Apartheid and resistance in the political economy of gentrification: The dialectics of black working-class struggles in Atlanta, Georgia, 1970-2015

Wood III, Augustus C

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Description

Title

Apartheid and resistance in the political economy of gentrification: The dialectics of black working-class struggles in Atlanta, Georgia, 1970-2015

Author(s)

Wood III, Augustus C

Issue Date

2020-05-07

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Cha-Jua, Sundiata K

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Cha-Jua, Sundiata K

Committee Member(s)

• Hogarth, Rana
• Oberdeck, Kathryn
• Mendenhall, Ruby
• Barnes, Teresa

Department of Study

History

Discipline

History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

Black working class, political economy, gentrification, Atlanta

Abstract

This study serves as a critique of the political economy of the Atlanta Metropolitan Region between 1970 and 2015 through the lends of class struggle amongst African Americans. This dissertation argues that gentrification in U.S. cities must be understood as a dialectic of racial class struggle defined primarily through black working class collective resistance to urban reorganization. Second, this project argues that neoliberalization and subsequent gentrification in Atlanta served as a structural form of anti-poor black pogrom—the planned destruction or removal of a significant portion of a specifically defined group from a location. I contend that this intraracial class struggle is fundamental to contemporary black urban life and should be central to any analysis of racialized market societies. This dialectical relationship is intrinsically paradoxical and a prime contributor to contemporary apartheid in urban America and beyond. In this relatively new formation of racial oppression, poor black bodies and spaces disproportionately served as superfluous and malleable objects manipulated and reorganized predominantly through gentrification in the interests of capital accumulation. This conflict at the heart of the social construction of urban spaces determined the physical and social shape of Atlanta, the distribution of people, the allocation of resources, and the ways space and place were built, transformed, maintained, and disrupted. At its core, this study asserts that by understanding Atlanta and U.S. cities as sites of (intra)racial-class struggle over the production and maintenance of social space and globalized capital, African-Americanist urban scholars can more effectively explicate the fluid intraracial fissures in black neighborhoods that further complicate the urban structure.

Graduation Semester

2020-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

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Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2020 Augustus Wood III

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