UC Berkeley

Scales in the Key of Geographic Blackness: Black Identity Formation Beyond the City Through Black Sub\urbanization Across Chicago Southland is an interdisciplinary and auto-ethnographic project that explores the relationships between geography and Black identity formation in the Chicago Metropolitan Area known colloquially as Chicagoland. This project broadens the scope of how we understand Black identity formation beyond “the urban” and “the city” by turning towards predominately Black sub\urban villages, towns, and neighborhoods in the South Suburbs of Chicago also known as Chicago Southland. I draw attention to the racialization of everyday life across geographic scales, particularly urban space, the sub\urban form, and urban-regional landscapes. In doing so, I interrogate the ways Blackness is often theorized through “the urban” as the primary scale of Black American life. This dissertation also puts necessary pressure on the racial and spatial imaginaries of American suburbs that are primarily viewed through Whiteness to the exclusion of Black American life and its generational histories, migrations, and livingness. By offering new theoretical, conceptual, and methodological insights into social and spatial processes shaping Black identity formation, I challenge overrepresentations of “the urban” and Blackness that redefine the relationships between Black American life and Black placemaking.