"Dance with me to the Paradise beat": Archaeological Investigations of Detroit's Paradise Valley (original) (raw)
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Historical Archaeology, 2024
Archaeological practice grapples with several kinds of dissonance in and of Chicago: the current municipally mandated commissions charged with responding to and reevaluating the commemorative landscape; the amateur, academic, private, and state archaeological apparatus that oversees what, if any, archaeological research is undertaken and reported; and the desires of people in Chicago for an understanding of the city that goes beyond the veneration of great architects and architecture. Archaeological work at Chicago’s Mecca Flats (built 1892) is a case study for potential ways to subvert forms of urban dissonance. The Mecca was a modern apartment prototype, a hotel for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a majority-white- then majority-Black-tenancy building, a social center of the 1920s Black Metropolis, and a symbol of urban blight demolished to expand the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2018, archaeological research joined the more commonplace architectural veneration to uncover this material legacy of urban renewal.
This article revisits the archaeology conducted by James Deetz in the 1970s at an early-nineteenth-century, African-American community in Massachusetts called Parting Ways. This article examines the architecture and several large earthenware jars uncovered at Parting Ways to reconsider those finds in the context of topics currently relevant to African diaspora archaeology, including racialization and community formation. Reinterpretations of the architecture and earthenware jars present opportunities to more fully understand some of the strategies which the residents at Parting Ways employed to establish themselves as free members of the community following the end of slavery, as well as some of the struggles they faced in doing so.
The Meanings of a Native American House in a Black Neighborhood
Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, 2019
The recent recognition of a twentieth-century Montaukett home in what has been considered a "Black neighborhood" brings into question the historical construction of race categories and boundaries, as well as the construction and production of history, giving us new perspectives on the histories of Long Island. Along with memories and other input from descendants and other community members, the authors use the methodologies of archaeology and cultural anthropology to understand relationships of kin, kind, and power in the Freetown neighborhood. In so doing, they interrogate and deconstruct the colonialist interpretations of the people and the way they lived their day to day lives. In this article, the authors unpack racialized histories as a method for framing their Mapping Memories of Freetown project, and shed light on the discursive relationship between constructed histories and lived experiences.
2018
Richmond, Virginia, located along the fall line of the James River, was an important political boundary during prehistory; was established as an English colonial town in 1737; and was a center of the interstate slave trade and the capitol of the Confederacy during the nineteenth century. Although Richmond holds a prominent place in the narrative of American and Virginia history, the city’s archaeological resources have received incredibly little attention or preservation advocacy. However, in the wake of a 2013 proposal to construct a baseball stadium in the heart of the city’s slave trading district, archaeological sensitivity and vulnerability became a political force that shaped conversations around the economic development proposal and contributed to its defeat. This dissertation employs archival research and archaeological ethnography to study the variable development of Richmond’s archaeological value as the outcome of significant racial politics, historic and present inequiti...
A Place in the Sun: Black Placemaking in Pan African Detroit
Journal of Black Studies, 2019
The article argues that a distinctive character of the Black city is revealed in its connections to African heritage preservation. The Africanized Black city is situated within the long foundations of Pan African thought. A main assertion is that Black dignity is (re)instilled through the reconstruction of Afrocentric identity and philosophy for the Black urbanite navigating the unresolved problem(s) of the color line. Pan African legacies in the African American encounter with the modern city erected the localization of “African Home,” where the spiritual citizenship inhabited by Pan African architects generated an agency of self-determination in Black placemaking. In this way, Black placemaking “refers to the ways that Black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction.”