Power Play : An Historiographic about Women and Urban Renewal

Abstract

This research will take form of a nonfiction graphic novel that resurfaces the lived experiences of womxn¹ in New York City during mid-twentieth century urban renewal projects. Pathologizing immigrant and nonwhite communities, city officials approved the wholesale demolition of the vibrant neighborhood of downtown Brooklyn by issuing reports and approving masterplans for public housing. This group of exclusively white men intentionally made these documents opaque as a way to suppress protests and push their political agenda forward. The ongoing preservation of these records as part of the city’s archives ensures that the production of history about urban renewal is constrained by governmental archival practices; which biases histories towards formal participants in exclusionary processes. In contrast, this project seeks to amplify the voices of womxn who lived, worked and passed through these neighborhoods by both leveraging and questioning these archival sources as fragmented evidence of urban histories. This graphic novel explores techniques of representing authorial positionality, especially as it relates to the production of history. To fill the narrative gaps, the creative nonfiction story attempts to humanize neighborhood destruction; it also calls attention to the continuation of oppression and how these histories manifest in the present.

¹Womxn is an intersectional term used to signal the inclusion of those who have traditionally been excluded from white feminist discourse.