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This paper uses Christina Sharpe’s concept of “anagramatical blackness” to explore the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center as an example of what I will term the anagramatical landscape. Sharpe writes that Blackness anagramatically shifts the meaning of people, places, and things. The Freedom Center is a museum located in Cincinnati, Ohio dedicated to telling the story of American slavery as well as other stories of civil and human rights. I examine the Freedom Center as more than a museum, but also as a memorial because of its geographic location along the boundary between the American North and South as well as its situation within the wider American geographic imagination as a site of “National” history telling. Content analysis of TripAdvisor reviews by visitors shows that these people struggle with their preconceived notions about what stories are being told as well as for who they are being told. Using Sharpe’s idea that when words come up against Blackness, their meanings shift, I look at the Freedom Center as an anagramatical space that white reviewers fear they may not have access to because of its focus on the story of Black people resisting against white supremacy. It is only when they reposition whiteness within the narrative or, as Sharpe writes, “redact” blackness, and decode the memorial landscape through epistemological whiteness, that this space becomes comprehensible. Through the use of this framework, I take the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center as an example of how geographers might expand upon the idea of the anagramatical landscape to understand opposition to memorial work that centers Black lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Christina Sharpe's concept of "anagramatical blackness" to explore the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center as an example of what I will term the anagramatical landscape. Sharpe writes that Blackness anagramatically shifts the meaning of people, places, and things. The Freedom Center is a museum located in Cincinnati, Ohio dedicated to telling the story of American slavery as well as other stories of civil and human rights. I examine the Freedom Center as more than a museum, but also as a memorial because of its geographic location along the boundary between the American North and South as well as its situation within the wider American geographic imagination as a site of "National" history telling. Content analysis of TripAdvisor reviews by visitors shows that these people struggle with their preconceived notions about what stories are being told as well as for who they are being told. Using Sharpe's idea that when words come up against Blackness, their meanings shift, I look at the Freedom Center as an anagramatical space that white reviewers fear they may not have access to because of its focus on the story of Black people resisting against white supremacy. It is only when they reposition whiteness within the narrative or, as Sharpe writes, "redact" blackness, and decode the memorial landscape through epistemological whiteness, that this space becomes comprehensible. Through the use of this framework, I take the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center as an example of how geographers might expand upon the idea of the anagramatical landscape to understand opposition to memorial work that centers Black lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobilities scholars have shown how injustices may arise from forced movement or stillness. However, with notable exceptions, these studies tend to collapse analyses of race into a simplistic binary of immobility as an inherent characteristic of non-white people and the possibility of movement as only granted to white people. In this article, I call for an expanded approach that is inclusive of both the controlling forces of white supremacy and life-affirming resistance against and despite these constraints. Drawing from Black studies and Black Geographies, I argue for a more unified Black mobilities research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American Mafia is a network of criminals engaged in drug trafficking, violence and other illegal activities. Here, we analyze a historical spatial social network (SSN) of 680 Mafia members found in a 1960 investigatory dossier compiled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The dossier includes connections between members who were 'known criminal associates' and members are geolocated to a known home address across 15 major U.S. cities. Under an overarching narrative of identifying the network's proclivities toward security (dispersion) or efficiency (ease of coordination), we pose four research questions related to criminal organizations, power and coordination strategies. We find that the Mafia network is distributed as a portfolio of nearby and distant ties with significant spatial clustering among the Mafia family units. The methods used here differ from former methods that analyze the point pattern locations of individuals and the social network of individuals separately. The research techniques used here contribute to the body of non-planar network analysis methods in GIScience and can be generalized to other types of spatially-embedded social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]