Hostility as Technique: Making White Space in a Black City (Observing a City Over Time through Collective Filmmaking and Collaborative Research)

ABSTRACT:This commentary examines how White space gets produced in a Black city, highlighting the affective dimensions of this production. In addition to showing how hostility works to produce White space, it establishes a link between this contemporary production and the repetition of the original colonizing project. Finally, this commentary thinks through the ways in which collective filmmaking by long-term residents of the city—in this case, Detroit—offers important alternative affective ways for thinking about and valuing the present and future of the city. In this way, the Black city emerges as a site of possibility, countering persistent images of abandonment and dereliction.