Fellows' Forum- Reconstructing Spatial Lives in the Black Atlantic: a Biographical Analysis of Resistance

This talk seeks to contribute to scholarship on Black spatial politics, Black internationalisms, self-making, and early Black intellectual history by examining how individual “cartographies” shaped memory and identity during the Age of Revolution. Focusing on the papers and writings the  prominent African American businessman, sea captain, and black nationalism advocate, Paul Cuffe, it reconstructs the spatial dimensions of his life and political activism across three interrelated domains: the physical geographies he travelled during his career, the political geographies he contested, and the geographic imaginaries through which he envisioned Sierra Leone as a complex yet hopeful site of Black liberation. By comparing these spatial frameworks, the paper positions Cuffe as a key figure in early American Black intellectual history and within the broader Atlantic World.