{"id":35859,"date":"2014-11-09T17:40:38","date_gmt":"2014-11-09T17:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35859"},"modified":"2015-02-14T19:00:36","modified_gmt":"2015-02-14T19:00:36","slug":"35859","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35859","title":{"rendered":"Historically Black: Imagining Community in a Black Historic District"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nyupress.org\/books\/book-details.aspx?bookId=11480\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>Historically Black: Imagining Community in a Black Historic District<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nyupress.org\" target=\"_blank\">New York University Press<\/a><br \/>\nJuly 2014<br \/>\n208 pages<br \/>\n10 halftones<br \/>\nCloth ISBN: 9780814762882<br \/>\nPaper ISBN: 9780814763483<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jmu.edu\/socanth\/anth\/polancom.shtml\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Mieka Brand Polanco<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Anthropology<br \/>\n<em>James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nyupress.org\/books\/book-details.aspx?bookId=11480\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/nyuconnexus.seisan.com\/uploads\/products\/9780814762882\/9780814762882_Full.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In <em>Historically Black<\/em>, Mieka Brand Polanco examines the concept of community in the United States: how communities are experienced and understood, the complex relationship between human beings and their social and physical landscapes\u2014and how the term \u201ccommunity\u201d is sometimes conjured to feign a cohesiveness that may not actually exist. Drawing on ethnographic and historical materials from <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Union,_Virginia\" target=\"_blank\">Union, Virginia<\/a>, <em>Historically Black<\/em> offers a nuanced and sensitive portrait of a federally recognized Historic District under the category \u201cEthnic Heritage\u2014Black.\u201d <strong>Since Union has been home to a racially mixed population since at least the late 19th century, calling it \u201chistorically black\u201d poses some curious existential questions to the black residents who currently live there.<\/strong> Union\u2019s identity as a \u201chistorically black community\u201d encourages a perception of the town as a monochromatic and monohistoric landscape, effectively erasing both old-timer white residents and newcomer black residents while allowing newer white residents to take on a proud role as preservers of history. Gestures to \u201ccommunity\u201d gloss an oversimplified perspective of race, history and space that conceals much of the richness (and contention) of lived reality in Union, as well as in the larger United States. They allow Americans to avoid important conversations about the complex and unfolding nature by which groups of people and social\/physical landscapes are conceptualized as a single unified whole. This multi-layered, multi-textured ethnography explores a key concept, inviting public conversation about the dynamic ways in which race, space, and history inform our experiences and understanding of community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Historically Black: Imagining Community in a Black Historic District New York University Press July 2014 208 pages 10 halftones Cloth ISBN: 9780814762882 Paper ISBN: 9780814763483 Mieka Brand Polanco, Assistant Professor of Anthropology James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia In Historically Black, Mieka Brand Polanco examines the concept of community in the United States: how communities are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,11,459,8,17,20,693],"tags":[16989,962,707],"class_list":["post-35859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-books","category-history","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-mieka-brand-polanco","tag-new-york-university-press","tag-nyu-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}