Twelfth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The recent 2020 uprisings that placed a global spotlight on America’s urban sectors like the Twin Cities, Minnesota, resulted in a boom of scholarship that theorized and speculated about the specific locale, its people, and the state of urban Black America in general. While largely following current trends in social justice scholarship such as intersectional analysis and structuralist interpretations on racism, contemporary scholars also follow the traditional sociological praxis of objectifying Black places/faces while failing to acknowledge inner city Black America’s robust intellectual tradition and right to tell their own story. This study takes a unique approach to Black urban studies by collecting intergenerational oral histories from Saint Paul, MN residents who have lived through the rise of police lynchings, hyper-militarization, and spatial dispossession within the last decade. Focusing on the politics of knowledge production along with the legacy of spatial-temporal liberation struggles within Black America, I am able to construct a social history of the area as derived from the people themselves. This study also introduces Hoodoo sociology as a methodological innovation built upon Dubois’s conception of “the veil” and Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic method of initiate-observation. Hoodoo sociology facilitates a cartographic shift by transporting the researcher beyond the veil of Black cultural cryptography and re-mapping the Black urban homeplace as a temple where higher knowledge is transmuted through an embodied esoteric culture that, I argue, survives (despite/in-spite-of multiple scales of state sanctioned genocide, culturicide, and epistemicide) through independent institutions of education, art, and athletics.