Black in Place
The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City
Brandi Thompson Summers
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/2019
Pages: 256
Subject: History, Social Science
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9781469654003
eBook ISBN: 9781469654027
DESCRIPTION
While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation's capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, "cool," and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.
Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.'s Black residents.
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