Memories of an Imperial City: Race, Gender, and Birmingham, Alabama

Abstract

September 15, 2013, marked the 50 th anniversary of the 16 th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. The bombing remains one of the most infamous events in the history of white supremacist violence in the United States. While conventional accounts of the event and its aftermath often consider the legal restructuring of the US state following the passage of subsequent Civil Rights legislation, little has been written about the transnational significance of Birmingham in shaping the character of US power abroad. This article argues that memorialisation and cultural architecture of Birmingham represent a significant crucible forging a particular style of liberal empire. Tracing a cultural genealogy of Birmingham through the writings of former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and famed scholar-activist Angela Davis, I demonstrate how Birmingham, as a site of historic black struggle, has been remembered alongside the place-making of empire.

Methodological reflections on geographies of blackness

“…Others have sought to explicitly foreground questions of (anti-)blackness and political economy via the environment (Pulido, 2016;Vasudevan, 2019;Williams, 2018;Wright, 2018). Still others have forged new geographical histories of the present by reflecting on how little-studied black histories have played a central role in the creation of our present world (Bledsoe, 2017;McCutcheon, 2019;Meché, 2020;Winston, 2019;Wright, 2020). All of these works employ a variety of methods and frameworks, drawing on (among other things) archival sources, personal interviews and focus groups, national, regional, and city-based histories, and political ecology literature.…”