The Landscape of Black Placelessness: African American Place and Heritage on the Postwar Campus

This article examines the ways African American history is effaced, distorted, and re-interpreted on an urban university campus. We focus on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), which sits where the university and state displaced an African American community after World War II. The community's displacement was rationalized by urban renewal ideology that championed the benefits of an urban campus and dismissed African American landscape histories. In the 21st century, the university and city celebrate the area's African American heritage, but the landscape of parking lots, empty spaces, and homogenous postwar architecture is represented as a placeless ahistorical expanse. Representing the campus as having no place-based heritage evades the university's history of racial displacement and rationalizes planning that remains firmly committed to the same development interests as postwar urban renewal.