Black Towns, Black Futures (eBook)

The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West

Karla Slocum (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019
192 Seiten
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
978-1-4696-5398-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Some know Oklahoma’s Black towns as historic communities that thrived during the Jim Crow era—this is only part of the story. In this book, Karla Slocum shows that the appeal of these towns is more than their past. Drawing on interviews and observations of town life spanning several years, Slocum reveals that people from diverse backgrounds are still attracted to the communities because of the towns’ remarkable history as well as their racial identity and rurality. But that attraction cuts both ways. Tourists visit to see living examples of Black success in America, while informal predatory lenders flock to exploit the rural Black economies. In Black towns, there are developers, return migrants, rodeo spectators, and gentrifiers, too. Giving us a complex window into Black town and rural life, Slocum ultimately makes the case that these communities are places for affirming, building, and dreaming of Black community success even as they contend with the sometimes marginality of Black and rural America.

Autor

Karla Slocum is the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair in Public Policy and professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also director of the Institute of African American Research.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.11.2019
• Zusatzinfo: 13 halftones, 1 map, 1 table
• Verlagsort: Chapel Hill
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Schlagworte: African American migration • black and native American relations • black geographies • Blackness • black rodeos • Black towns in Oklahoma • black towns in the west • historically significant black communities • historic black towns • life in black towns • rural black communities • rural communities in the west • successful black communities • the African diaspora • the connection between race and place • the historical significance of place • the meaning of place • the precariousness of rural economies • the prison industrial complex • the racial identity of places • the western frontier • tourism of black heritage
• ISBN-10: 1-4696-5398-2 / 1469653982
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4696-5398-3 / 9781469653983