Description
Book SynopsisExamines the concept of community in the United States: how communities are experienced and understood, the complex relationship between human beings and their social and physical landscapes - and how the term community is sometimes conjured to feign a cohesiveness that may not actually exist.
Trade Review"Mieka Polanco makes clearer the complexities of the past and the present through the articulation of various interest groups stances. She adeptly draws from anthropologys intellectual geneaology to reposition simplistic notions of history-making and uncovers the cartographies of one community in ways that eloquently raise questions about race, space, histories and the business of making historically designated communities." * Dana Davis, Queens College, City University of New York *
"This book provides a fine historically informed ethnography of Union, Virginia, and it also gives readers indispensable conceptual tools to better understand 'communities' in a non-essentialist way, both in terms of ongoing processes, and as products of specific histories that have unfolded in contexts always structured racially and spatially." * Jean Muteba Rahier, Director of African & African Diaspora Studies, Florida International University *
"Polanco delivers a powerful ethnography of community life among residents living in rural African American historic district in Central Virginia. . . . The text touches on many social aspects of community, and readers will feel as though they are part of the conversation as they read residents' narrative histories." * Choice *
"There are so few current works on small black-identified communities that Polancos book is welcome reading for those of us who study such locales. The work is timely and should garner greater attention in anthropology." * American Anthropologist *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Gating Union: The Politics of "Protecting" Community 3. Thick Histories: Producing Community through Historical Narratives4. "Not to Scale": Cartographic Productions of Community Conclusion: Unfolding Communities: Union Road as a "Uniter of People"?Notes Bibliography IndexAbout the Author
