“It's the ’Hood. But That Means It's Home!”: African American Feminist Critical Geographic Wanderings in the Anthropology of Space and Place

Abstract

This article pursues an African American feminist critical geographic approach in locating experiential geographies that help shape people's perceptions of city life. I center the culturally symbolic site of Detroit bus stops as point of ethnographic departure. With my choreography as strategy approach to ethnography, I hang out at the site of the bus stop itself, finding perceptions of city life are shaped by people's subjective‐geographic understandings, and reflect the paradox of place. In other words, people's perceptions exist both within and beyond built environment and prefigured assumptions of group membership. However, the philosophical, the choreographic, and the paradox do not substitute for historical‐materialist, political economic analysis. Rather, I suggest that people's subjectivities and philosophical stances be considered alongside the political economic in an anthropology of cities. Demonstrative of such an approach, I offer several ethnographic sketches and some of the nuances that emerge as I wander bus stops in Detroit. Ultimately, I argue for an approach to urban anthropological research that prioritizes people's complex subjectivities alongside onto‐historical context.

“Where Are All the Black People At?”: Landscapes of Erasure in the Flower City

“…This framework is apt for illuminating the fraught entanglements of race and space in Rochester. In addition, a focus on Black space in Rochester puts this study in dialogue with scholars raising similar spatial questions around the world, in cities in Brazil (Caldeira 2000; Perry 2013; Roth‐Gordon 2017), the UK (Brown 2005), Australia (Shaw 2007), and elsewhere in the urban United States (Carter 2014; Ducre 2012; Gregory 1998; Reese 2019; Shange 2019; Stovall 2019). 4…”