Beyond Resistance: Futurities and Carceral Logics of Black Worldlessness

Abstract

In scholarly and policy discourses on socio-spatial patterns and Black well-being in Canada, little attention has been paid to how the spatialization of blackness, at the intersection of race, class, and carceral logics, shapes the lived experiences, expressive capacities, and futurities of Black residents in racialized neighbourhoods. This dissertation interrogates how Black life is both constrained and creatively negotiated within geographies marked by surveillance, neglect, and containment. Grounded in Black Radical Thought, Critical Race Theory, Critical Urban Studies, Black Geographies, postcolonial critique, and carceral studies, I examine the tactics of self-making, strategies of reclaiming Black life, and the envisioning and materialization of Black futurities among Black residents navigating what I theorize as Black worldlessness in racialized neighbourhoods within Toronto and the Region of Peel, Ontario.

Based on 17 semi-structured interviews with self-identified Black residents (aged 18–57) across Toronto, Brampton, Caledon, and Mississauga, this study investigates how internalized and externalized racial-spatial constraints shape practices of belonging, subjectivity, and futurity. I demonstrate that dominant urban narratives, shaped by media, planning discourse, and state policy, deploy anti-Black frameworks that index Black life to social death, thereby legitimizing punitive interventions while erasing Black subjectivity and interior life from spatial imaginaries.

In response, I introduce the Quiet, as mobilized by Kevin Quashie (2012), as an analytic of interiority: a contemplative, affective reservoir that Black residents draw upon to navigate the psychic and material dimensions of Black life. This inner world serves as a site of both refusal and possibility. Through this framework, I identify three experiential categories: (1) residents Quietly Holding Ground, who are constrained, but not fully, by the internalization of anti-black stigma and systemic abandonment; (2) residents Moving Ground, who mobilize interior capacities and external supports to envision lives beyond the terms of Black worldlessness; and (3) residents Making Ground, who remain in racialized neighbourhoods by choice, forging transfigurative futures through acts of interior sovereignty and collective care.

Ultimately, I argue that Black life in racialized geographies cannot be apprehended solely through paradigms of resistance or structural domination. Instead, this work demands an analytic that centers Black aliveness, an orientation to being expressed through relations, dreaming, refusal, contemplation, and heterogeneity, as a legitimate mode of existence, as is. While anti-black spatial orders structure the external world, they do not exhaust Black lifeworlds. Attending to the practices through which Black communities envision and enact futurities, even within zones of abandonment, reveals a richer cartography of Black being, one that unsettles the epistemological limits of urban and carceral thought.

This study contributes to our understanding of how Black life unfolds within carceral urban geographies by drawing on and further developing theory at the intersections of Black Geographies, Critical Race Theory, carceral studies, and Black Radical Thought. By introducing the internal-external continuum of Black worldlessness and mobilizing the analytic of the Quiet, this research expands the conceptual vocabulary for understanding how Black residents navigate racialized spatial containment, not solely through resistance, but through interiority, contemplation, and quotidian acts of self-making. It offers a methodological and theoretical intervention that reorients urban and sociological scholarship toward the interior dimensions of Black livability, revealing the nuanced and heterogeneous ways Black communities imagine and enact futurities within and against the structures that seek to delimit their lives. The envisioning of Black futures serves as a reminder that we have ambitions, we desire, we pray, we hunger, we dream, we cry, and we fear; the Quiet and interiority holds all of this within.