| dc.description.abstract | Missing Miami: Anti-Blackness and the Making of the South Florida Myth presents an investigation of Miami, Florida’s cultural topography, with specific attention to how anti-Blackness has shaped the city. In this dissertation, I problematize narratives of Miami as a diverse, immigrant-friendly, and global city by analyzing state-sanctioned disenfranchisement of Afro-descended inhabitants. I have structured this project around the following questions: What circumstances, issues, and cultures shape the city, its inhabitants, and representations? What is at stake in the overabundance of descriptions of Miami as “diverse,” “not Southern,” “Caribbean,” “Latin American”? What do these descriptors reveal about the city’s racial politics and cultural climate? What do they hide?
The answers to these questions shore up my argument that the construction of Miami as a diverse extension of the Caribbean and/or Latin America validates narratives of the US as an inclusive nation and belies the global prevalence of anti-blackness. Missing Miami draws on and departs from work in literary and cultural studies, cultural geography, critical race theory, migrant studies, and Afro-Diasporic studies to complicate the celebration of Miami’s demographic. In particular, this project pinpoints a popular and scholarly tendency to displace widespread iterations of racism, xenophobia, and other similarly repressive ideologies onto allegedly “racist,” “backward,” and “unsafe” regions, i.e., the mythic South. I suggest that the myths of Miami’s inclusivity and the exclusionary South are codependent, and that the constitution of Miami as an inclusive space is necessarily dependent on the erasure of ongoing anti-Blackness that is disproportionately displaced onto the South. Rather than seeking to define, or categorize, Miami as either Southern or Caribbean, my project aims to investigate how authors, journalists, and filmmakers both reify and write against claims of Miami’s diversity. I focus on representations of Afro-Diasporic populations set in Miami ranging from the 1950s to the 2000s. My methodological approach, which uses Miami as a microcosm to discuss transnational racial hierarchies, facilitates an intersectional analysis of cross cultural interaction, and tension, and treats antiblackness as not only a global phenomenon, but also a transnational problem. | |
