Utopic Oakland: Representing Political Futurity, 1999-Present

Trisha Barua
Cultural Studies
UC Davis

This project examines representations of contemporary Oakland, California as a site of imaginative racial and political futurities, a city where the possibilities of progressive social change are perpetually contested. Its periodization starts with Jerry Brown’s mayoral tenure through to the eventual end of Jean Quan’s. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of cultural production, this project assembles a kaleidoscopic portrait of Oakland that renders racial and political formations as multiple and unstable. Futurity is determined through spatial and racial imaginaries of Oakland as a site of left politics. Spatial imaginaries are read alongside material transformations of urban space by capital. Racial imaginaries are representations that fall along a spectrum of an ambivalent politics of recognition and politics of redistribution. This grant funded archival work to historicize this time period and place objects of study in conversation with the context in which they are produced and represent.