benjy Akhavan, Anas Alkhatib, and Marlene Schwemer.
Generous funding for this event is provided by the School of Architecture, History of Art Department, and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.