Mapping the Black Pacific: 19th-Century Maritime Mobility as a Black Spatial Practice

Caroline Collins
Urban Studies and Planning
UC San Diego

This project joins emerging Black Pacific scholarship which reimagines notions of race, migration, and diaspora, engaging with foundational Black Atlantic theorizing. Building from my Black Pacific public history exhibition, related community-university collaboratories, and my current manuscript regarding land-based spatial remembrance, I am in the initial stages of developing a manuscript regarding the Black Pacific. This manuscript will examine mobility across the Black Pacific through the prism of Black spatial practices—and particularly Black spatial literaries—which I posit as not only seafaring knowledge to cross vast oceanic space, but nuanced world-faring knowledge of differences from port to port, ship to ship, and within discrete portions of vessels. I will conduct archival research in Santa Barbara, California to examine materials directly and indirectly related to 19th-century Black sailor and otter hunter Allen B. Light. This research will inform the development of a manuscript chapter for this next project on the Black Pacific.

Image Credit: National Park Service