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Preface

In the immediate aftermath of the hijackings, the Caracas city council debated the merits of residents’ tactics.

To sustain the protest over time, neighbors relied on an intricate system of task sharing drawn from the 23 de Enero’s multiple orga-nizing traditions.

alter public order.’

They proposed instead to take the piled-up trash and burn it on the streets, but Earles recalls saying, “we’ve tried that crap forever and it’s always the same, we’re the ones who end up picking up the trash, people from the community ended up picking up our mess.” Others proposed another familiar tactic, like climbing up the rooftops to throw rocks and yell chants

he neighborhood was not peripheral. Its residents were deeply implicated in a national imaginary that upheld their spatial and symbolic centrality, turning local issues into national issues through spectacular displays of constituent power. The case of the 23 de Enero and its 1981 – 82 hijackings suggests that physical and political exclusion need not inform insurgent forms of citizenship. Instead, the process may also apply to the resignification of urban space during times of structural transition

Daniel James’s account of October 17 and 18, 1945, in Buenos Aires revealed how an “implicit contest over . . . spatial hierarchy and territorial proprieties” turned the spectacle of thousands of workers from peripheral areas crowding the city center in support of Juan Perón into a form of constituent power that would eventually translate victory at the polls into a mandate for radical reform.1

Residents combined long-standing support for representative democracy with tactics forged in the fray of contentious protest to pursue basic principles of liberal citizenship: participation, accountabilit y, and the power of elections to shape new horizons and opportunities

sprawling public housing proj-ect, Venezuela’s larges

d in 1958 on Januar y 23 — the neighborhood’s namesake — residents from Monte Piedad took to the streets to lend popular legitimacy to the coup that inaug urated a decades-long period of liberal democratic ru

It bears some further thinking, how spaces get appropriated for purposes which are not intended

Our approach was classic modernist city planning. Because the site was long and narrow, we organized the residential areas into clusters like neighborhoods and communal services along a spine so that they were accessible to a

So, this was seen as a way of diffusing tension by saying ' Come in an organized way into the very center of power? TL Right. Well also some symbolism because King had given his speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But I think it was like, partly it was isolated a bit, very few people actually go to that side of the Mall.

very person killed,

Mikhail Bakhtin’s

carnival refers to celebrations of great abandon, social inversion, public excess, sen-suality, and the temporary establishment of an alternate society, one free of or even in opposition to the norm

A resistant community with a vision for the future outlasted the officials who had planned disruptive urban renewal, leaving their homes and blocks intact

rais-ing juxtapositions all the more interesting for their comparison of highly planned modern-ist new towns with the unplanned settlements on their margins.

focus on authenticity that participants discerned in the vernacu-lar culture of economically impoverished African American communitie

The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community,

Bond moved frequently, as his father, J. Max Bond Sr., manned academic posts at Dillard University and Tuskegee Institute, an educational post for the U.S. government in Haiti, and the presidency of the University of Liberi

in 1965, his objective was “to turn the consumers of architectural goods—the poor—into clients.” arch staff would “de-velop their ideas into physical plans and concrete proposals for social action.” Ar

e War on Poverty fueled experiments in participatory democracy and new campaigns for local autonomy not only by residents of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds but also by outsiders such as Hatch, who sought to organize communities that had suffered without self-determination.

if black placemak-ing is as fun, as witty, as soulful, as smart, as biting, and as rejuvenating asthe Chicago examples we have featured here, imagine what it – whatwe–could be in a more just and equitable city and world.

