Metropolitics

The Black Radical Imagination in a Rural Forgotten Space

Brad Stephens & Chris Stephenson & Max O. Stephenson Jr. — 2024-01-16T06:00:00Z

How does the Black Radical imagination manifest in “forgotten places” amid shifting populations? Brad Stephens, Chris Stephenson, and Max Stephenson, Jr., attend to this question by considering the role of “communitas” in the work of St. Paul's College 4 Life, a group working to reimagine the possibilities for a shuttered historically Black college in rural Lawrenceville, Virginia.
---- Series: Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces On the surface,

- From the Field / Black Power, Black politics, university, space, race, Blackness, United States, Virginia

Remaking Black Political Spaces for Black Liberation

Akira Drake Rodriguez — 2016-12-01T06:00:00Z

What are the political implications of the redistribution of the Black population in the US? Akira Drake Rodriguez looks back at the long-running strategies of Black political mobilization and the political economic contexts that have hindered them. She calls for moving beyond place-based electoral strategies with a full embrace of the Movement for Black Lives policy platform.
Following a politically volatile and racially charged election, this moment marks a particularly precarious state for

- Essays / gentrification, elections, race, space, Blackness, electoral geography, Black politics, political geography

Impossible Compliance: Policing as Violent Struggle over Bodies and Urban Space

Michelle Billies — 2016-03-01T06:00:00Z

The absence of charges brought in the case of a police murder of a Black lesbian in front of the homeless shelter where she lived reveals the impossibility of compliance with police authority for those already made criminal by race, disability, class, gender, and sexuality.
Yvonne McNeil, a 57-year-old Black lesbian who used a cane for walking, was shot to death by police in front of the New York City homeless shelter where she was living in 2011. Short news reports of the incident offer

- Debates / public space, gender, police, race, homelessness, brutality, Blackness, queer