Imagining the Black Landscape: The Materiality of Gentrification and African American Heritage

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Most American cities like Indianapolis, Indiana have historically African American neighborhoods that are today distinguished by vacant spaces and ruination reflecting state demolition programs, displacement, and ill-conceived modernist construction. While much of the historical landscape has been razed, planners routinely invoke and even preserve select dimensions of history that complement dominant narratives. These constructions of the 21st-century city are akin to Edward Said’s "imaginative geographies" that represent places that are otherwise unknown or outside our experience. Indianapolis’ urban iconography routinely invokes select dimensions of its African American heritage, aspiring to craft histories that will make the formerly African-American near-Westside a more attractive place to shop, visit, and live. This paper examines the material landscape of urban renewal and 21st-century gentrification in the near-Westside and the ways this imagined landscape selectively invokes African American heritage.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 114