Urban Social Hauntings: Disappearing Gravestone Murals in Gentrifying Brooklyn

This article concerns the disappearance of gravestone (or “rest in peace”) murals in gentrifying Brooklyn, New York. Social hauntings reveal the unresolved violence of Black disposability and dispossession, as it manifests in the urban landscape in periods of urban decline and gentrification; gravestone murals are forms of “wake work” that attend to social haunting, accounting for Black life and death in urban place. This article first considers the wake work of gravestone murals, that they are memorials, archives of collective memory, spaces of worldmaking, and resistance to anti-Black violence. Because gravestone murals illustrate how Black people produce meaning in the urban landscape, they are also forms of Black spatial production. The article then explores the emergence of newer, stylized murals as aesthetic commodities that bring social and economic value to urban space, while commodifying Black life and death. The disappearance of gravestone murals, a visual record of the urban crisis, indicates the transformation of Black urban space in the 21st century.

"Because I won't ever forget"

Poetry within trauma-informed literacies has been influential to understanding youth writing. As the tendency to focus on the individual rather than structures of power remains, the authors of this essay point to collective resistance and connect youth writing to other creative texts in their engagement of black life, livingness, and pedagogical possibilities. Specifically, they draw on black feminist theories and methodologies to consider race, gender, class, diaspora, and time-space in poetry and juvenilia studies. The discussion concludes with questions about learning and writing as counter-expressions.

Decolonizing the Color-Line: A Topological Analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois's Infographics for the 1900 Paris Exposition

As infographics are implicated in racist policies like redlining, we need to decolonize the genre. But previous studies have found that infographics’ panopticism—their at-a-glance reduction of complex issues—makes them tend to support hegemonic power structures in spite of their designers’ intentions. A way out of this dilemma can be located in the first attempt to decolonize the infographic: W.E.B. Du Bois's series depicting Black life in the United States, created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. This topological analysis of Du Bois's decolonial project reveals both problematic and promising avenues for our own attempts to decolonize the infographic.

In the Legacy of Marronage: The Sir George Williams Affair and Acts of Refusal, Protest, and Care

At its core, this article is concerned with the relationship between Black life and the university. It is focused on those working and studying in and at the interstices of the university—those for which the university itself was made to exclude; those for whom the university cannot begin to know how to include. By attending to the events of the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair, which took place in Montreal, Canada, as well as the events preceding it, I consider how the occupation of the ninth floor computer centre by the university’s Black students operated within a legacy of refusal that can be traced back to an earlier history of resistance, specifically, to acts of marronage. Moreover, this article will seek to advance how the siting of spaces for protest, resistance, and solidarity by Black students illustrates how a lineage of marronage is at once a continuance of a project and practice of an ethics of care.

Aspiration and the Violence of Gentrification in Marvel’s Luke Cage

This article analyzes the cultural politics of gentrification as they are deployed in the Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage. Based on the comic book character, Luke Cage, who was created in response to the popularity of the 1970s blaxploitation films, and the Black Power movement, the television series portrays a Black superhero who defends contemporary Harlem and its people from crime and exploitation. Critically recognized and widely watched during its first airing from 2016 to 2018, Luke Cage was a breakthrough television series that not only centered a Black superhero but directed itself to Black experience and public dialogue during the time of Black Life Matters. The Harlem portrayed in Luke Cage is both a specific community, and a virtual invocation of Black community aspiration, and the structural violence of gentrification. The violent emotions and displacement of gentrification that are presented in the series represent a form of intramural dialogue between the Black creatives working on the show and the broader Black public that is engaging with the long-time debates around the meaning and future of Harlem.

Still Joy: A Call for Wonder(ing) in Science Education as Anti-racist Vibrant Life-Living

Wonder is an elusive yet ever-present dynamic phenomenon that deserves more attention in (science) education. What might wonder have to do with critiquing science (as the hegemonic and “neutral” discipline it has become) and living out a more life-affirming and anti-racist vision of science education? In this chapter I share a meta-assemblage research-creation: a researcher-created experimental exhibit of found poetic data assemblages about wonder, joy, Black life, neurodiversity, love, science, and science education. The intention of this meta-assemblage research-creation is to explore the affective flows of the phenomenon of wonder, while also inviting consideration of how the multiple forces and co-components of the body(ies) assembled here move together in an uneasy and historically traceable tension. These co-movements suggest how “traditional” science and school science education are not only complicit with, but also may be directly implicated as primary protagonists in the violent anti-Black racism and planet-wide suffering happening today. A more wonder-filled approach to science education may be necessary now more than ever.

“Like a Cosmic, Invisible Umbilical Cord”

In summer 2002, New York City-based DJ Sadiq Bellamy and his two partners, DJs Tabu and Jeff Mendoza, organized the first Soul Summit Music Festival: a free, open-air, and open-to-the-public weekly series of house music dance parties set in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, during the summer season. The party ran every summer without incident for many years, and twenty years later, continues to receive global recognition among house heads for its success in bringing house music culture—and its legacy of liberation as a sensorial practice—to a broader and more intergenerational crowd than one would find in a club. Keeping in mind its rich genealogies, this article considers the social significance of open-air house music culture, and how various forms of participation within these house music topographies rearticulate the social in a way that refuses the spatiality of peripheralization and the temporality of extinction imposed on Black, brown, and queer of color life in New York City and beyond. In the case of Soul Summit, however, it is not just who participates, but also when and where that matter—in public space and in a historically Black neighborhood situated in a post-9/11, post-Bloomberg New York City—particularly as gentrification devastates the material and symbolic conditions that made possible house culture’s multi-faceted expression in the first place. This article proposes that in resistance to the “revanchist” urbanism of gentrification, the affects and arrangements cultivated on the open-air house music dance floor offer an alternate epistemology of, or way to re-imagine, the social. This lens of “house epistemology” illuminates how the gentrification of Fort Greene brought not only a shift in residential demographics, but also the displacement of a certain modality of public culture by foreclosing the social infrastructures that serve to remediate cultural memory and mobilize Black life.

Shana Redmond. Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson.

Shana Redmond tracks the ways Paul Robeson’s presence has travelled via recordings and other forms of capture. The author builds on Robeson’s diverse output to construct an interdisciplinary method, enabling a formal analysis of a range of materials and underscoring the interplay between modes of representation and Black life.