The Politics and Racial Aesthetics of Public Space

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

The shifting landscapes of race, inequality, politics, and dissent in the 21st century require new analysis of aesthetic practices, and of the way people resist particular aesthetic regimes – in both urban and non-urban sites. This panel examines different ways that racialized moral geographies and aesthetics are mapped on to sites in Mexico and the U.S. Papers take various foci: how blackness and indigeneity are marketed and consumed in beach cities in Mexico; how “anticipatory grief” and aesthetic changes to the built environment mark a neighborhood undergoing gentrification; the various ways that contemporary suburban municipalities racialize suburbanites of color, as well as the way newcomers develop new vocabularies to resist suburban white racial aesthetics to imagine and create a different future; and the ways that marginalized subjects occupy and transform roofscapes, transforming them into “territories of citizenship”. This panel draws our attention to racial aesthetics to better understand the politics of race, class, gender, public space, and dissent in the contemporary.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Brian McCammack, Lake Forest College

Individual Presentations

• Narratives of Belonging and Exclusion: Nationalism, Blackness and Citizenship in Afro-México - Ashley N Agbasoga, Northwestern University

• On Gentrification and Death - Johana Londono, University at Albany (SUNY)

• Dystopic Suburbias: Towards a New(?) Racial Aesthetics of Dissent - Ana Aparicio, Northwestern University

• “Horrible” Landscapes as Spaces of Dissent: The Racial and Aesthetic Regimes of Atlanta’s Gentrifying Suburbs - Elisa Lanari, Northwestern University

• Roofscapes: Geographies of Fugitive Praxis - Elleza Kelley, Columbia University