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Abstract
Currently, many Black residents of metropolitan Atlanta live in neighborhoods under the threat of gentrification and displacement. Creative placemakers, urban planning scholars, and political theorists have long argued that structural racism embedded in America’s political economy influences the uneven development of such Black urban geographies. This dissertation presents a conceptual models and critical frameworks at the intersection of Womanism, Black joy, and Black Food Geographies that I term Black creative place-keeping. Using this framework, I examine how Atlanta, GA, performance artists and entrepreneurs T. Lang of T. Lang Dance, Alex Acosta of Soul Food Cypher, and Aisha “Pinky” Cole of Slutty Vegan, have individually or collectively utilized performance and performatively in order to negotiate the race and class constraints within each of their neighborhoods. I examine the aesthetic strategies utilized by these Black creative place-keepers to intervene in the racist systems of oppression and displacement euphemistically termed gentrification. Black creative place-keeping seeks to “hold” the places by creating an anti-gentrification framework and discourse where Black people already live, work, and play versus the idea of creating or making place.