brandi t. summers, ph.d.
professor ∙ researcher ∙ writer
race, urban infrastructure, aesthetics
race, urban infrastructure, aesthetics
⎯⎯Books⎯⎯
Oakland Afterlives: How Black Cities Survive Their Unmaking (May 2027) University of California Press
A powerful account of how Black Oakland survives displacement and erasure—and what its story reveals about the future of Black cities everywhere.
What happens to a Black city when its people are displaced but their presence refuses to disappear? In Oakland Afterlives, Brandi Thompson Summers turns to her hometown to trace seven decades of both the unmaking and persistent reinvention of Black Oakland. She chronicles the systematic destruction of Black urban space, while revealing how Black Oaklanders have continually fought to claim the city as their own.
Drawing on archival research, interviews, and cultural analysis, Summers introduces the “spectral city” to capture a striking paradox: Black Oakland is disappearing as a demographic reality even as it remains a ubiquitous cultural force. Moving from the legacy of the Black Panther Party and the branding of Oakland as a Black city to the work of artists and filmmakers who imagine alternative urban worlds, Summers shows how aesthetic activism, capitalist consumption, speculation, and recovery become powerful tools for resisting erasure. Both a vital history of Oakland and a moving cultural account of Black life and urban change, this book reveals how Black communities persist, resist, and reimagine urban futures.
A powerful account of how Black Oakland survives displacement and erasure—and what its story reveals about the future of Black cities everywhere.
What happens to a Black city when its people are displaced but their presence refuses to disappear? In Oakland Afterlives, Brandi Thompson Summers turns to her hometown to trace seven decades of both the unmaking and persistent reinvention of Black Oakland. She chronicles the systematic destruction of Black urban space, while revealing how Black Oaklanders have continually fought to claim the city as their own.
Drawing on archival research, interviews, and cultural analysis, Summers introduces the “spectral city” to capture a striking paradox: Black Oakland is disappearing as a demographic reality even as it remains a ubiquitous cultural force. Moving from the legacy of the Black Panther Party and the branding of Oakland as a Black city to the work of artists and filmmakers who imagine alternative urban worlds, Summers shows how aesthetic activism, capitalist consumption, speculation, and recovery become powerful tools for resisting erasure. Both a vital history of Oakland and a moving cultural account of Black life and urban change, this book reveals how Black communities persist, resist, and reimagine urban futures.
Reviews of Black in Place
J.S. Lewis, J. Robinson, A. Reese, M. Ramírez, B. Summers. 2021. “Book Review Symposium - ‘Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City.’” Antipode
O. Clerge. 2021. “Review of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City.” Social Forces
B. Hinger & E. Quinn. 2020. “Black aesthetic emplacement: Thinking beyond neoliberal capitalist explanations of gentrification.” City
V. Brown. 2020. “Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of a Post-Chocolate City.” Carolina Planning Journal
J. Perez Caro & B. Cheng. 2020. “Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of a Post-Chocolate City.” Ethnic and Racial Studies
T. Kumfer. 2021. “Making and Unmaking a Chocolate City: Three Recent Works on Washington, D.C.” Journal of Urban History
L. Freeman. 2024. “Brandi Thompson Summers. Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City.“ American Historical Review
Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (University of North Carolina Press)
While Washington, D.C. is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than H Street. Black in Place documents D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street’s economic and racial developments. The book focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like D.C., how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Black in Place also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, “cool,” and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.
Black in Place offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, it shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often leaves out D.C.’s Black residents.
“Black in Place is a beautiful, critical, and searing narrative of displacement on H Street, the most heartbreaking and telling of all of the gentrification processes in the Chocolate City. Brandi Thompson Summers has written the book you need to read to understand how racism, capitalism, and power, material and symbolic, collide in the modern American city with constraining and calamitous outcomes for working class Black residents.”—Zandria F. Robinson, author of This Ain’t Chicago
“Sitting at the intersection of human geography, cultural studies, and Black studies, Black in Place brings new cutting edge perspectives to each of these fields. A both timely and important book.”—Rashad Shabazz, author of Spatializing Blackness
While Washington, D.C. is still often referred to as “Chocolate City,” it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than H Street. Black in Place documents D.C.’s shift to a “post-chocolate” cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street’s economic and racial developments. The book focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like D.C., how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Black in Place also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, “cool,” and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.
Black in Place offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, it shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often leaves out D.C.’s Black residents.
☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
“Black in Place is a beautiful, critical, and searing narrative of displacement on H Street, the most heartbreaking and telling of all of the gentrification processes in the Chocolate City. Brandi Thompson Summers has written the book you need to read to understand how racism, capitalism, and power, material and symbolic, collide in the modern American city with constraining and calamitous outcomes for working class Black residents.”—Zandria F. Robinson, author of This Ain’t Chicago
“Sitting at the intersection of human geography, cultural studies, and Black studies, Black in Place brings new cutting edge perspectives to each of these fields. A both timely and important book.”—Rashad Shabazz, author of Spatializing Blackness
⎯⎯Publications⎯⎯
Selected academic articles, essays, and book chapters
Summers, Brandi T. 2026. “When the Margin is the Center: Urban Geography and Possibility Amid Crisis.” Urban Geography, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2025.2601043.
Summers, Brandi T. 2026. “Oakland and the Ghosts of Urbicide.” Places Journal, March.
Summers, Brandi T. and Moriah Ulinskas. 2025. “Archiving Oakland.” Places Journal, April.
Summers, Brandi T. and Juleon Robinson. 2025. “Black Geographies.” Pp. 159-170. In J. Winders and I. Ashutosh, eds. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Cultural and Social Geography, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Summers, Brandi T. 2024. “The Reparative Schematics of Housing in Zachary Levenson’s Delivery as Dispossession.” Critical Sociology 51(3): 601-604.
Summers, Brandi and Desiree Fields. 2024. “Speculative Urban Worldmaking: Meeting Financial Violence with a Politics of Collective Care,” Antipode 56(3): 821-840.
Summers, Brandi T. 2023. “Picturing the Textures of a Chocolate City.” Pp. 143-149. In G. Harris and A. Watson, eds. Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City, Delmonico Books/High Museum of Art.
Summers, Brandi. 2022. “Urban Phantasmagorias.” City 26(2-3): 191-198.
Summers, Brandi Thompson and Olalekan Jeyifous. 2022. “Apocryphal Gospel of Oakland: (Im)permanence, Improvisation, and Our Absurdist Future.” Perspecta 54: Yale Journal of Architecture.
Summers, Brandi. 2022. “Black Insurgent Aesthetics and the Public Imaginary,” Urban Geography 43(6): 837-847.
Summers, Brandi T. 2021. “Untimely Futures.” Places Journal, November 9.
Summers, Brandi T. 2021. “Aesthetic Activism and the Quest for Authenticity in a Time of Crisis.” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 6(3), June 14.
Summers, Brandi Thompson. 2021. “Race, Authenticity, and the Gentrified Aesthetics of Belonging.” Pp. 115-139. In C. Lindner and G. Sandoval, eds. Aesthetics of Gentrification: Seductive Spaces and Exclusive Communities in the Neoliberal City, Amsterdam University Press.
Summers, Brandi Thompson. 2021. “Reclaiming the Chocolate City: Soundscapes of Gentrification and Resistance in Washington, DC,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39(1): 30-46.
Summers, Brandi Thompson and Kathryn Howell. 2019. “Fear and Loathing (of Others): Race, Class, and Contestation of Space in Washington, D.C.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43(6): 1085-1105.
Summers, Brandi. 2017. “Race as Aesthetic: The Politics of Vision, Visibility, and Visuality in Vogue Italia’s ‘A Black Issue.’” QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking 4(3): 81-108.
Summers, Brandi. 2019. “‘Housing is a Natural Right, Not a Privilege’: Anti-Gentrification Activism in a Chocolate City.” The Funambulist 22, March 4:12-14.
Summers, Brandi Thompson. 2019. “‘Haute (Ghetto) Mess’: Post-Racial Aesthetics and the Seduction of Blackness in High Fashion.” Pp. 245-263. In H. Gray, S. Banet-Weiser, and R. Mukherjee, eds. Racism Post-Race: Culture, Critique, and the Color Line. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
⎯⎯Public Writing⎯⎯
Public scholarship and academic essays written for a general audience
“We Need Action to Accompany Art”
The Boston Globe (June 11, 2020)
This solicited op-ed offers a critical lens to view state-sanctioned public art as “black aesthetic emplacement.”
This solicited op-ed offers a critical lens to view state-sanctioned public art as “black aesthetic emplacement.”
“Race and the Quarantined City/What Black America Knows About Quarantine”
The New York Times (May 15, 2020)
This solicited op-ed discusses the long history of Black spatial containment and marginalization in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This solicited op-ed discusses the long history of Black spatial containment and marginalization in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Black Aesthetic/Aesthetic Black: Race, Space, and the
Possibilities of Becoming
Public Seminar (May 2018)
This solicited piece discusses the productivity of blackness, and the mutual constitution of “black aesthetics” and “blackness as an aesthetic.”
Public Seminar (May 2018)
This solicited piece discusses the productivity of blackness, and the mutual constitution of “black aesthetics” and “blackness as an aesthetic.”
“Black Lives Under Surveillance”
Public Books (December 2016)
A review essay on Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness and Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation that draws connections between race, surveillance, and capitalism.
Public Books (December 2016)
A review essay on Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness and Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation that draws connections between race, surveillance, and capitalism.
