UC San Diego

Didn't It Rain?: Religiosity, Swingin’ Jazz, and Black Community Formations in the Pacific Northwest (1844 – 1967) focuses on the ways in which the material conditions of anti-black racism, segregation, and exclusion affect the development of the Pacific Northwest from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. Furthermore I identify and examine the contributions of Black communities over time to the development of the Pacific Northwest, including the ways in which religion and jazz music have functioned to define freedom for Black communities and support community movements for freedom and equality. This project deploys an intersectional analysis, routed through political geography and historical materialism, which considers the ways in which the logics of slavery affect the development of communal relationships with land in the Pacific Northwest within the prevailing contexts of Manifest Destiny and settler colonialism in the US. Didn’t It Rain intervenes on the abstraction and normalization of the concept of ‘private property’ by engaging with the ways in which property is a racialized and gendered concept. At the same time, I am concerned with the ways in which Black communities have imagined and produce different relationships to land that exceed conceptions of private property due the material histories of chattel slavery.