Race, Property, and Erasure in the Rust Belt

Viewing Urban Changes through a Binocular Colonial Lens

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2135694
AutoresC W Herbert (0000-0003-3650-7797, University of Oregon, autor correspondente), Michael P Brown (0000-0002-5796-1932, University of Oregon), Michael Brown (0000-0003-3839-9822)
Ano2023
Volume20
Fascículo2
Páginas311-332
Data de publicação2023-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoDu Bois Review Social Science Research on Race (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1742-058X • E-ISSN: 1742-0598
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1742058x23000061
OpenAlexW4375866049
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas108

This article builds on settler and domestic colonial histories and theories to advance our understanding of urban changes in segregated, disinvested, U.S. Rust Belt cities. While many major cities have rebounded in population and experienced gentrification since the mid-twentieth century, many Rust Belt cities have continued to decline. The resulting conditions call for new theories to describe their changes, trajectories, and the impacts for majority poor Black populations. We construct a Binocular Colonial Lens: an analytic framework that superimposes shared conceptual descriptions and theoretical explanations of settler and domestic colonialisms. With this lens, we can elucidate the practices of erasure that are deployed throughout colonized communities and focus them on phenomena associated with urban decline and revitalization. While some urban scholarship has used metaphors and language of settler colonialism to describe gentrification, most of these works at best reflect the salience of settler ideology, and at worst reinforce Indigenous erasure. Foregrounding shared conditions of colonization and conquest in the United States, we train this Binocular Colonial Lens on Detroit, which reveals myriad urban processes like ghettoization, urban renewal, suburbanization, and gentrification as ongoing colonization, wherein domestically colonized populations are subject to numerous forms of erasure at the behest of the settler state and toward the advancement of settler society. This lens advances urban theory by expanding the depth of our analyses of urban changes, and scaffolds connections with other axes of racialized inequality by revealing shared tools of erasure operative in, for example, mass incarceration and environmental injustices

Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Economic growth · Erasure · Foregrounding · Gentrification · Geography · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Scholarship · Sociology · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law · Urban Planning and Governance · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies · Urbanization and City Planning