Black Urbanism
An exploration of the ways in which the long, and by no means systematic history of black inhabitation of cities could be a critical method through which to engage urban life everywhere.
This is an urban life that is more than its multiple manifestations, that exceeds any definitive attempt to pin it down, and that yet remains something specific, and not simply a potential-making machine. How does this history open up new ways of engaging the very concrete efforts that constructed the city? How does it enable engagement with all the layers of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover-up? How might it exhibit all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought it about?