Black in Place

The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City

Brandi Thompson Summers

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781469654010, 9781469654003
• eBook ISBN: 9781469654027
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Preface: Living in and Researching “Chocolate City”
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations in the Text
• Introduction: Black Space Matters
• 1. Capital Reinvestment: Riot, Renewal, and the Rise of a Black Ghetto
• 2. Washington’s Atlas District: Inequality, Cultural Vibrancy, and the New Regime of Diversity
• 3. The Changing Face of a Black Space: Cultural Tourism and the Spatialization of Nostalgia
• 4. Consuming Culture: Authenticity, Cuisine, and H Street’s Quality-of-Life Aesthetics
• 5. The Corner: Spatial Aesthetics and Black Bodies in Place
• Conclusion: A Chocolate City Is No Dream
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index