Mapping race, erasing history: History, space and race in a United States historically black community

At its core this dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of the idea of 'community': how communities are imagined, how they are produced and experienced, the complex relationship they embody between human beings and the social and physical landscapes they consider meaningful. I argue that, at least in the United States, the way communities are understood and experienced is deeply entrenched in people's relationship to history, space and race. Moreover, no one of these components can easily be disentangled from the other two, not in the academic literature, and not in people's daily experiences.;The dissertation is based on ethnographic and archival research conducted in a historically black community in central Virginia where I studied the political dynamics that shaped governmental recognition of the place as a Historic District on the one hand, and the lived experiences of residents on the other. While the State identifies Union as unambiguously 'black,' it has been home to residents raced both 'black' and 'white' since at least the late-19th century. The process of gaining official historic recognition reifies racial categories while promoting hegemonic readings of history and space.;I demonstrate that local productions of history, space and race are far more complex than is represented in the official History, and that the voices of some residents are silenced at the very moment that their history is being told. The dissertation identifies three social groups living in Union today, history brokers, descendent residents and delegitimized historians. Focusing separately on the ways each group produces and experiences community (and by extension history, space, and race), I highlight the disparities between how different residents relate to the place they collectively call home, who and what they imagine as the community, and how they map history onto the landscape. The result is an ethnography of a multi-layered, multi-textured community in which who narrates the official History is just as problematic as what is included in the narrative.