Toward a Pedagogy of Place for Black Urban Struggle*
Stephen Nathan Haymes
DePaul University
Chicago
In City and the Grassroots, Manuel Castells asserts that "cultural identity (is) associated with and organized around a specific territory" (1983:14). Elaborating on this point, Brett Williams observes that dense living in the city has made black American culture seem vibrant: "Through the work of the street (blacks) build a vivid detailed repertoire of biographical, historical, and everyday knowledge about community life" (1988:4). In addition, the meanings and uses that blacks assign to their specific territory are defined around a popular memory of black rural southern culture: "Through the shared lore of alley gardens, through the exchange of medicines and delicacies, through fishing and feasting among metropolitan kin, and in visits, exchanges, and the construction of an alternative economy with relatives that bring Carolina harvest to the city" (Williams, 1988:3).
By producing urban meanings that recall popular memories of black rural southern culture, blacks have been able to construct alternative identities and relationships based on ties of friendship, family, history, and place. Blacks therefore define and use urban space to renegotiate an oppositional identity which knits together neighbors and draws families together across the city" (Williams, 1988:3). Renegotiating their identities as blacks is linked to place making. It involves the production of public spheres, which bell hooks refers to as "homeplace," "site(s) where one could confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist" (hooks, 1990:42). As spaces of care and nurturance, homeplaces, according to hooks, are where "all black people could be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves dignity denied us on the outside in the public world" (1990:42). The black public sphere is therefore the basis for building a community of resistance. Referring to the public sphere of marginalized or subaltern communities Nancy Fraser comes to the same conclusion:
Subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides. (191:69)
It is this dual character of counterpublics that provides the necessary conditions for developing oppositional identities. The public sphere is not only an arena for the formation of discursive opinion; it is an arena for the formation and enactment of social identities; it is the arena that allows one to speak in one's own voice (Fraser, 1991:69). Public spheres are therefore culturally specific institutions, which according to Fraser, include various social geographies of urban space (1991:69).
The social geography of urban space is characterized by public spaces in the city that are positioned unequally in relation to one another with respect to power. The concept of power is key to interpreting this positionality, to understanding how public spaces relate to one another in the context of the urban. In particular, if power is linked to the production of urban meaning, then those public spaces located at the center of city life dominate its meaning, and in so doing define the cultural and political terrain in which marginalized public spaces, in this case black public spaces, resist, form alternative identities, and make culture in the city. In this way, the physical space of the black ghetto is a public sphere, a culturally specific institution. Because inner-city blacks live on the margins of white supremacist domination and privilege, they have no other alternative than to struggle for the transformation of their places on the margin into spaces of cultural resistance. Michael Keith and Steve Pile observe that "for those who have no place that can be safely called home, there must be a struggle for a place to be" (1994:5). This is why bell hooks argues that historically, "African American people believed that the construction of a homeplace, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack) had a radical political dimension" (1991:42). What this indicates is that the struggle by blacks for place is bound up with their identity politics. The problem with this is that if black identity is viewed as fixed, perceived in biologistic terms and not as a social construction, then the meanings attached to place are perceived as being fixed. In a white supremacist culture that equates race with being black, the meanings and uses that blacks attach to a place are believed to be derived from their biology, from their nature. As a particular kind of place, the category "urban" has been inscribed with racial meaning; it has operated as a racial metaphor for black. What this means is that black cultural politics in relation to place making should avoid essentialist constructions of blackness and black identity when defining and using their public spaces in the city. If they do not, they risk reinforcing white supremacist stereotypes that rationalize redevelopment practices that displace blacks from their public spaces.
It is imperative, then, that a pedagogy of place maintain or establish the necessary conditions for the development of black public spheres within the "ghetto territory." To do this, it should draw on the tradition of critical pedagogy. Henry Giroux argues that in relation to producing counterpublic spheres, critical pedagogy must be seen "as having an important role in the struggle of oppressed groups to reclaim the ideological and material conditions for organizing their own experiences" (1983:237). Critical pedagogy in the context of black city life has a crucial role to play in the production of counterpublics, in construction political and cultural practices that organize human experiences enabling individuals to interpret social reality in liberating ways. However, for a "pedagogy of place" this must be understood in terms of establishing pedagogical conditions that enable blacks in the city to critically interpret how dominant definitions and uses of urban space regulate and control how they organize their identity around territory, and the consequences of this for black urban resistance.
References
Castells, Manuel. 1983. The City and the Grassroots. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1991. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." In Social Text. Spring.
Giroux, Henry A. 1993. Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. New York: Peter Lang Press.
hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.
hooks, bell, and Cornel West. 1991. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Boston: South End Press.
Keith, Michael, and Steve Pile. 1993. Place and the Politics of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Williams, Brett. 1988. Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington D.C. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
* Excerpt taken from Stephen Nathan Haymes. Race, Culture, and the City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle. SUNY Press (New York 1995), pages 111-114.
Contact: thea@chicago1.nl.edu
Entered: 14 January 1997
