Civic pivot: Smoothing the politics of race and place through arts and culture in Nashville, Tennessee

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Nashville, Tennessee, arts and culture have become levers for competition, civic engagement, and collective action. Specifically, the proliferation of an artistic civic practice—creative placemaking and other efforts to promote social inclusion, address public problems, and enliven public participation through the arts—is cast as a “civic pivot” within the cultural sector. I argue that Nashville’s “civic pivot” in the arts is a vehicle through which to examine how public life is made marketable, and the specifically racial considerations of this commodification. This research is based on 18 months of mixed methods qualitative fieldwork in a city where contestations over land-use, representation, identity, and belonging have been long-standing. I argue that artistic civic practices are enrolled in maintaining a social and racial order that is hospitable to market investment, absorbing pressures to brand a genteel urban politics and underscore effective social assimilation. Such practices make public life marketable to the extent that they facilitate common interests in private sector investment and assimilate specifically racial histories and claims into endorsements of the “greater good” of regional prosperity. The contradictions of this civic pivot are vulnerabilities to be exploited by citizen-subjects, continuing to enliven struggles for belonging.