A
history of Black urban placemaking and politics in Philadelphia from
the Great Migration to the era of Black Power
In this book, author J.T. Roane shows
how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent
modes of insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century
Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural
imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial
resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts
that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to
expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the
city’s social and ecological arrangement, these communities
challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions
for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them.
Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane
brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging
associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface
diametrically opposed, the city’s underground—its illicit
markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces
housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with
the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and
experiential continuum with the city’s set apart—its house
meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive
spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements
that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing,
hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated
Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging
dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race,
gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black
communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of
geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration
and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate
the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in
shaping matters of urban place and politics.