Black Freedom and the Metageography of North America, 1850–65

This paper points to the utility of cultural geography in illuminating the workings and breadth of racial hierarchies of labor that underlined exclusionary measures against free black populations in both Canada and the United States in the decade before U.S. emancipation.  Drawing on the methodological frame of metageography, an approach that recognizes geographic knowledge as a set of cultural, social, and political constructions of space, I argue that British and U.S. imperialists defined “North America” as a racialized spatial entity off limits to black freedom and that by the 1850s free people of African descent became painfully aware that North America existed exclusively for whites’ political liberty and economic mobility via freeholding. 

By pointing out the racialized construction of North America and its attendant political and economic orders, the paper illustrates the transnational geographic frame within which white Anglo-Americans vilified and persecuted black freedom in Canada and the United States.  Indeed, the Civil War and U.S. emancipation held out no hope for some formerly enslave refugees living in Canada who believed that as long as they remained in “this continent,” their freedom would be compromised.  Foregrounding the whitening of North America this way further addresses an important question of race and geography during this era.  It shows how such process went hand in hand with “the invention of Latin America,” a theme gaining revived attention with the publication of Michel Gobat’s article in the American Historical Review.  The white identification of North America was part and parcel of the intensifying racial organization of the Western Hemisphere into Latin America and North America, a process that deeply influenced the experiences of free black populations in both geographic entities.