Ghosts of Urbicide: The Specter of Blackness in the Haunting of Oakland

What does this haunting reveal? asks Brandi Summers, delineating the historical and contemporary destruction and disinvestment of Black Oakland as a form of Black urbicide—the forcible and intentional unmaking of Black urban spaces that enables the state and private capital to slowly but methodically chip away at the Black city through multiple and varied sets of processes and practices. In conversation with Rosalyn Deutsche, Brandi Summers will argue that the intended death of the Black city produces ghosts that haunt its cultural and material landscapes, leaving only traces of a past Black presence. These ghosts reveal the power dynamics that contribute to social transformation and what has been hidden by those who engage in repressive tactics.

About the Speakers

Brandi T. Summers is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, A&S African American and African Diaspora Studies. Director of Graduate Studies. Her research engages theoretical themes that cut across multiple domains of social life. She builds on epistemological and methodological insights from Black studies, cultural and urban geography, urban sociology, and media studies by examining the cultural, political, and economic dynamics by which race and space are reimagined and reordered.

Summers’ first book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington, D.C. In it, she demonstrates the way that competing notions of blackness structure efforts to raise capital and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her second book, Oakland Echoes: Reimagining and Reclaiming the Black City explores and highlights the roots and routes of resistance and reclamation, not only as a response to urban gentrification and related economic policies in her hometown, Oakland, but also as a quest to think about the past, present, and future of a Black city.

Rosalyn Deutsche is an art historian and critic who taught modern and contemporary art at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York City. She has written extensively and lectured internationally on such interdisciplinary topics as art and urbanism, art and the public sphere, art and war, art and psychoanalysis, and feminist theories of subjectivity in visual representation. Her essays have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Grey Room, October, Society and Space, among other journals, in many exhibition catalogues and anthologies, and in numerous translations. Deutsche is the author of Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (MIT Press, 1996), Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War (Columbia University Press, 2010), and Not-Forgetting: Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of Mastery (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

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