South Hall 3635
Join us for a talk by Marília Oliveira (University of São Paulo / Brazil Visiting Scholar, UCLA). This event is part of the Black Cities Lab Security and Refusal Series, which explores new directions in urban studies by centering race as a political device that informs regimes of security and practices of refusal. In this sense, we are interested in understanding how the urban organizes and gives coherence to the dispersed violence of racial capitalism through the securitization of bodies and space. Rather than approaching urban space through an inclusion/exclusion framework, we consider gentrification, food deserts, uneven urban temperatures, police violence, unemployment, and similar phenomena as co-constitutive political resources for city-making. As a privileged locus for reinforcing the citizens/enemies, free/enslaved, and human/nonhuman divides, the city reinstates the time and space of the colony.
At the same time, attentive to the rebellious impetus of Black urbanity, we are interested in clandestine forms of placemaking that refuse the urban as confinement, dispossession, and death. These refusals may take the form of organized protests against police violence and urban strikes, or seemingly dispersed fugitive practices such as bus fare evasion, gang territoriality, or neighborhood-level self-help initiatives.
We ask: How do localized forms of control interplay with regional and global dynamics of security? How do people move within and across these racialized cityscapes? What are the limits and possibilities of right-to-the-city politics within the context of urbicidal wars? What can we learn from Black people's spatial experiences of captivity and fugitivity? How do their acts of refusal challenge the city as a colonialscape?