‘We recognized each other before': On the confluences and constellations of Black geographies,geographies of the Black Atlantic,and Black ecologies

Abstract

This rejoinder dialogues with the commentaries bestowed on our article by focusing on three themes: the contours of discipline, love as struggle, and shared grammars for coming storms and those already with us. We argue that, while academic disciplines often function as colonial infrastructures designed to channel and contain knowledge, a Black geographical scholarly praxis embraces confluences - processes of becoming stronger through the convergence of diverse onto-epistemological worlds. Drawing on the metaphors of constellations and sand, we move beyond seamless integration to embrace a relational approach that acknowledges the frictions, confluences, and necessities of love and solidarity. We clarify that Black Geographies, geographies of the Black Atlantic, and Black Ecologies are not academic elixirs, but practices of recognition and co-resistance rooted in Black thought rather than traditional Western disciplines. Ultimately, the piece advocates for ‘un-disciplinary’ disciplines that refuse colonial rigidity in favor of interdependence, reciprocity, and the arduous labor of building lasting coalitions and solidarities.

Here, with deep gratitude and appreciation, we dialogue with three responses to our collaborative article ‘Black livingness and insurgent ecological politics’ (Williams et al., 2025). We are thankful for the thoughts, sentiments, and provocations that four writers so generously bestowed on our work. While we were inspired and energized by so many of the comments and questions raised, we focus this rejoinder on three themes that cut across many of the points made in the three responses: the contours of discipline; love and / as struggle; and a selection of shared grammars – mantras, coalitions, and buttresses – for coming storms and those already with us.

When we set out to write together, we began from a position of coalition-building, of joining forces, of solidarity across disciplinary fractures. What would happen if we dared to bridge disparate, though allied, approaches? Even this process of collective writing revealed these questions of discipline/disciplining, where we had to learn to speak together with and through these distinctions. We decided to build on shared affinities and potentials, even as we acknowledge the importance, and even benefits, of some of those distinctions.

Our goal was always to think with diaspora, without erasing histories, places, languages, and knowledges of particular sites, and to acknowledge, alongside some of our commentators, that collapsing particularities risks generating fractures and erasures, which can feed the epistemic violence that colonization thrives on. In our own collective writing, we often felt the tensions of disciplines and disciplining emerge, but kept returning to our desire to share breath (Lethabo King, 2019) to work through them. What follows is not just a rejoinder to the careful invitations shared by the respondents, but also a way to make our process (often rendered opaque by publishing) more transparent, showing how the respondents touched on questions and tensions we had to work through and are working through. Without perfect solutions, we invite readers to think alongside us and consider what relational approaches may reveal and conceal.

As Gibson and Agard-Jones (2025) rightly insist, disciplines discipline: they work to contain and channel flows, subdue troubled waters, and forestall confluences. The colonial infrastructures of disciplinary extraction and containment certainly shape the contours and forms of knowledge about Black life in Africa and across the diaspora (Last, 2025). Hawthorne and Heitz (2018: 150) remind us that ‘Claims to dialogue within human geography, and the academy writ large, are frequently invoked to obscure a lack of engagement with noncanonical scholarship’. But like them, ‘we are still convinced that geography has important things to offer our understanding of Blackness, and vice versa – that centering Blackness can actually tell us important things about space and place, about power and the politics of resistance’ (Hawthorne and Heitz, 2018: 150). As such, in our manuscript, we oriented towards flows and confluences rather than the disciplinary infrastructures that seek to channel and contain turbid waters.

Here, on disciplines and distinctions, we are reminded of conversations between Brazilian theorists Ailton Krenak and Antonio Nego Bispo dos Santos. Krenak, an Indigenous scholar-activist, engages with Nego Bispo, the late quilombola thinker, farmer, and writer, through the latter's concept of confluências. Thinking with Bispo, Krenak understands confluences as transfigurations, formed of both convergences and divergences, that ‘evoke the context of diverse worlds that can affect each other’ (Krenak, 2024: 21–23). They remind us how our ideas, theories, and concepts course like waters across the Earth. They meet and converge with other (life-giving) ideas and activities, just as they diverge from others. Confluências thus provide metaphors and methods for coalescing and building strength through onto-epistemological and, indeed, disciplinary diversities. ‘The river’, Nego Bispo teaches, ‘does not stop being a river because it converges with another river; on the contrary, it becomes itself and other rivers, it becomes stronger. When we enter into confluence, we do not stop being us; we become us, and other people – we render’ (dos Santos, 2023: 4–5, emphasis ours).

