Spring 2023 Mellon Forum: Spatial Storytelling // April 11 with Ana Ozaki and Keisha-Khan Perry
Boats, Beaches, and Bairros
Apr 11, 2023, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Location: Princeton School of Architecture and Zoom
Event Description
Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment
Spring 2023 || Spatial Storytelling
Boats, Beaches, and Bairros with Keisha-Khan Perry, Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania and Ana Ozaki, Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities
This is a hybrid event. Attend in person at the School of Architecture (lunch boxes available while supplies last), or register for the Zoom webinar: https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cr7UGrwqTXSqn5F-HiWufg
Black feminist scholar bell hooks (1952-2021) gave us innumerable conceptual tools to understand the complexities of race, gender, and place. Her critical essay "Homeplace: A Site of Resistance," first published in the 1990 Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural politics, illustrates how the homeplace can represent spaces of oppression as well as liberation. In this presentation, I narrate stories from coastal cities across the Americas to explore the neighborhoods where the cultural imagination and radical politics flourish even as poor and people of color experience the brutality of white supremacist violence and spatial displacement. In hooks' formulation, the oppressed make home in inhospitable places, resist the gendered racial domination of space, and demand a sense of cultural and political belonging. I tell the stories of how social movement activists fight to keep beachlands as Black homespaces, where they have forged communities and survived amidst the violence for generations.
The Spring 2023 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is kindly sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Princeton University Humanities Council, Program in Latin American Studies, Center for Collaborative History, Departments of Art & Archaeology and English, HMEI, PIIRS, SPIA, and the School of Architecture.
Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. Boxed lunches are available while supplies last.