Yale Architecture Forum: Elleza Kelley (Yale)

In her talk, Elleza Kelley will introduce her forthcoming book, Flight Lines: A Poetics of Black Space, which examines how visual art and literature serve as repositories for black spatial praxis. 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. Reading African American cultural production from the 19th century to the present, the book traces an interface between black aesthetics and black geographies that compels us to study space beyond the enclosures of discipline and media.