Haunting Interruptions: Race, Infrastructural Violence, and Spatial Memory in Ferguson, Missouri, USA

• In Event: The Racial Politics of Public Memorials and Grassroots Remembrance

Abstract

This presentation engages the racial politics of infrastructural violence and spatial memory in Ferguson, Missouri—the historically-white suburb of St. Louis and site of the tragic police killing of Black, 18-year-old Michael Brown, Jr. in August 2014. It critically examines the use of blockades, space-based protests, and other forms of infrastructural disruption by Black subjects in Ferguson before and after Michael Brown Jr.’s execution, paying specific attention to the mnemonic work these practices perform. It argues that Black subjects in Ferguson deploy these tactics of spatial intervention not only to claim space in Ferguson’s suburban landscape but to haunt its collective memory. Scholars of Black and Indigenous Studies have long mobilized haunting as a framework to analyze the unredressed and ongoing violence of racial captivity and settler colonialism. In the context of Ferguson, I assert that these unresolved violences are entrenched and exemplified in the suburban pattern, specifically in its roadway and housing infrastructure. Accordingly, I interrogate how Black communities in Ferguson employ haunting as a spatial method (Best and Ramirez 2021) by staging interventions in everyday suburban space to remember and expose the legacies of racialized violence in Ferguson’s geography. Black people in Ferguson haunt the suburban geography through practices of interruption that demand witness to previous and ongoing harms, expose infrastructures as sites of unredressed and palimpsestic racial injury, and upend spatial hegemonies that sequester and reproduce Black suffering through suburban amnesia. These disruptive practices—what I call “haunting interruptions”—effect disturbances or cessations of normative infrastructural functions to indict the racist logics that have historically undergirded suburban life in Ferguson and to publicly perform a critical remembrance of place-based violence. The presentation grounds haunting interruptions in an examination of historical and contemporary protests in the notorious apartment complex where Michael Brown Jr. perished. It analyzes demonstrations from the 10th anniversary of Michael Brown Jr.’s assassination in August 2024, protests in the immediate aftermath of his murder in August 2014, and an organized picket led by Black tenants of the complex in the mid-1970s. In each case, I find that Black subjects use protest and blockage as spatial tactics not simply to force state, institutional, or corporate entities to act but to surface the memory of persistent racial suffering that exceeds reparation and is acutely sedimented in the suburban geography.

Author

• Rashad Arman Timmons, University of California-Santa Barbara