The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race by
Brown's The Black Skyscraper provides a detailed account of how scale and proximity shape our understanding of race.Over the next half-century, as city skylines grew, American writers imagined the new urban backdrop as an obstacle to racial differentiation. Examining works produced by writers, painters, architects, and laborers who grappled with the early skyscraper's outsized and disorienting dimensions, Brown explores this architecture's effects on how race was seen, read, and sensed at the turn of the twentieth century.
Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity by
Made in America -- There is no such thing as African American architecture -- Architecture liberation theology -- Space as praxis as identity -- The problem with African American museums -- (Black) sexuality and space: the body and the gaze.
Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface by
Cheng argues that Baker's famous nakedness must be understood within larger philosophic and aesthetic debates about, and desire for, 'pure surface' that crystallized at the convergence of modern art, architecture, machinery, and philosophy. Through Cheng's analysis, Baker emerges as a central artist whose work engages with and impacts various modes of modernist display such as film, photography, art, and even the modern house.
African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945 by
This unique reference work brings their lives and work to light for the first time. Written by 100 experts ranging from architectural historians to archivists, this book contains 160 biographical, A-Z entries on African-American architects from the era of Emancipation to the end of World War II.
Ruffneck Constructivists: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Kendell Geers, Arthur Jafa, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Rodney McMillian, Pope. L, Tim Portlock, Lior Shvil, Szymon Tomsia by
Ruffneck Constructivists," published to accompany a group exhibition curated by artist Kara Walker, brings together 11 international artists in order to define a contemporary manifesto of urban architecture and change. Inspired by both the Russian Constructivists and McLyte's 1993 hit song "Ruffneck," the phrase "Ruffneck Constructivists" evokes thuggishness as an expression of abjection.
Drawn from African Dwellings by
This exquisitely illustrated study takes us into the traditionally built dwellings of African society. This "life-in-architecture" material culture reveals the socioeconomic and cosmological organization and the world views of these societies. Bourdier and Trinh connect structural patterns - setting, design, decoration, orientation - to factors such as kinship, gender, history, religion, poetry, and oral traditions.
Race and Modern Architecture by
Although race-a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination-has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century.
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by
Finney looks beyond the discourse of the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, and represented by both white and black Americans. Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Finney argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the "great outdoors" and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces.
Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South by
O'Brien illuminates this untold facet of Jim Crow history in the first-ever study of segregation in southern state parks. His new book underscores the profound inequality that persisted for decades in the number, size, and quality of state parks provided for African American visitors in the Jim Crow South. Even though the stories behind these largely inferior facilities faded from public awareness, the imprint of segregated state park design remains visible throughout the South.
Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage by
With a basis in environmental history, this groundbreaking study challenges the idea that a meaningful attachment to nature and the outdoors is contrary to the black experience. The discussion shows that contemporary African American culture is usually seen as an urban culture, one that arose out of the Great Migration and has contributed to international trends in fashion, music, and the arts ever since. But because of this urban focus, many African Americans are not at peace with their rich but tangled agrarian legacy.
White Sand Black Beach by
The first legally recognized beach for African Americans in South Florida, Virginia Key Beach became vitally important to the community, offering a place to congregate with family and friends and to enjoy the natural wonders of the area. It would also help to foster further civil rights activism. By providing an important and tangible victory in the struggle for equal access to the coast, it became central to the struggle for civil rights in public space.
Dark Matters: on the Surveillance of Blackness by
Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws.
Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago by
A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration.
Race, Place, and Suburban Policing by
This book tells the story of social injustice, racialized policing, nationally profiled shootings, and the ambiguousness of black life in a suburban context. Through compelling interviews, participant observation, and field notes from a marginalized black enclave located in a predominately white suburb, Boyles examines a fraught police-citizen interface, where blacks are segregated and yet forced to negotiate overlapping spaces with their more affluent white counterparts.
