The Landscape of Black Placelessness: African American Place and Heritage on the Postwar Campus

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond the Classroom: Campus Archaeology and Community Collaboration" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper examines the ways African-American history is effaced and distorted on an urban university campus. We focus on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), which sits where an African American community was displaced by the University and state after World War II. The community’s displacement was rationalized by urban renewal ideology that championed the benefits of an urban campus and dismissed African American landscape histories. In the 21st century the University and city celebrate the area’s African American heritage, but the landscape of parking lots, empty spaces, and homogenous postwar architecture is represented as a placeless ahistorical expanse. Representing the campus as having no place-based heritage evades the University’s history of racial displacement and rationalizes planning that remains firmly committed to the same development interests as postwar urban renewal.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond the Classroom: Campus Archaeology and Community Collaboration   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology