Remaking Place: Black Women and a Politics of Refusal in St. Louis, 1937-1972

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

American Studies

First Advisor

Feimster, Crystal

Abstract

This dissertation centers on the labors and lives of African American women living through the urban crises of the mid-20th century United States. It examines poor Black women's quotidian and large-scale moments of activism, placemaking strategies, and world-forming practices across the landscape of public housing and urbicidal redevelopment schemes in St. Louis, Missouri. I argue that Black women enacted an epistemology rooted in dialectical opposition to the logics of capital: possessive individualism, relations of private property, and normative domesticity. As St. Louis city officials sought to manage Black bodies through the organization of urban space, Black women engaged in what I term a politics of refusal to guide their approach to resistance. Describing both Black women's multi-scalar acts of protest and counter-placemaking against/ beyond the state, and a Black feminist vision of transformative change, a politics of refusal situates their activism within the broader Black radical tradition. The dissertation draws from oral history, Black feminist theory, urban studies, theories of racial capitalism, and Indigenous and Black geographies to examine how Black women responded to the destruction of vital geographies and the construction of large-scale public housing.

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