Echoes of a Chocolate City: Race, Aesthetics and Black Urbanism
Reading America’s present through its past brings up a sense of déjà-vu, especially if we pause and reflect on the events of the past couple of years. Urban problems are at the heart of what we are seeing in the world today. Especially since 2020, when an interracial coalition of people organized demonstrations in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black Americans by police officers, it has been difficult to ignore how the events of the present-day echo a time in the 1960s, when a wave of urban race rebellions, led by Black Americans, gripped the United States. Feelings of cyclical loss and anxiety about unrelenting state violence, uneven development, and physical and cultural displacement are currently exacerbated by processes of gentrification. So, what does it mean for Black people to have the same experience over and over again? What does it mean for Black people to live through constant cycles of movement, containment, dispossession, and erasure? How can we imagine various forms of displacement and emplacement alongside the mechanisms (policies) that attempt to keep Black people in place?
Dr. Brandi T. Summers
Brandi Thompson Summers is faculty in Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS) at the University of California, Berkeley where she also is co-founder and co-director of the Berkeley Lab for Speculative Urbanisms. Her research examines urban cultural landscapes and the political and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered. Her first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (University of North Carolina Press), explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C. In it, she demonstrates the way that competing notions of blackness structure efforts to raise capital and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her current book project focuses on the complex ways in which uses of space and placemaking practices inform productions of knowledge and power. This project examines representations and experiences of space, place, and landscape in Oakland, CA across historical contexts. Dr. Summers has also published widely in journals on the relationship between race, power, aesthetics and urbanization.
For more information please visit: UW Event page or https://geography.berkeley.edu/brandi-thompson-summers or https://branditsummers.com/
