Carl H. Nightingale. “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York.” The American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (February 1, 2008): 48-71.
By the 1710s, British authorities at both Madras, India, and New York City had made, by fits and starts, more than a half-century of progress in their efforts to increase their power over people they categorized as “black.” Yet the residential color lines they drew in these two cities contrasted sharply. In Madras, known today as Chennai, stout stone walls separated a privileged European neighborhood from the city’s Asian districts. Similar arrangements existed in other colonial cities in the Eastern Hemisphere, but Madras was the first place in world history to officially designate its two sections by color: “White Town” and “Black Town.” In New York, by contrast, a small part of town outside the city wall sometimes called the “negro lands” was dismantled, along with the wall itself. In a pattern that New Yorkers would scarcely recognize today, but which was common among slave-importing cities of the Atlantic world, authorities forced black slaves to live inside the households of whites, especially the wealthiest ones. There, the politics of domestic life settled further questions of color and space.
More on black geographies:
Katherine Mckittrick and Clyde Woods, eds. Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007.
1. “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean”
Katherine McKittrick; Clyde Woods
2. Towards African Diaspora Citizenship: Politicizing an Existing Global Geography
Carole Boyce Davies & Babacar M’Bow
3. “Sittin’ on Top of the World”: The Challenges of Blues and Hip Hop Geography
4. Memories of Africville: Urban Renewal, Reparations, and the Africadian DiasporaAngel David Nieves
5. “Freedom Is a Secret”
6. Henry Box Brown, an International Fugitive: Slavery, Resistance, and Imperialism
Suzette A. Spencer
7. “A Realm of Monuments and Water”: Lorde-ian Erotics and Shange’s African Diaspora Cosmopolitanism
Kimberly N. Ruffin
8. “The Lost Tribe of a Lost Tribe”: Black British Columbia and the Poetics of Space
Peter James Hudson
9. Deportable or Admissible: Black Women and the Space of “Removal”
10. Mapping Black Atlantic Performance Geographies: From Slave Ship to Ghetto
Sonjah Stanley Niaah
11. Urban Revolutions and the Spaces of Black Radicalism
James A. Tyner
12. Homopoetics: Queer Space and the Black Queer Diaspora
Letter from the Rastafari Community of Shashamane to UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan, June 27, 2001.
Stephanie M. H. Camp. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Press, 2004.