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Pinhook Day Embrace, 2015. Image courtesy of David Todd Lawrence.
In Review

Storying Pinhook: Representing the Community, the Floods, and the Struggle

When They Blew the Levee is a fierce love letter to the power of community, one encoded to Black sociality, the broader American social imaginary, and the mythical power of the Mississippi River. In praxis, it is a political tool—a lyrical baseball bat—for the residents of Pinhook, Missouri to wield in a rally against the sustained structural violence of a biased justice system and racialized world.

Ruins of Pinhook Union Baptist Church circa 2014. Like all buildings in the village, the church was completely submerged for more than two weeks. It was set ablaze by an arsonist soon after the water subsided and was later demolished along with remaining town buildings in 2015. Image courtesy of David Todd Lawrence.
Teaching and Practice

“The Soul to See”: Toward a Hoodoo Ethnography

In his book, How Racism Takes Place, George Lipsitz (2011: 5) contends that “race is produced by space,” and that “it takes places for racism to take place.” While Lipsitz focuses primarily on the intersection of race and space in urban settings, racialized spatial practices in rural environments can be just as devastating to communities of color, if not more so.