Imagining Musical Place: Race, Heritage, and African American Musical Landscapes

Indianapolis, Indiana, once had a rich range of African American music and performance spaces in the city’s segregated near‐Westside, but postwar urban renewal, construction of a university campus, and interstate displacement erased almost all of those venues by the 1970s. In the early twenty‐first...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal for the anthropology of North America 2020-04, Vol.23 (1), p.32-46
Main Authors: Mullins, Paul R., Ryan, Jordan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African Americans
Cities
Cultural heritage
Culture
Economic development
Imagination
Indianapolis
Jazz
jazz culture
Landscape
Music
placemaking
Race
Renewal
Urban renewal
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Summary:Indianapolis, Indiana, once had a rich range of African American music and performance spaces in the city’s segregated near‐Westside, but postwar urban renewal, construction of a university campus, and interstate displacement erased almost all of those venues by the 1970s. In the early twenty‐first century, the city and developers have championed new construction, and many of those projects celebrate jazz history as the heart of the near‐Westside’s heritage. However, the rhetorical valorization of selectively interpreted African American jazz history aspires to rationalize a half‐century of erasures of African American place. Rather than acknowledging the breadth of African American expressive culture in Indianapolis’ near‐Westside, the city’s imagination of jazz essentializes African American expressive culture to serve contemporary economic development and paint jazz as a unifying mechanism across color lines.
ISSN:2475-5389
2475-5389
DOI:10.1002/nad.12122