⎯⎯Projects⎯⎯
BLACK ARCHIPELAGO AND THE CRISIS OF PLACE
Co-Directors: Brandi T. Summers (Columbia University) and N.D.B. Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)
Black scholars have long recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, and anti-/post-colonialism that are inherently geographical. As we currently navigate a world in which we are seeing unprecedented levels of income inequality, food insecurity, austerity, ostentation, excess, and abject scarcity, it is hard not to recognize Black people experiencing pervasive states of crisis, as opposed to moments of crisis. Black life happens amid the crimes of apartheid and Jim Crow, war, and land loss. Temporality and spatiality, blackness includes realizations that and narratives about the “same things” keep happening to Black people repeatedly, in ways highly local and in different locations around the globe. In other words, what has been called a crisis represents an enduring condition of Black life. What does it mean, culturally and materially, for crisis to be quotidian? How do states of Black crises, across land, time, and jurisdictions, represent connected but distinct islands of predicament?With the “Black Archipelago” initiative, we hope to explore connected but distinct challenges that have threatened and been contested by equally distinct and linked strategies of Black self- and community determination. We see “Black Archipelago” describing islands of affinity and belonging as well as islands of predicament. The Black Archipelago describes both Black people’s shared encounters with white supremacy as well as, more crucially, how Black people stay connected to each other, to place and to notions of blackness.
Through public lectures, workshops, and collective opportunities to write and think together, we aim to consider critically and recast responsibly narratives about how the production of Black space is foundational to imaginative Black placemaking, self-actualization, and ways to catalogue future and existing spaces. We want to gather and innovate applied research in Black Studies.
We cast geographical locations and their Black populations spatial and embodied solutions to imposed and serial crises rooted in the inequitable distribution of social, political, and environmental hazards. What have elsewhere been called “Black Geographies” have both been made by and have challenged patterns of unequal housing and lending practices, extraction and chronic underdevelopment. As a term, however, “Black Geographies,” doesn’t, on its own, emphasize connectedness or the distinctiveness of specific Black spatial situations. Island chains stand as unique geographic formations that, in history, have been demarcated imperially, fortified militarily, and exploited economically. They’ve also given rise to culturally related and linguistically distinct peoples of indigenous and African descent.
Through Black Archipelago, we seek to advance collaborations and, hopefully, methodologies grappling with the many threads of domination and insurgent innovation constituting historical patterns of the Black experience. To be sure, these patterns, regardless of capitalism’s various twists and turns, have ensured certain continuities of colonial administration and have tethered imperial cultural norms to modern-day racial and gender formations among Black people. White supremacy has attempted to confine Black lives – whether urban or rural – behind walls of divestment, violence, and infrastructures of extraction. The ensuring islands of predation were designed to be plundered, again and again. Yet, just as recurrently, Black people refashioned predatory spaces into provisioning places. Rather than falling into cycles of isolation they connected their scattered hardships into a Black Archipelago – a diasporic place where ideas, culture, and family (blood and chosen) keep crisis from becoming annihilation.
ARCHIVE OF URBAN FUTURES: OAKLAND
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Image Credit: Maya Sapienza
The Archive of Urban Futures (“the Archive”) is a collaborative project with Moms 4 Housing, generously supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place program. The Archive focuses on questions of history, value, the right to place, and memory and erasure in Oakland, California. The Archive will take the form of a database of material about Oakland and visions of and for its future over time, as well as related activities including community-based workshops, institutes, and art/exhibitions.
The Archive is an effort to anticipate possibility by assembling histories of Oakland that are not reducible to its already well-documented experiences of racialized inequality and dispossession, while at the same time we recognize the ways that racism is always and already a productive enterprise. Or, as Saidiya Hartman (2008) writes, “to imagine what cannot be verified…to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance” (p. 12). Engaging historically displaced, dispossessed, and disenfranchised urban communities as interpreters and investigators disrupts what counts as knowledge and allows for an expansive reading of archival data into alternative historical narratives – surmising not only what happened in the past, but also what could have been.
The work of The Archive was featured in the Oakland Museum of California’s (OMCA) Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain exhibit.
Selected Press for Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain:
KQED
‘Black Spaces’ at the Oakland Museum Meditates on Displacement and Reclamation
NBC Bay Area
‘Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain': New exhibition at Oakland Museum of California
The Oaklandside
‘There are Black people in the future’: Oakland Museum exhibit documents displacement and resistance
SFist
Field Notes: 'Black Spaces' at OCMA, East Bay Skyline Trail Hike, and Tenderloin Museum Turns 10
UC Berkeley News
UC Berkeley student collective Archive of Urban Futures shines at new OMCA exhibit
The Guardian
‘Our dreams were shattered’: the Black Californians forced from the city they built
East Bay Times/Mercury News
Former residents remember Russell City after historic passage of reparation fund: Museum exhibit examines the triumph and tragedy of Russell City’s history
The Daily Californian
Exhibit by campus students, faculty uncovers Black history in Oakland
SF Chronicle
'Black Spaces' at OMCA traces the past and future of Black communities in the East Bay
East Bay Express
Black spaces speak: Stories of resilience and future-building echo through the East Bay at Oakland Museum's latest exhibition