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

Mysia Anderson-White
Theatre and Dance
UC San Diego

Black Miami in the Eye of the Storm: Performing Black Sustainability explores the spaces and practices that perform Black Miami identity, examining the expressive cultures that remap the city’s geographies. From waiting out hurricane seasons every year, to finding calm amid thunderous regimes—Black Miami life is tethered to the weather. This book asks how histories of ecological exclusion reverberate through contemporary climate gentrification and environmental precarity, and how Black Miami creatively imagines a future. Grounded in expressive practices from the 1970s to the present, the manuscript traces how artists, cultural institutions, and community historians use performance and storytelling to resist erasure, predatory capitalism, and the myth of Miami as a multicultural paradise. I theorize these practices as performances of Black sustainability: the cultural, artistic, and everyday acts through which Black communities stage care, endurance, and futurity in the face of systemic anti-Blackness and climate peril. Drawing on critical ethnography, oral histories, archival research, and performance theory, the book situates Black Miami in the eye of the storm—materially, epistemological, and theoretically. By centering Black feminist practices of readiness, care, and environmental justice, this project reframes sustainability not as preservation of place alone, but as an embodied strategy for survival.