While television and print media focus inces-santly on street violence in Chicago’s black neighborhoods as supposedevidence of the disintegration of community bonds and the devaluationof human life, the wholesale evisceration of the apartments, streets, play-grounds, corners, hallways, and community centers where thousands ofblack families once lived is state-perpetrated violence dressed in the lan-guage of social welfare policy.

mphasize an intersectional perspective (Collins,1990; Crenshaw, 1991) that captures the attitudes and actions of awide range of black Chicagoans – men and women, old and young,gay and not gay, poor and not poor, digitally connected and in the‘real world’.

urban commons (

placemaking is the simple idea thatpeople ‘transform the places in which we find ourselves into places in4Theory, Culture & Society 0(0) by guest on March 28, 2016tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

they are also subjects that fashion places by inscribingthem with their own interpretations, meanings, and cultural significance.This enterprise, which is not the dominant narrative in the social scienceresearch on black communities, is what we call black placemaking

Black placemaking refers to the ability of residents to shift otherwiseoppressive geographies of a city to provide sites of play, pleasure, cele-bration, and politics.

social science scholarship on black urbancommunities (not to mention mass media portrayals) so rarely capturesthe life that happens within them, and thus the matter of black people’shumanity

A spot in the universe’, writes sociologist Thomas Gieryn, ‘becomesa place only when it ensconces history or utopia, danger or security,identity or memory

his article puts forth a notion of black placemaking thatprivileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poeticexperiences of being black and being around other black people in thecity.

Such spatial forms were explicitly contrasted with the thatched huts and crowded yards of the poor black peasantry and the squalid living conditions of the urban black population.

A Government that sows the wind must expect to reap the whirlwind.”27

oten and Harney call the‘undercommons’(Moten & Harney,2004),that is, the practice of using our institutional positions to open up spacesfor contestation and horizontal solidarity across and beyond the academy.

Isthe garret a continuous assertion of black politics, conceptually and expe-rientially reframed as the margin?

“a publicgenealogy of resistance”: histories, names and places of blackpain, language, and opposition, which are “spoken with the whole body”and present to the world, to our geography, other rhythms, other times,other spaces.35

The poetics of landscape allow blackwomen to critique the boundaries of transatlantic slavery, rewrite nationalnarratives, respatialize feminism, and develop new pathways across tradi-tional geographic arrangements; they also offer several reconceptualiza-tions of space and place, positioning black women as geographic subjectswho provide spatial clues as to how more humanly workable geographiesmight be imagined.

Theclaim to place should not be naturally followed by material ownership andblack repossession but rather by a grammar of liberation, through whichethicalhuman-geographies can be recognized and expresse

aming place is also an act of naming the selfand self-histories

Wynter’s termi-nology, “Man’s” g

“our landscape is our only monument: its meaningcan only be traced on the underside

saying, theorizing, feeling, knowing, writing, and imag-ining space and place

the ideaof “belonging” in and to place—whether it be a particular nation, aspecific community, real/imagined Africa, homelands—is incomplete, prem-ised on a struggle toward some kind of sociospatial liberation

I amnot suggesting that the violence of transatlantic slavery is an ongoing,unchanging, unopposed practice, but rather that it is a legacy that carrieswith it—for black and nonblack peoples—“living effects, seething andlingering, of what seemsover and done with.”16

four interrelated processes that identify the socialproduction of space: the naturalization of identity and place, discussedabove; the ways in which geographic enslavement is developed throughthe constructs of black womanhood and femininity; the spatial practicesblack women employ across and beyond domination; and the ways inwhich geography, although seemingly static, is an alterable terrain.

it is not a natural system, but rather a working system that managesthe social world

production of space

material and metaphoricalspace

space “just is

eography as space, place, andlocation in their physical materiality and imaginative configuration

I explore the inter-play between geographies of domination (such as transatlantic slavery andracial-sexual displacement) and black women’s geographies (such as theirknowledges, negotiations, and experiences).

existing carto-graphic rules unjustly organize human hierarchies in placeand reify unevengeographies in familiar, seemingly natural ways

she reminds me that the earth is alsoskin and that a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, oran entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with

extensive wooded patches and waterways

Santana’s public obsession with rooting out Candomblé has proven to be a trea-sure trove for researchers

hen the French appeared, the Native Americans had already died off.

the observer notices a sense both of that which is to be seen, marked by sharp focus, and that which is to remain unseen, marked by shadow and haze

Frantz Fanon, in Th e Wretched of the Earth

Without ownership there is no slavery, and so in that moment, the believer briefl y enjoys freedom

