Black Miami in the Eye of the Storm: Performing Black Sustainability

Mysia Anderson
Theater and Dance
UC San Diego

Miami has been marked as ground zero in the battle against climate change. This is a watershed moment in Miami history defined by unprecedented development, climate gentrification, and a creative capital boom. My manuscript, “Black Miami in the Eye of the Storm: Performing Black Sustainability,” is a cultural analysis centering performances of Black sustainability in the city of Miami. Black sustainability is a term I utilize to describe an embodied, communal orientation toward the care and repair of Black histories, presence, and futures within the backdrop of environmental uncertainty. Black Miami is a thunderous crossroads within the African Diaspora. Although a diverse, hemispheric city, Miami continuously enacts anti-blackness through its spatial practices and customs. This project travels across distinct Black Miami communities to investigate how Black performance, identities, and expressive cultures sustain, hinder, and remap social geographies. This grant supports my community-engaged fieldwork, oral history collection, and archival research across three neighborhoods: Seminola, Brownsville, and Overtown. The work positions the contemporary moment within a historical continuum of environmental crises that attempt to render Blackness “ungeographic.”

Image credit: Timothy Drescher, Community Murals (Artstor).