Race and Prosaic Materiality

Race has long been rendered invisible in everyday materiality or remade to mask the relationship between material things and the colour line. This chapter focuses on a public sculpture project in Indianapolis, Indiana and reveals how racist privileges are at the heart of American experience even as the racial dimensions of seemingly mundane materiality are unseen or concealed. The Indianapolis experience reflects the ways many communities struggle to simultaneously remember, displace, memorialize, and efface colour line heritage in cities where there appear to be no contemporary material...

Race has long been rendered invisible in everyday materiality or remade to mask the relationship between material things and the colour line. This chapter focuses on a public sculpture project in Indianapolis, Indiana and reveals how racist privileges are at the heart of American experience even as the racial dimensions of seemingly mundane materiality are unseen or concealed. The Indianapolis experience reflects the ways many communities struggle to simultaneously remember, displace, memorialize, and efface colour line heritage in cities where there appear to be no contemporary material traces of the colour line.