Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life

by Marcus Anthony Hunter, Zandria Robinson

From Central District Seattle to Harlem to Holly Springs, Black people have built a dynamic network of cities and towns where Black culture is maintained, created, and defended. But imagine—what if current maps of Black life are wrong? Chocolate Cities offers a refreshing and persuasive rendering of the United States—a “Black map” that more accurately reflects the lived experiences and the future of Black life in America. Drawing on film, fiction, music, and oral history, Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson trace the Black American experience of race, place, and liberation, mapping it from Emancipation to now. As the United States moves toward a majority minority society, Chocolate Cities provides a provocative, broad, and necessary assessment of how racial and ethnic minorities make and change America’s social, economic, and political landscape.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, African American, Sociology, Academic, Music, Geography

311 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Kristen Jeffers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book so much for how it melds Black popular culture, migration, and place making, it's a central text in my online school on Black queer feminist urbanism. Very easy to read, but chock full of footnotes and information

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book artfully explains the premise that everywhere is "The South" for Black Americans. Whether you go North, West or wherever you encounter a form of racism. It also tells the story and pattern of Black placemaking. Across the US towns have Black clusters like a Black bottom, or Black side of the tracks, etc. Often times those areas developed as a means of survival but they're also the makers of culture, wealth, and excellence. Not only are we introduced to the places and patterns we're also introduced to the people who lived there, travelled, and created their own maps of Black life.

[Tyler :3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a really good way to talk about Black spaces, how they are created, Black agency in leaving spaces or staying and creating unique culture and safe space, and relating all of these topics to Black popular culture. I read this for a class, and I am think the issues presented are fantastic; I am giving it 4 stars because it is a little dense and at times a bit dry (I think it was written by two sociologists?), but great nonetheless!

[Jessica Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best explorations of spatial politics I have ever read. The necessity of understanding the world through multiply positioned cartographies (rather than through the colonial gaze only) is elaborated in wonderful detail by Hunter and Robinson. The intersectional approach in this book is sophisticated rather than remedial, which is wildly refreshing.

[Dionne Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for urban Soc- fire

[Charlie Stetson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read!!! Teaching passages of this in parallel with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” and very excited to continue thinking about this!!

[Mills College Library]

973.0496 H946 2018