Been pouring over Richard Iton’s work over the break and into the year not only for the upcoming Souls issue but also for a few projects I’m working on in 2014. I’m particularly interested in the role geography plays in black cultural production. In Search of the Black Fantastic pushes against geography to a certain extent, calling for a blackness NOT tied to the nation-state. Yet and still it’s impossible to talk about black cultural production WITHOUT talking about geography–without talking about the cities and towns that generate the productions. In the lecture I sampled from in the Iton remix, Iton doesn’t talk about “house” in the abstract, he refers to its Chicago, Detroit, and African variants.

Along those lines I came across a couple of links on facebook–(h/t to Karizma and to Angela Clark)–that I thought were interesting and worth sharing here. Both fall within a larger body of work that examines Detroit as a relic in search of its Indiana Jones, but push against the general theme of the majority of that work in a couple of different ways.