Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life by Marcus Hunter and Zandria Robinson. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780520292833; 312 pp. $29.95 Paperback.

《Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life by Marcus Hunter and Zandria Robinson. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780520292833; 312 pp. $29.95 Paperback.》

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作者: Orly Clerge

来源: CITY & COMMUNITY,Vol.18,Issue1,P.419-421

语言: 英文

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作者单位: University of California Davis

摘要: Chocolate Cities offers a critical contribution to urban sociology through its refreshing approach to the cultural geography of Black life. Representations of Black Americans in sociology often focus on the myriad disadvantages they encounter in urban political economies. The emphases on crime, violence, political disenfranchisement, and poverty have become the organizing principles of research on Black American life. Chocolate Cities, however, challenges urbanists to move beyond studies that focus on the deficits that Black people in cities face and instead promotes asset‐based paradigms that unpack the complexities of Black urban life. Hunter and Robinson portray the centrality of Black migration, culture, and politics to the social order of cities. Chocolate Cities takes readers from the 19th century to the 21st century and back again to elucidate the historical contributions urban Black actors have made to campaigns for social progress, technological advancements and cultural revolutions across American cities. These are the legacies of countless Black Americans, and Chocolate Cities eloquently uses a collection of provocative case studies to illustrate them. Chocolate Cities makes compelling theoretical arguments that encourage scholars and practitioners to rethink the relationship between race, racism, culture, and space. First, Hunter and Robinson dismantle the stereotypical boundary between the backwards, rural South and the progressive, urban North. “The South,” they claim, is not simply everywhere below the Mason Dixon Line. Instead, it is everywhere Black people reside. They evoke the wisdom of Detroit‐raised and New York City‐groomed Malcolm X to illustrate the lived experiences of Black communities in white‐dominated cities. Hunter and Robinson remind us that in his famous 1964 Bullet or the Ballot Speech, Malcolm X articulated the cultural geography of white domination by stating: “As long as you South of the Canadian border, you South.” Prevalent discourses about the Great Migration, the exodus of millions of Black Americans from the South to Northern cities, paint a portrait of migrant prosperity in Northern industrial cities. However, if we created a chocolate city archive of the experiences of many Black sojourners, it would reveal that the north was no promised land. Jim Crow policies followed them on their bold journeys, and the Negro Motorist Green Book helped them steer clear of white terrorism on the road North and West. Chocolate Cities advocates for correcting this historical assumption, and throughout the text features case studies to illustrate that the urban North propagated the same segregationist politics and racial terror Black Southerners sought to escape. According to Hunter and Robinson, “our current maps of Black life are wrong” (p. 3). These models of the Great Migration posit that Black people moved from the South to the urban North. However, Hunter and Robinson argue that Black people confront southern‐style politics across the American map. Chocolate maps provide a corrective model that helps urbanists uncover the underappreciated and undertheorized migratory experiences and urban, suburban, and rural sites of Black agency and leadership. Chocolate maps encourage us to see Black spaces with new eyes. A chocolate city forms at multiple scales. It can be identified at the neighborhood level (e.g., Bedford‐Stuyvesant) or the city level (Oakland, California). Each beautifully written chapter uncovers the rich historical and contemporary happenings of chocolate places where Black ways of knowing have been (re)rooted and thrived amid extraordinary hostilities aimed at their community survival. Hunter and Robinson demonstrate that chocolate maps are windows to the “lived experiences and the future of Black life, and thus, of the nation” (p. 5). From these complex urban networks emerge the dynamic destinations on chocolate maps, which are identified as Up South, Mid‐South, Down South, Deep South, West South, and Out South. These destinations challenge the neat binary distinction between the American North and South and are outlined visually in the book to great effect. New York and Chicago, for example, were the leading destinations of Great Migrants and are often collapsed into the category of “the North.” Chocolate maps, however, demonstrate that migrants settled in the Mid‐South if they went to Chicago, and Up South if they ended their journey in New York. These geographical distinctions correspond with the varied urban experiences of Black migrants and make an important contribution by encouraging new directions in urban phenomenology. Hunter and Robinson portray Black spaces as sites of cultural and political creativity by exploring three important concepts of black urban life: the village, the soul, and the power. The village refers to the fundamental ethic of community—or the inextricable connection between the individual and the community. This philosophy has been a fundamental principle of Black American community formation and survival over time. Chocolate Cities uses the community‐building practices of Solomon Northup, Marsha P Johnson, and Duanna Johnson to highlight an extraordinary collection of ambassadors of Black urban villages. At the heart of the village is the soul of Black place‐makers. The soul of America's chocolate cities is energized by the transgeographical cultural creativity of Black actors who travel within and between them. The soul of chocolate cities spiritually and culturally cements consciousness and social bonds across the chocolate map. Vignettes of cultural workers such as Memphis‐born, Detroit‐raised Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin, Baltimore and L.A.’s prodigy Tupac Shakur, and New Orleans’ progeny Big Freedia elucidate the freedom songs that dismantled the racial, class, gender, sexual, and religious boundaries imposed on generations of Black villages. The third organizing principle of the chocolate city paradigm is Black power. Throughout Black American history—from the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Emancipation, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, and up to the Obama Era—chocolate cities have been sites of resisting white supremacy over Black bodies, minds, and spirits. Black power represents the pivotal micro‐ and macrolevel political work Black urbanites have done to mandate their freedom, right to life, and survival. Black people have been at the forefront of myriad campaigns for human rights. They have made many political claims to land, schooling, housing, safety under conditions of terror, and exclusion to ensure that America lives up to its democratic promises. In turn, they have faced hostility in re‐making cities, suburbs, and rural areas into places of their own. To illustrate this Hunter and Robinson uncover the local and international articulations of Black urban political activity. The narratives of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Mary Sanders, Dionne Warwick, Alma Burrell, Mos Def (Yasin Bey), and W.E.B. Du Bois each provide soul‐stirring windows into how the practices of people from below are underappreciated despite their political sophistication, power, and impact. Chocolate Cities reveals the authentic cultural and political work of place‐making occurring behind the veil. The book's reflections emerge at an important historical moment. Its publication is in the same year as the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. Despite the achievements of the Civil Rights Legislation, racial and class residential segregation has intensified in the 21st century, making chocolate cities an enduring element of urban life. Hunter and Robinson provide us with new lenses and language for understanding it. Chocolate Cities takes us into the historical sites and the bold journeys unappreciated in urban theoretical paradigms. The book is not only theoretically rich, but also calls us as urbanists to do more to preserve Black urban histories amid the dispossession of Black families and commodification of Black cultures—for example, clubs, murals, restaurants, cityscapes—through widespread gentrification. Walks through the streets of iconic chocolate cities such as Harlem, Bronzeville, Memphis, and Atlanta are reminders that the babies baptized in chocolate churches and adults who created chocolate community organizations are global change‐makers, and that the political ideologies birthed there have pried open closed doors for marginalized communities. Chocolate Cities reminds scholars and practitioners that a complete understanding of who has the right to the city requires centering the narratives of Black place‐makers. Future articulations of Black place‐making should explore how chocolate maps can serve as a compass for designing equitable cities from Montgomery to Nairobi.