Likewise, in our efforts to think alongside constellations of co-resistance, we take seriously Lethabo King's (2025) invocation of hurricane season grammars as strategies for surviving multiple storms. Like Andrew Curley and collaborators (2022) we see great benefit in choosing solidarity among movements toward abolition and decolonization. As a political project rooted in the common ground of shared political orientations, decolonization makes space for constellations of co-resistance: ‘we cannot risk ascription to ontological frameworks that elide and obscure the interlocking intimacies that empire has woven, or the abundant paths toward decolonisation and abolition presented by researchers, activists, and other ordinary people working toward these goals’ (2022: 1044). Such constellations should not rest on collapsing differences, but work through place-based political orientations with an eye toward transcending colonial boundaries. Tiffany Lethabo King's (2019) theorization of the shoal offers just such an analytical approach to relational thinking about Black and Native studies, centering the politics of (Indigenous) decolonization and (Black) abolitionism against slavery and its persisting violence. Together, such polyglossic grammars and intertwined commitments and demands provide critical tools to face the storm of global anti-Blackness.

But what are these constellations that drove us to look for confluences of three distinctive subfields rather than focusing on their distinctions? M. Jacqui Alexander (2006) invited us to take up the charge of constellation – of thinking constellationally – as both method and ethical demand. Though not a participant in the 1960s and 1970s women of color movement, she writes of feeling profoundly indebted to it. Even as she recognized and learned from the experiences of Chicana, Native, and Asian women, she saw herself reflected in the memories they were holding up to themselves. Recognition did not require sameness; it required relation – reciprocity, curiosity, deep study of collective struggle. Yet Alexander is never naïve about what relation demands. Solidarity is not a smoothing over of tension, nor crossing an uncomplicated unity. She writes as someone keenly aware that those rendered ‘unbelonging’ – those kidnapped, murdered, disappeared through imperial white supremacist racial capitalist projects – inherit fractures as well as affinities. Solidarity, especially when routed through disciplines and the academy, is difficult work. As she writes:

The racialized squabbles between African American and Caribbean communities are also mirrored within the academy in the struggles between postcolonial and African American studies, […] Since the academy operates through its own brand of colonialism and imperialism, this unfinished project of decolonization is as urgent within these intellectual projects as within the relationships among intellectuals who continue to make theory out of studied myopia. (Alexander, 2006: 271)

Here, Alexander names something familiar: disciplines do not simply organize knowledge; they organize estrangement. They train particular attachments and suspicions, habituate us to defend methods, to mistake specialization for superiority, to internalize hierarchies of legitimacy. The violence is subtle but real. And yet estrangement is not destiny. She reminds us:

We have recognized each other before. Blood flows, making a mockery of biology, of boundaries—within individuals, within families, within neighborhoods. One drop of blood is not sufficient to mark where one line begins and the other ends. Boundaries are never discrete. We have recognized each other before. (2006. 273)

It is here that constellation becomes practice. It does not dissolve difference; it refuses discreteness as final truth. Likewise, Daigle and Ramírez (2019: 80) describe a ‘constellation in formation’ as a confluence of ‘multiple stars, multiple roots and routes – embodied conceptualizations of space coming into formation in pursuit of a decolonial vision’. Constellatory thinking demands the labor of learning one another's migrations, archives, longings – each struggles its own star, none disappearing into another, none shining in isolation. And in this register, Alexander's offering of love emerges not as sentiment or erasure, but as fortification: a commitment to remain in the difficulty without retreating into disciplinary camps or smoothing over the tensions that structure our encounters, to stay long enough to learn each other's genealogies and methods without demanding their assimilation.

Love, then, is not an elixir. It does not erase why we fail to recognize one another – to which Alexander is explicitly referencing Black and Brown daughters of unbelonging shaped by theft and dispersal. Nor does it absolve us, as scholars, from the imperial and disciplinary infrastructures that continue to organize our scholarship. Rather, love is what allows us to remain in difficulty. Love, in this sense, is not the opposite of critique. It binds what Alexander (2006: 286) calls the ‘permanent impermanence of our footprints in the sand’: the fact that our intellectual and political labors are always provisional, always marked by dispersal, and yet still traceable.

