Belongingness and the Harlem drummers

Abstract

In this article, I analyze a recent conflict over drumming in a Harlem park to understand the ways in which cultural and racial symbols are employed in negotiations of space within cities. Specifically, I argue that racial belongingness—a racialized claim to space that exists outside of property rights and demarcated through iconography—can be used to both resist and facilitate gentrification in urban locales. The Harlem case illustrates how racial belongingness functions as a device that allows groups to contest power, representation, and access to public space across temporal, physical, and aural boundaries. Thus, I look closely at the city as a canvas and stage upon which passive forms of communication manifest in a racially and culturally coded fashion. Additionally, I argue that contemporary public space discourse is overly preoccupied with class, often neglecting the significance of race in the constitution and experience of urban space.

Keywords:

• gentrification
• race
• public space
• Harlem

Notes

1. Smith’s early exploration of the urban “frontier” symbolism largely dates from the mid-1970s (see Smith, 1979a, 1979b).

2. Additionally, the idea of pioneers invading an “empty” urban space is important rhetoric in urban gentrification. The “urban frontier motif” is both a mythological and ideological device that promotes gentrification while simultaneously disappearing those current residents who are being displaced.

3. This is an issue that Phil Cohen explores in more depth in his piece “Out of the Melting Pot into the Fire Next Time” (Cohen, 1997).

4. This use of “locale” draws on Agnew’s (1993) definition of “the settings in which social relations are constituted” (p. 263).

5. One component that I do not explore here is the use of recording devices during the police interruption. Several of the bloggers referred to the use of video cameras and cell phone recordings during the confrontation. In light of Iveson’s discussion of public address, it is clear that maintaining a visual record of the incident was important—it implied the potential for engaging a wider public, which may have also dissuaded the police officers from acting in violence against the drummers.

6. The City Council Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs Committee was the governing body that formally approved the bill changing the name of the Mount Morris Park to Marcus Garvey Memorial Park in 1973 (New Pittsburgh Courier, 1973).

7. This case complicates Blomely’s argument for alternative property rights, for Blomely imagines that such claims can only be made by residents of and within a particular location; racial belongingness, however, allows for proprietary claims that extend beyond a geographical residency.

8. According to a board member of the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance, the area surrounding Marcus Garvey Park was officially designated as the “Mount Morris Historical District” in 1971, two years before Mount Morris Park was renamed to Marcus Garvey.