Introduction: Looking for Black Miami

Donette Francis,Allison Harris

doi:10.33596/anth.408

Abstract

Conceptualizing Miami as the “Hemispheric South” captures the hemispheric collision of peoples, practices, and prejudices that have transformed understandings of whiteness, Blackness, Latinx and power in this city. The essay argues that Black migrants are foundational to Miami’s hemispheric history. Using the life writings of Black academics, it demonstrates that a hemispheric angle on Miami revises understandings of U.S. migration, Civil Rights, and the sounds of Blackness. The city speaks in different grammars of Blackness, thereby rendering more layers of the Black experience legible, usable, and cautionary. Miami’s Black histories speak to our present moment where global migration is rapidly becoming the defining issue of the era. Because Miami’s history presaged a wider set of civil rights reversals for Black Americans, the city’s Black history provides a new lens on familiar questions of race and incorporation thus enabling us to see a different narrative arc of the United States. Reframing Miami in terms of Black hemispheric movement reorients key debates in Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, American Studies around race, migration, whiteness, and civil rights.

Highlights

Looking for Black MiamiDonette Francis1 and Allison Harris2Conceptualizing Miami as the “Hemispheric South” captures the hemispheric collision of peoples, practices, and prejudices that have transformed understandings of whiteness, Blackness, Latinx and power in this city
These engagements with the city’s Blackness are only the surface of the deep Black multi-generational migrant and immigrant histories constitutive of Miami’s multicultural and hemispheric composition, where 93% of the current foreign-born population are from the Americas
On April 20, 2018, seven leading Black intellectuals convened at the University of Miami: Tera Hunter, Juana Valdes, 4 Arguably, there have been earlier fleeting moments where the nation was obliged to see Black Miami: the June 19, 1990

Summary

Introduction

Conceptualizing Miami as the “Hemispheric South” captures the hemispheric collision of peoples, practices, and prejudices that have transformed understandings of whiteness, Blackness, Latinx and power in this city. Reframing Miami in terms of Black hemispheric movement reorients key debates in Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, American Studies around race, migration, whiteness, and civil rights. Black migrants are foundational to Miami’s hemispheric history.. A city built on the speculation of real estate, transportation, banking, agriculture, and tourism, Miami has only recently registered in national public policy conversations around Blackness or scholarly theorizations of Black aesthetics.. A city built on the speculation of real estate, transportation, banking, agriculture, and tourism, Miami has only recently registered in national public policy conversations around Blackness or scholarly theorizations of Black aesthetics.2 This invisibility has been due, in part, to tendencies that privilege histories and resonances of plantation slavery in the South and the Great Migration out of the South. Along with Barry Jenkins, their 2017 Oscar-winning film, Moonlight, explored their Liberty City neighborhood, and more recently McCraney’s OWN Network series, David Makes Man, centers the agricultural town of Homestead in relation to other northern inner-city

Notable engagements include

Miami’s diversity is skewed toward its Hispanic population

Findings

12 In their 2018 book Chocolate Cities