Here, Vanessa Agard-Jones's meditation on sand sharpens what is at stake. As she writes, ‘If water is the romantic metaphor that has irredeemably made its place in Caribbean and African diasporic studies, sand is the less embraced referent that returns us to the body's messy realities. Water washes and makes clean. Sand gets inside our bodies, our things, in ways at once inconvenient and intrusive’ (2012: 325–326). If water too easily becomes the metaphor for seamless flow, for confluence without residue, sand interrupts that fantasy. Sand irritates. It lodges. It lingers…and perhaps in that lingering we become recognizable. Constellation and sand together offer a way to inhabit instability without mistaking it for incoherence – to take seriously the genealogical, disciplinary, and imperial tensions that shape our approaches, while refusing to let those tensions foreclose the difficult work of solidarity.

Taken together, Alexander's (2006: 286) call for a new ‘pattern of our knowing and loving’ and Agard-Jones's (2012) attention to sand help us clarify what we are – and are not – claiming. To think constellationally through Black geographies and Black ecologies, then, is not to time-jump beyond disciplinary violence. It is to allow the grit of those histories to remain present – to refuse the fantasy of cleanliness that would render our formations coherent, uncontested, or innocent. If confluence risks appearing too fluid, sand reminds us that relation is textured and abrasive.

We are also clear that there is no pivot to naming ecology in explicit relation to Blackness without the coalitional labor of Black geographies – a formation already composed of many thriving branches and tentacles. Black ecologies become part of a wider constellation indebted to Black geographies. Further, to mobilize yet more solidarity, we chart a confluence that also constellates geographies of the Black Atlantic. To think relationally through Black geographies, geographies of the Black Atlantic, and Black ecologies, then, is not to deny genealogical tension, but to inhabit it differently. It is to attempt – imperfectly, within the limits of space and citation – to continue the solidarity work that Black feminists such as June Jordan and M. Jacqui Alexander have modeled: to write through love and struggle together; to move toward history rather than away from it; to repair, where possible, what disciplining and dis-familiarization have fractured.

While it's dangerous to romanticize any concept, we are clear that none of these approaches can serve as magical elixirs capable of time-jumping the tragic and ongoing political conditions under which Black life has always been made to endure. They do not absolve us from the violence of disciplines or from our implication in the academe-colonizing project. If anything, our writing process revealed how deeply we remain shaped by those formations. And yet still, we worked toward a form of relation because we saw the struggles in Pembroke as inseparable from the ongoing battles in and for quilombos. If we reduced some of the rigor we often find in Black feminists’ ecological theorizations and formations to mere citation to satisfy word limits, the commitment itself could never be reduced. Confluence and constellation remain for us not resolutions but practices: remembering that we have recognized each other before, that we will again, and that relation – however difficult – remains the only way through.

Finally, we want to acknowledge that certainly, work coalescing the categories of Black geographies, geographies of the Black Atlantic, and Black ecologies is never free of the disciplinary influences of (capital-G) Geography and (capital-E) Ecology. However, to us, much of the promise and power of these approaches lies in the opportunities they offer to address socio-spatial and socio-environmental concerns while remaining rooted in and committed to Black thought and practice. In particular, the ‘ecology’ of Black ecologies is not born primarily of the discipline of ecology, but rather, from an ontological and epistemological commitment to understanding environmental and more-than-human relations through a lens of interdependence and reciprocity. Nor were Black geographies – in the sense of Black place-making and spatial knowledge and practice – born solely from the discipline of Geography. There is much room for explicit attention to the differences that Geography and Ecology, as disciplines, make in the formations of Black geographies and Black ecologies. However, that is not our project here, though we welcome and are eager to cite such future endeavors!

Thus, while treatments of distinctions and divergences are indeed necessary, for our paper, we decided to focus intently on convergences, both real and potential, across various fields and approaches. We invoke these confluences then, in efforts to begin the arduous processes of addressing erasures, of healing ruptures, of building real and lasting solidarities. And even as we find ourselves allied across a variety of (sub)disciplinary and methodological boundaries, our work here remains firmly rooted in an amorphous coalition of the disciplines of Black Studies and Geography, two trans- and un-disciplinary disciplines that have long welcomed and indeed invite the blurring of such arbitrary and restrictive boundaries.