Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City

While Washington, D.C. is still often referred to as 'Chocolate City,' it has undergone significant demographic, political, and architectural change in the last decade. No place represents this shift better than H Street, one of the neighborhoods devastated by the April 1968 riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Over the last decade and a half, the H Street corridor has changed from a historically low-income, African American neighborhood--featuring black-owned businesses that catered to the local residents--to one of the most sought after commercial and residential areas in the nation, replete with art house theaters, fusion restaurants, and rising property values that have pushed out much of the original population. Brandi T. Summers explores this shift from chocolate city to cosmopolitan metropolis, looking at the role of race in urban environments and how the neighborhood's aesthetics--from fashion and language to foodways and black bodies themselves--have been commodified and branded. Through ethnography, interviews, archival research, and media analysis, Summers sheds new light on the relationship between race, space, and capitalism

• | Author: Brandi Thompson Summers
• | Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• | Publication Date: November 25, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 256 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1469654008
• | ISBN-13: 9781469654003