Home-Coming | Coming-Home: A Discourse Deriving from Black Domesticity

Abstract

When imagining a discourse around Black domesticity, it is essential to create new parameters, or for that matter, no parameters at all, no longer relying only on colonial Anglo-Saxon methods telling how to appropriate or deem What is considered space-making and What is not. What is comfortable and What is not, What is safe and What is not, What is beautiful and What is not and so on. This discourse interrogates and respond to gaps within the cannon. A discourse that is no longer concerning with the individual and more about the collective. A discourse of collective cultivation, cultural tracing, a discourse around being. No longer relying on the built environment as the only enabler of space-making but relying also on that of the human body and of earth. This thesis searches for traces of spatial liberation and cultural identities within the domestic realm of Blacks. Analyzing historical typologies within Black vernacular ranging from the slave plantation to that of the current day suburb, identifying spaces and bodily movements of liberation within these communities. Using this framework to reveal how the study of Black Domesticity has the power to reimagine and reassemble how we think about housing in America. Using these findings to then return to a site of Black Domesticity such as Pruitt Igoe, creating a rebuttal against the system. For Blacks to return to this site, it can represent the ultimate act of home-coming/coming-home in which this time through Black domestic space-making indicates WE ARE HERE TO STAY.