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Title: Black Migration to Atlanta: Metropolitan Spatial Patterns and Popular Representation, 1990–2012
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2012
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Abstract: How does recent black migration impact Atlanta’s geographies of black life? Since 1990, the Atlanta metropolitan region has become a major destination for three groups of black migrants from disparate origins: native-born “return south” blacks from other U.S. regions, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and sub-Saharan African immigrants. These migrants’ ethnic diversity dismantles existing notions of “black” culture, politics, and place. Black Migration to Atlanta revises scholarship by demonstrating that we cannot understand the complexity of black lives in Atlanta without investigating the complex relationship between space, migration, and popular culture. Atlanta emerges not just as an urban core, but as a region—a multiplicity of metropolitan sites—imagined and contested through residential patterns, commercial geographies, and popular culture’s attempts to accommodate cultural and geographic shifts brought by recent black migration. In my first chapter, I provide a brief history of Atlanta’s racialized geography as a framework for my research. Then, I articulate black migrant residential geographies and delineate common patterns of suburbanization, exurbanization, and urban depopulation across groups. I next explore immigrant participation in the production of ethnic and regional foodways . I argue that such participation illustrates the ways migrants transform culturally and racially coded spaces through popular presentations of black ethnic diversity and make intraracial contact. Finally, I examine narrative modes of imagining migration to Atlanta. Popular culture texts contain “migrant imaginaries”—narrative constructions that advance specific relationships between migrants and imagined metropolitan places. These multiple, conflicting imaginaries are central to understanding how popular culture presents and informs migration. Black Migration to Atlanta relies on mapping, historical scholarship, census data, interviews with migrants, observational fieldwork, and close readings of popular culture. It draws attention to three migrants groups who thus far have garnered little academic or popular recognition because they do not fit easily into prevailing academic ideas about black urbanism, particularly in southern U.S. cities. Located within regional, national, and global networks of cultural production, these migrants broaden notions of ethnic and class diversity across a region long configured in terms of racial/spatial binary.
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Authors: Abbott, Frances
Institution: Emory University
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Race and Ethnicity
Countries: United States