Imagining Musical Place: Race, Heritage, and African American Musical Landscapes

Indianapolis, Indiana, once had a rich range of African American music and performance spaces in the city’s segregated near-Westside, but postwar urban renewal, construction of a university campus, and interstate displacement erased almost all of those venues by the 1970s. In the early twenty-first century, the city and developers have championed new construction, and many of those projects celebrate jazz history as the heart of the near-Westside’s heritage. However, the rhetorical valorization of selectively interpreted African American jazz history aspires to rationalize a half-century of erasures of African American place. Rather than acknowledging the breadth of African American expressive culture in Indianapolis’ near-Westside, the city’s imagination of jazz essentializes African American expressive culture to serve contemporary economic development and paint jazz as a unifying mechanism across color lines.