UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores historical and ongoing contests over the production and policing of the public cultural landscape in Oakland since World War II. Recently, these struggles have surged to the center of local and national concerns about gentrification and displacement through impassioned conflicts over longstanding Black-centered cultural practices like barbecuing, drumming, and dancing in public. Indeed, these attempts to regulate Black collectivity and conviviality resonate with the rapid arrival of privileged residents, companies, and real-estate speculators in the city since the Great Recession, all of which has uprooted working-class communities of color, especially African Americans. As this study reveals, however, this process is at the same time much more complex and entrenched than the notion of gentrification as an emergent mode of urban restructuring suggests.

In this text, then, I argue that the current moment in Oakland resounds with what I call racial reverberations—looping patterns of racialized dispossession, cultural (re)production, and resistance that disturb bounded notions of time and space. This consideration of racial reverberations causes me to attune to sound, music, and dance as sites of an emancipatory spatial politics of pleasure, on one side, and a repetitive liberal drive to repress “disturbances” to the raced and classed order of the city, on the other. Further, in contrast to linear narratives of urban change, whether in terms of development or decline, this approach attends to the recursive and looping nature of racial and spatial politics in Oakland and other U.S. cities. I thus trace the politics of racial reverberations in Oakland through a sequence of what I call socio-sonic arrangements—or epochal configurations of race and urban space, cultural production and policing, that remix rather than replace the relations that precede them. This, I argue, reveals the enduring ways that attempts to rid the city of “disturbances” serve to perpetuate norms of liberal reason and liberal racism that, while seemingly “race neutral,” drive anti-Black dispossession and spirited resistance.

The text is split into three sections. The first section (Chs. 1 and 2) traces changes in Oakland’s socio-sonic arrangements before and after Black Power. It argues that, after World War II, Black migrant youth found themselves mired in geographies of racial segregation and assimilation that resounded in the Oakland Blues. In response, they remixed the call for Black Power into a new sound—what I call, after Rickey Vincent, the Beat—that disturbed the choreographies of public culture administered by Oakland’s Jim Crow. Then, in the 1970s and 80s, the Black Power revolt accelerated the rise of the city’s Black political and economic elite at the same moment that disinvestment, drug-related violence, and other intersecting crises introduced a deep sense of insecurity. Mayor Lionel Wilson thus implemented new modes of regulation meant to secure the precarious “quality of life” in working-class communities of color. In the process, Oakland underwent a shift in the object of policing from “Negro” to “nuisance,” especially “noise,” in ways that tended to condemn and control the emancipated youth cultures of the Beat.

In the next two sections, the orientation of the text switches from time to space as it charts the socio-sonic arrangement associated with this apparently race-neutral mode of what I call governing through nuisance across a series of interrelated cultural sites. The second section (Chs. 3 and 4) reveals that, in the 1990s, Oakland solidified this new regime of policing through a moral panic about the disturbances of “hyphy” rap and illegal car parties called “sideshows.” The anti-sideshow campaign led to a reorganization of the optics/sonics, tactics, and relations of policing in ways that echoed out to surround young people of color—in particular, young Black men—as they circulated across the city’s recreational landscape to spaces like cultural festivals. The third section (Chs. 5 and 6) then demonstrates that, as a regional economic resurgence put local reinvestment within reach, Oakland’s leaders staked their development aims on the revival of the city’s nightlife. At the same time, the rising popularity of rap—linked, in the minds of some club owners and regulators, to the violence of local drug economies and recklessness of sideshows—led to an increased focus on techniques of security. In this context, regulators sought to manage the tension between the drive to attract crowds and the increased securitization of the night through what I call frequencies of government, which made Downtown Oakland’s “renaissance” a site of racialized dispossession, as well.