Race and Gardening in the African-American City- CHAT Orkney 2016
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-12-14

Throughout  the  20th  century  African‐American  cities  were  dotted  with  ornamental  gardens  that hearkened  to Southern  rural  traditions, provided inchoate imaginative  retreats, and demonstrated aesthetic  creativity, middle‐class  discipline, and even  raw affluence.  This  paper examines African‐
American ornamental gardens in 20th‐century Indianapolis, Indiana and focuses on the complicated performative  dimensions  and  rich  interiority  of  African  American  materiality.    Gardens  provide especially  rich mechanisms  to illuminate  the inchoate African‐American imagination of nature  that borrowed from African‐American rural heritage and fashioned a notion of nature that defied public constructions of race.  Gardens provide a vehicle to examine how contemplative things and spaces
sparked an introspective and imaginative African American interior life.

Paul R. Mullins
Indiana University‐Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Session 3: Urban | |  Rural
CHAT Annual Conference - Orkney 2016: Rurality