Files
Abstract
This dissertation tracks the attempted secession of the Buckhead community from the City of Atlanta. This movement would see a white, wealth, northern corner of the City de-annexed and reincorporated as a distinct municipality. In addition to removing crucial tax revenue from broader popular control and worsening racial inequality and segregation, Buckhead City—as the newly-incorporated city would be called—threatens to collapse the bond rating of every city in the state. Probing the foundations of secessionist discourse, developing racial capitalist readings of property, critiquing descriptive accounts of urban boundary change, and tracking the ongoing negotiation between hegemonic neoliberalism and emergent authoritarianism in urban governance, this work reads the movement for Buckhead City as part of a broader secession democracy in the United States, one which does not (cannot) undergird universal self-determination and collective freedom but rather reproduces exclusive and possessive geographies of whiteness.