Allure in the uninhabitable: on affect, space, and Blackness in gentrifying Philadelphia

Abstract

This article engages with affect theory and Black feminist interrogations of the human to examine the conflicting feelings evoked by the gentrification process. Black feminist theorists have long demonstrated how histories linger, shape, and make meaning in the present. Affect theory offers further insight into this process by illustrating how we imbue people, places, and things with meaning. This article links these perspectives to address how associations such as economic development/life, Blackness/death, and the uninhabitable/nonhuman shape public sentiments on gentrification and space more broadly. This discussion centers on two urban development projects in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city that is, like many American cities, racially segregated. This analysis attends to how antiblackness circulates to imbue space and bodies with racialized meaning and resonance. I advance that while this circulation of affects is devastatingly powerful, antiblackness does not circulate uncontested or capture all elements of Black life and Black place-making.