Urban Social Hauntings

Disappearing Gravestone Murals in Gentrifying Brooklyn

Bibliographic Data

ID4476360
AuthorsA Okechukwu (0000-0002-4905-1373, George Mason University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume40
Issue1
Pages138-157
Publication date2022-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/02637758211059539
OpenAlexW4200071065
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited37

This article concerns the disappearance of gravestone (or "rest in peace") murals in gentrifying Brooklyn, New York. Social hauntings reveal the unresolved violence of Black disposability and dispossession, as it manifests in the urban landscape in periods of urban decline and gentrification; gravestone murals are forms of "wake work" that attend to social haunting, accounting for Black life and death in urban place. This article first considers the wake work of gravestone murals, that they are memorials, archives of collective memory, spaces of worldmaking, and resistance to anti-Black violence. Because gravestone murals illustrate how Black people produce meaning in the urban landscape, they are also forms of Black spatial production. The article then explores the emergence of newer, stylized murals as aesthetic commodities that bring social and economic value to urban space, while commodifying Black life and death. The disappearance of gravestone murals, a visual record of the urban crisis, indicates the transformation of Black urban space in the 21st century

Aesthetics · Art · Civil engineering · Gentrification · Public space · Sociology · Urban space · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Photography and Visual Culture · Public Spaces through Art

Tools

Open DOI