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- Info
Sites of danger and risk: African Americans return to the rural South
| Author: |
Stack, Carol B. |
| Date: |
1995 |
| Periodical: |
In: Demko, George J.; Jackson, Michael C., eds. Populations at risk in America: Vulnerable groups at the end of the twentieth century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press |
| Abstract: |
My intent in this essay is to pivot the center of our concerns, indeed, to move us off center from a particularized definition of our subject as urban. I hope to entangle rural spaces within urban dichotomies, ultimately re-defining the subject of our inquiry. My comments are based on my own ethnographic observations of diverse, multi-generational, African-American families and communities in the United States – studies that chronicle nearly fifty years of a population in motion bounded by an uninterrupted commitment to group survival. The migrations of African Americans along well-worn paths between urban and rural locations in the North and South provide a fulcrum for constructing connections between rural and urban. Moreover, the perspectives of migrants themselves offer a window of vision on the language we are using and the discourse that has framed our conceptualization of populations at risk. In this paper I call attention to the decidedly urban focus in the debate in the U.S. about endangered populations. To the contrary, I hope to reveal connective tissues and the tensions between rural and urban places, and convey how both are "thoroughly penetrated and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them." Center-periphery political categories create borders that negate intersections of power and difference. "Borders," as anthropologist Anna Tsing writes "are a particular kind of margin; they have an imagined other side." The other side in this matter is the rural South, a place which has become a site of creative political and cultural production for the people whose narratives inform this essay |
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