Brandi T. Summers, "Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City" (UNC Press, 2019)

New Books in African American Studies · Nov 4, 2020 · 37m

While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street’s economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to…