Fluorescent Flags: Black Power, Publicity, and Counternarratives in Go-Go Street Posters in the 1980s

This semiotic landscape analysis probes urban patterns of racial placement and displacement through an archive of music publicity posters. The music poster archive is a site to map the so-called “Chocolate City” of Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, explore its calendars, rhythms, textures, communication technology, history and movements of segregated black life. These posters advertising go-go music, the city's indigenous black popular music, asserted a territory of black economic, cultural and political power. They resisted the narrative of a sanitized “White City” designed for white tourists. The city's cultural entrepreneurs challenged false dominant narratives and public policies that marginalized black urban culture as dangerous and deviant. A crack-down on postering in the late 1990s was an early harbinger of gentrification.