city after property

August 336 pages, 29 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-2078-3 $27.95/£23.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-2002-8 $104.95/£94.00

Black religion/Sex and gender/Political theory

Black, Quare, and Then to Where Theories of Justice and Black Sexual Ethics

jennifer susanne leath

In Black, Quare, and Then to Where jennifer susanne leath explores the relationship between Afrodiasporic theories of justice and Black sexual ethics through a womanist engagement with Ma’at—the ancient Egyptian deity of justice and truth. Ma’at took into account the historical and cultural context of each human’s life, thus encompassing nuances of politics, race, gender, and sexuality. Arguing that Ma’at should serve as a foundation for reconfiguring Black sexual ethics, leath applies ancient Egyptian moral codes to quare ethics of the erotic, expanding what relationships and democratic practices might look like from a contemporary Ma’atian perspective. She also draws on Pan-Africanism and examines the work of Alice Walker, E. Patrick Johnson, Cheikh Anta Diop, Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, and others. She shows that together, these thinkers and traditions inform and expand the possibilities of Ma’atian justice with respect to Black sexual experiences. As a moral force, leath contends, Ma’at opens new possibilities for mapping ethical frameworks to understand, redefine, and imagine justices in the United States.

RELIGIOUS CULTURES OF AFRICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA PEOPLE

A series edited by Jacob K. Olupona, Dianne M. Stewart, and Terrence L. Johnson jennifer susanne leath is Assistant Professor in Black Religion at Queen’s University.

Urban studies/Geography/American studies

The City after Property Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit SARA SAFRANSKY

In The City after Property, Sara Safransky examines how postindustrial decline generates new forms of urban land politics. In the 2010s, Detroit government officials classified a staggering 150,000 lots—more than a third of the city—as “vacant” or “abandoned.” Analyzing subsequent efforts to shrink the Motor City’s footprint and budget, Safransky presents a new way of conceptualizing urban abandonment. She challenges popular myths that cast Detroit as empty and narratives that reduce its historical decline to capital and white flight. By connecting contemporary debates over neoliberal urbanism to Cold War histories and the lasting political legacies of global movements for decolonization and Black liberation, she foregrounds how the making of—and challenges to—modern property regimes have shaped urban policy and politics. Drawing on critical geographical theory and community-based ethnography, Safransky shows how private property functions as a racialized construct, an ideology, and moral force that shapes selves and worlds. By thinking the city “after property,” Safransky illuminates alternative ways of imagining and organizing urban life.

Sara Safransky is a geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University. She is coeditor of A People’s Atlas of Detroit