A Black Sense of Place, From the Interior: Geoaesthetic Praxis and the Break From Being Colonial Subject

In this article, I theorize a Black sense of place, from the interior—as geoaesthetic praxis and as a break from being a colonial subject. Composed within the traditions of Black studies and prior scholarship on geospatial praxis, the work draws on the aesthetic, spatial, and pedagogical orientations that emerge from understanding Black interiority as sovereign ground. Through close readings of Solange Knowles’s Don’t Touch My Hair and the disciplinary marking of Deanna and Mya Cook, I explore in this article how Black aesthetic practice disrupts the terms of recognition through which Black life is rendered visible and knowable. Rather than approaching aesthetics as representation or critique I frame Black livingness as aesthetic method—one that unsettles the logics of legibility, compliance, and institutional care. By foregrounding composition, opacity, refusal, and study as critical orientations, this work intervenes in dominant frameworks of art education, offering not a reformist gesture, but a methodological shift: a reimagining of aesthetics, space, pedagogy, and Black life on its own terms.