Greening the Black Urban Regime by Alesia Montgomery

Author:Alesia Montgomery [Montgomery, Alesia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026030 Social Science / Sociology / Urban, SOC001000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, POL002000 Political Science / Public Policy / City Planning & Urban Development
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

Ill did a rap about the area, including the destruction of public housing (“up the street from where they knocked the Jeffries down”) and its drug addicts (“You gotta ask where they live / Who they were before here / Hustling in the aftermath of chemical warfare.”) that included a “bucket solo” from the drummer. As the drummer reached his crescendo, the white videographer with earphones and the black man in the blue dashiki moved in with their cameras. Next Ill did a song, “Apple Orchards,” which warned of corporate agriculture: “Have you seen the apple orchards / Where the trees are trapped and tortured / But the captives all look gorgeous.” Ill, in collaboration with Wajeed and other artists, would go on to form Complex Movements—an arts collective that blends high tech creations with social and environmental justice concerns and cross-place organizing. The collective, inspired by the philosophy of emergence (derived from quantum physics), seeks to bring together the local and translocal to solve problems and transform communities. The collective is tied to a strand of cultural work in Detroit that critiques “corporate science”—technology that causes poverty and alienation—yet embraces innovations (digital media, 3D printing, microgrids) that facilitate the localized production, translocal connections, ecological harmony, and direct democracy that the Boggses advocated.

After the trio performed, Joe Reilly—a guitarist of European and Native American heritage—came on stage. He flapped his arms in a “turkey vulture rap” (“Uh uh yeh I’m a turkey vulture dude . . . fly in a v-shape . . . make a turkey vulture beat”) as children dance and laugh. As he shifted to a slow song about water, a mother danced with her baby in her arms. There was little greenery on the block—the crowd was told to imagine and embody water, plants, and animals as they danced and sang along to songs about the earth. The performers urged the crowd to think about the effects of their actions on their bodies, each other, and the earth. In the central business district, nature tended to be concretely framed (by renovated parks, the RiverWalk) not playfully embodied. The fish carousel on the RiverWalk was fanciful, but it left less to the imagination than becoming a turkey vulture in the Corridor. In the central business district, developers described nature as a resource that enterprising people harnessed for pleasure and profits. In the Corridor, artists talked about the pleasure and freedom that came from realizing the self as nature and a force of creation (profits mattered, but they were not emphasized).

In the central business district, I only saw one space that was as open as the Corridor: the defunct Canticle Café. Brother Al Mascia—a Franciscan friar—ran the café, serving free muffins and fair trade organic coffee in a space that had a piano, computers with internet access, and poetry slams. To help support the café, he sold bags of fair trade coffee to affluent patrons. The café was named after the Canticle of the Sun, a praise song for God and nature by Francis of Assisi.

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