“It's the ’Hood. But That Means It's Home!”: African American Feminist Critical Geographic Wanderings in the Anthropology of Space and Place

Abstract

AbstractThis article pursues an African American feminist critical geographic approach in locating experiential geographies that help shape people's perceptions of city life. I center the culturally symbolic site of Detroit bus stops as point of ethnographic departure. With my choreography as strategy approach to ethnography, I hang out at the site of the bus stop itself, finding perceptions of city life are shaped by people's subjective‐geographic understandings, and reflect the paradox of place. In other words, people's perceptions exist both within and beyond built environment and prefigured assumptions of group membership. However, the philosophical, the choreographic, and the paradox do not substitute for historical‐materialist, political economic analysis. Rather, I suggest that people's subjectivities and philosophical stances be considered alongside the political economic in an anthropology of cities. Demonstrative of such an approach, I offer several ethnographic sketches and some of the nuances that emerge as I wander bus stops in Detroit. Ultimately, I argue for an approach to urban anthropological research that prioritizes people's complex subjectivities alongside onto‐historical context.