“Oakland is a Vibe”: Black Sense of Place as Praxis for Spatial Reclamation
Topics: Black Geographies
, Cultural Geography
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Keywords: black geographies, cultural geographies, affect, gentrification and displacement
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26
Authors:
Kaily Heitz, University of Texas, Austin
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Abstract
This paper explores the concept of “vibe” as a means of looking at the raced ontology of place in Oakland, California. Given the relatively positive colloquial associations attributed to vibe, I situate vibe as a Western counter valence to the blues of the South (Woods, 1998; Foster, 2020), as an extension of black placemaking (Hunter et al, 2016), as part of the appeal of Black spaces (Slocum, 2019), and as a form of affective or visceral geographies (Hayes-Conroy, 201). In addition to containing that which is desirable and commercialized about Black experience, vibe contains a relational epistemology: it accounts for affective kinship and networks of care couched within a racialized understanding and representation of Oakland as a Black space. Drawing from Katherine McKittrick’s “Black sense of place,” I am proposing vibe as a form of racial-spatial encounter that produces a sense of place that is not wholly circumscribed within abjection or violence, but is productive of an empowering, affective claim to the spaces that have been created through Black experience. For Black communities in Oakland, claiming vibe is a way of claiming a familiar relationship to the city; Blackness thus shifts from an object to be appropriated toward a subjective quality, and, moreover, a community of people integral to the experience and economic life of the city. Vibe thus helps to elucidate the way that the culture and politics that emerges from a racialized experience of place may be central to not only anti-displacement efforts, but broader anti-racist struggles.
“Oakland is a Vibe”: Black Sense of Place as Praxis for Spatial Reclamation
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
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