UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I examine the ways that developers and Black community organizers in Oakland, California, utilize a situated concept of Black culture to produce value in the city. This value is constituted by a politics of Blackness rooted both in racial capitalism, shifting structures of community care, and their affective articulations. The affective qualities of Black Oakland – which includes a sense of relationality, creativity, and resistance – are understood colloquially as “vibe.” While representations of vibe are mobilized by both developers and community organizations to respectively advance and resist gentrification, I argue that the vibe of the city is constituted by a Black sense of place that cannot be reproduced through capitalist representations of cultural value alone. This study of vibe presents an opportunity to take seriously the invitation of Black geographic scholarship to work at the intersection of poetics and historical materialism by exploring relationality as a site that coproduces racialized space and experience. Where developers leverage notions of vibe to generate value through private investment, Black organizers utilize such representations in order to reclaim the physical space necessary to the very production of vibe. The latter strategy is, I suggest, an enactment of what I call “emancipatory framing,” in which hegemonic framing is mobilized in order to create alternative spaces for liberatory praxes. This dissertation explores vibe and emancipatory framing at three different scales: the Black body, the independent business, and the grassroots collective. I conclude that vibe as a material and metaphorical asset of Blackness, is at the root of contestations over place, and sometimes contradictory imaginaries of freedom.