Brandi Summers | Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City

BlackInPlace

16/04/2020 12:00 am

Lecture 5:30pm

To be delivered via Zoom.

Co-sponsored by the Department of City and Regional Planning and the ARCUS program.

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. 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.

Dr. Brandi Summers is Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at UC Berkeley.

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