Silent/-ced Inscriptions of Race and Gender on the Architectural Skin of Atlanta
Silent/-ced Inscriptions of Race and Gender on the Architectural Skin of Atlanta

Summary/Abstract: This paper is an exploration of central Atlanta through the lens of psychogeography, as well as race and memory studies, aimed to examine how hegemonic power frames knowledge and memory of the past through symbolic architectural encoding. The feminist concept of intersectionality, which focuses on social differences and exclusions generated by the intertwining of race, gender and class, provides a meta-tool for analysing the cityscape to uncover urban race- and gender-blindness.Architecturally, the black of glass-and-steel or glass-and-concrete skyscrapers of Atlanta’s cityscape contrasts with the white of its fin-de-siècle European-looking buildings. This aisthetic, not just aesthetic, opposition between warmth and coldness ostensibly betokens different lifestyles and worldviews, even as both architectural styles belong together as landmarks of the white race, with its supremacist obliteration of the other races. Yet Atlanta’s cityscape, like most others worldwide, also etches women out of sight and thus out of mind: through either commission or commemorative aim, edifices, statues and parks celebrate male achievement. Markers of ideological fracture, from the gender divide to the white/non-white-non-black divide, multiply in the city so that the urban skin becomes the architectural palimpsest of clashes past and present, whose ghostly traces in the present perform the early clashes anew, yet at so many discursive removes. Such dual obliteration of associations with race and gender from the architectural fabric of Atlanta is hardly new. Cities are, by definition, erected around the ancient concept of civitas, a patriarchal construct of the (implicitly)white community which celebrates the maleness of its citizen-cum-conqueror at the same time as it obliterates the toil and suffering of those coerced to ensure the city’s subsistence.

• Details
• Contents