Black Migration to Atlanta: Metropolitan Spatial Patterns and Popular Representation, 1990-2012 Público
Abbott, Frances Reyburn (2010)
Abstract
How does recent black migration impact Atlanta's geographies of
black life? Since 1990,
the Atlanta metropolitan region has become a major destination for
three groups of black
migrants from disparate origins: native-born "return south" blacks
from other U.S.
regions, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and sub-Saharan African
immigrants. These
migrants' ethnic diversity dismantles existing notions of "black"
culture, politics, and
place. Black Migration to Atlanta revises scholarship by
demonstrating that we cannot
understand the complexity of black lives in Atlanta without
investigating the complex
relationship between space, migration, and popular culture. Atlanta
emerges not just as
an urban core, but as a region-a multiplicity of
metropolitan sites-imagined and
contested through residential patterns, commercial geographies, and
popular culture's
attempts to accommodate cultural and geographic shifts brought by
recent black
migration.
In my first chapter, I provide a brief history of Atlanta's
racialized geography as a
framework for my research. Then, I articulate black migrant
residential geographies and
delineate common patterns of suburbanization, exurbanization, and
urban depopulation
across groups. I next explore immigrant participation in the
production of ethnic and
regional foodways . I argue that such participation illustrates the
ways migrants transform
culturally and racially coded spaces through popular presentations
of black ethnic
diversity and make intraracial contact. Finally, I examine
narrative modes of imagining
migration to Atlanta. Popular culture texts contain "migrant
imaginaries"-narrative
constructions that advance specific relationships between migrants
and imagined
metropolitan places. These multiple, conflicting imaginaries are
central to understanding
how popular culture presents and informs migration.
Black Migration to Atlanta relies on mapping, historical
scholarship, census data,
interviews with migrants, observational fieldwork, and close
readings of popular culture.
It draws attention to three migrants groups who thus far have
garnered little academic or
popular recognition because they do not fit easily into prevailing
academic ideas about
black urbanism, particularly in southern U.S. cities. Located
within regional, national,
and global networks of cultural production, these migrants broaden
notions of ethnic and
class diversity across a region long configured in terms of
racial/spatial binary.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Introduction and a Brief History of Atlanta's Black Geography
1
Chapter Two
Mapping Atlanta's Metropolitan Black Populations, 1990-2010
18
Chapter Three
Black Ethnic Foodscapes and Geographies of Intraracial Contact
89
Chapter Four
"Welcome to Atlanta": Popular Narratives and Migrant Imaginaries
129
Bibliography 175
Non-Printed Sources 179
About this Dissertation
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