Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa
In Violent Utopia Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.
1141001218
Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa
In Violent Utopia Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.
26.95 In Stock
Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

by Jovan Scott Lewis
Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa
Add to Wishlist
Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

by Jovan Scott Lewis

Overview

In Violent Utopia Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478023265
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 08/08/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 288
File size: 19 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jovan Scott Lewis is Associate Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Violence  21
2. Inheritance  55
3. Restoration  93
4. Repair  131
5. Territory  174
Conclusion  210
Notes  223
Bibliography  239
Index  251

What People are Saying About This

Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West - Karla Slocum

“In Violent Utopia, Jovan Scott Lewis cautions that Tulsa’s historic Greenwood community is more than its Black Wall Street legacy. Situating the 1921 Tulsa race massacre within knotty and enduring place-specific geographies of anti-Black and anti-Native American violence, he masterfully outlines the complex structures of dispossession and trauma in which Tulsa’s Black population has been entangled from Indian Removal to Jim Crow to urban renewal to gentrification. With an ultimate interrogation of the possibilities for Greenwood’s twenty-first-century freedom and repair, this book stands out for its original and timely insights that only can be revealed through the mix of tools that Lewis leverages from geography, anthropology, and history.”

Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean - Peter James Hudson

“Jovan Scott Lewis makes an important, radical, and critical turn away from histories that exceptionalize the white violence of the Tulsa massacre and cast it as a singular event as opposed to a structural occurrence. Deftly and sensitively moving beyond narratives based on an easy nostalgia, cheap sentimentalism, and knee jerk patriotism, he painstakingly demonstrates that 1921 must be seen as a century-long project of deprivation and dispossession. With this important book, Lewis has given us a harrowing narrative of Black disenfranchisement.”

From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Related Subjects

Social Sciences
African Americans
African Americans - General & Miscellaneous
Social Sciences
African Americans
African Americans - General & Miscellaneous

Customer Reviews