Quicksand, Nella Larsen describes the experience of Helga Crane

In dancing the ring shout, with its slow, sedimented steps inscribed around an ever-revolving circle, slaves marked off an autonomous sphere of spiritual practice

It was a small one-roomed cabin that looked weirdly alive as you approached it through the darkness.

estles beneath a great oak half-hidden by a screen of cassina bushes such as only time can ere

Th e back rail they found to seriously impede this exercise

By overlooking these structures, most whites completely missed the spiritual practices that took place inside

construction of the buildings in spiritually specifi c spaces—connected both to cemeteries and the spirits generally resident in outlying areas—al-lowed slaves to establish praise houses as loci of power and communication between this world and the next

Harriet Jacobs

impasi

While whites laid their primary religious loyalties with the church, slaves experienced religion in the praise house

Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ,

Christophe built Sans Souci, the palace, a few yards away from-if not exactly-where he killed Sans Souci, the man. Co-incidence and inadvertence seem quite improbable. More likely, the king was engaged in a transformative ritual to absorb his old enemy.39

here is how we look,untethered to the gaze or the white spectator, not pleading before the court,not trying to convince the world of anything

Quashie’s reading ofWayward Livesfocuses on the interface of history andliterature, analysis and speculation, theory and poetry. The anecdotes and frag-ments are assembled as a part of the larger narrative“suspend[ed] between thereal and the literary.”Quashie poses a series of questions about the formalconstituents of a wayward poetics, and the role of intimacy and affect in creat-ing and transforming one’s critical position? How is it, he wonders, that I amable to look at the girl at the center of“A Minor Figure”and dare reproduce thiscompelled image? Isn’t the mere appearance of this photograph at odds withthe injunction that opensScenes of Subjectionregarding the reproduction andcirculation of scenes of the violated body and the dangers entailed—reinforc-ing the spectacular character of Black suffering.9There I ask,“What does theexposure of the violated body yield? Proof of Black sentience or the inhumanityof the peculiar institution’”? Implicit is the question: for whom does one ex-pose the body and as explicit is its rejection of a politics of recognition. There isthe clear refusal to offer Black suffering as the raw material of white pedagogy.

master’stools

anecdote and fragment, and narrative strategies (of the sub-junctive, fabulation and“romance,”) as a way of refusing the enclosure of disci-plinarity and the hierarchy of high theory and everyday life

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

If history is a chronicle of changeover time, then how does one tell a historical story for those who endure thelongue duréeof dispossession and the seemingly interminable and unalleviatedcondition of fungibility?

. The matters of time and his-tory are especially vexed for those whose existence challenges the prevailingperiodization,

formal means of inhabitingthe space of the tenement with those captured in the frame.

iconic visual stills of urban poorwomen and Black interior spaces, venturing beyond reformers and intellectu-als’one-dimensional frames and captions.”

The point is that everydaypractice troubled stark distinctions between secular and sacred beliefs and obli-gations

A fugitive text, awayward method, a Black feminist poetics is not a plea for recognition, but a planfor abolition

respectable ladies

thismoreis a legitimate subject of history and scholarly writing.

Venus in Two Acts

If Mattie or Estherdidsay the things that were re-ported, how would they have expressed it and what would they have meant byit? How could I convey the force and intensity or the edge of withholding

creatively disorderthe institutionalfic-tions and the violent abstractions authorized as fact and truth.

It also was an attempt to collapse the subject-object divide, topple the hierarchy of reason, and enact other ways of knowingand doing. I strived for the language ofjust us, the brilliance of the circle.

f scholars and writers sitting at their desk,scrawling copious notes, endlessly revising drafts, and rifling through docu-ments might be described as a studio practice,

monoculture

Hispaniola

masters begrudged a certain amount of uncontrolled move-ment among their workers. In the Caribbean, masters resorted to a p~o~sion oflocal laws and international treaties to keep this mobility within the narrowest of possible limits

The steady rise in sugar prices on the world market after about 1740 favored the expansion of plantation mono-culture into areas where cattle and pigs had grazed

West Indies

w

questions and notes will be uploaded to the course website

speak and write about the built environment, architecture, and spatial practices of the Black diaspora in the Americas.