The Problem with Placemaking: Vibe, Holding Space, & Oakland’s Radical Black Poetics
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Cultural districting in gentrifying neighborhoods and cities appears to offer a feasible political and economic foothold for Black businesses, artists, and community organizations. But such districts also risk becoming the mechanisms by which Blackness is used to inculcate construct an attractive image of diversity while effectively diluting emplaced Black political power. Activist efforts to (re)claim postindustrial cities like Oakland as a Black city - in their spatiality, political-economy, and its informal culture - therefore confront the paradoxical challenge of suturing the operations of liberal racial capitalism with its more radical, liberatory counterparts. In this talk, Hetiz will present the idea of “vibe” as a material and affective framework for understanding Black world-making amidst ongoing dispossession, abandonment, and aesthetic appropriation. Vibe, Heitz argues, describes a relationship of care and labor within and beyond Black communities that grounds place-based organizing. Drawing on ethnographic vignettes and archival research from Heitz’ forthcoming manuscript, Oakland is a Vibe: The Relational Geographies of Black Cultural Development, Heitz will explore how vibe as Black placemaking in the amidst urban speculative development is situated within liberal progressive failing and a placelessness that has haunted Oakland since its decline following WWII. In particular Heitz develops the idea that the liberatory world-making possibilities of Black cultural projects operate in the interstice of the “holding space,” which is at once an action of resistance, a pause in time, a carceral space, and an embrace. Heitz will look at the way such spaces are being developed in the Black Arts Movement and Business District in downtown Oakland, a project which pays homage to the Black radical and anti-capitalist imaginary of the Black Arts Movement while staking claims in the city’s racial capitalist development plans.
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