In love and struggle: Black life and the difference disciplines make

Abstract

In this commentary, we respond to the article ‘Black livingness and insurgent ecological politics: Thinking across Black geographies/Atlantics/ecologies’, described as a love letter that prioritises confluences and the bringing together of Black spatialities as radical praxis. Our response attends to the alterity that is embedded in and surrounds these confluences and the struggle that, as Black feminist letters teach us, must accompany this love. This commentary engages with one such difference – that between geography and ecology, not just as distinct approaches to examining Black life, but as different material, intellectual, economic, and political arrangements involved in shaping Black life. The commentary also responds to the imperial fault lines and their violent demarcations of and impositions on Black geographies, and examines the roles played by scholarship that engages and reproduces these zonations.