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

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.