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.