New Frontiers in Black Placemaking: Afrotopias of the West

Center for Cultural Landscapes

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 25, 2023
CAMPBELL HALL 153
5PM (ET) | FOLLOWED BY A RECEPTION
This event is in-person only; a recording will be made available on UVA School of Architecture's YouTube Channel.

The notion of the Western frontier prompts recognition of the genocide and forced removal policies informed by notions of Manifest Destiny that dismembered Indigenous and Native communities. Native and Black landscapes of the West have historically lost population, been destroyed by development, and industry has extracted water and oil. Post-Emancipation, Black Western place makers sought a promised land in places like Nicodemus, Kansas, Blackdom, New Mexico, and Allensworth, California. During this event, descendant activists, planners, preservationists, and scholars from these towns will share their experiences preserving and planning in these emancipatory landscapes or Western Afrotopias. 

This symposium is a generative, re-memory project in which attendees share counter-narratives of Black Western placemaking, contemporary grassroots preservation efforts, and current movements to right the wrongs that led to the decline of Western Afrotopias. To shape practice and intellectual inquiry, the event showcases descendant leaders, practitioners, and scholars who historically frame Black settlement in the West as a contemporary reparative struggle and as a seat of speculative Black futures. The audience is invited to engage frontierism as being about expansive, new ways of increasing the capacity of Black folks to speak and plan in boundaryless ways about their pasts, presents, and futures.

Speakers:

Dr. Ashley Adams is a descendant of early settlers of the historic Black town and federally designated site, Nicodemus, Kansas.

Denise Kadara has served as President of the Allensworth Progressive Association (APA), a nonprofit serving community needs and governance of the historically Black rural township of Allensworth, California since 2011.

Dr. Timothy E. Nelson is a historian who addresses foundational issues in African American and African diasporic history related to borderlands and the Western United States.

La Barbara James Wigfall joined the Kansas State University faculty in 1987 after ten years of private practice in Texas and faculty appointments and fellowships at Howard University, University of Texas, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Moderator:

Dr. Andrea Roberts is a planning historian, theorist, public humanities scholar, place preservationist and educator. She is also the founder of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, a research and social justice initiative documenting placemaking history and grassroots preservation practices in the African Diaspora.