Queering Juneteenth, Claiming Black Land: Brioxy’s Urban Design in Post-Crisis Baltimore
Topics: Black Geographies
, Queer and Trans Geographies
, Economic Geography
Keywords: black spatial imaginaries, foreclosure crisis, black feminism, racial capitalism, queer economies
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:
Sa Whitley, Dartmouth College
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Abstract
In the afterlife of the subprime foreclosure crisis, black queer and transgender women in Baltimore grapple with the local real estate market as a site of both subjection and possibility. This paper examines an urban black land movement in West Baltimore cultivated by black queer women who lost their homes in the predatory subprime mortgage market. To challenge post-crisis real estate speculation and gentrification in the Reservoir Hill neighborhood, Brioxy organized annual Juneteenth festivals between 2017 and 2020 with Afrocentric real estate tours, a black art bazaar, and an extensive home & garden tour. Designed to function as the cultural and market threshold through which local black artists take the initial steps to purchase houses and vacant lots in the neighborhood, the Juneteenth festivals creatively advance a “keep the hood black” discourse and circulate racial affects of loss and grief within the long black freedom struggle and urban geographies of subprime foreclosure. Brioxy’s Juneteenth festivals took place at a black queer-owned café: a mixed-use rowhouse in which the 19th century white owners enslaved and owned black people as property. Mobilizing critical analyses of racial capitalism and urbanization within black feminist geography and economic geography, I critically unravel the political discourses and community organizing strategies in Brioxy’s black queer spatial imaginaries within and against finance. Following the BLM uprisings of 2020, Juneteenth has been taken up or appropriated for remarkably distinctive ends. This paper offers a necessary political and geographic analysis of black queer placemaking through Juneteenth and post-crisis financial markets.
Queering Juneteenth, Claiming Black Land: Brioxy’s Urban Design in Post-Crisis Baltimore
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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