Rishabh Annotations

Can you suggest ways to elaborate the caption of this visualization to extend its ethnographic message?

Thursday, March 5, 2020 - 6:38am

Both the caption and the image address the divisive production of space. But the image actually goes further than the caption : by defining a given population (one with white children) as desired for bettering the neighborhood, it negatively frames the current population as blight-causing ; through presenting whiteness as a remedy, the image is actually about the toxicity of blackness. The caption, on the other hand, could be more explicit, and mention outwarldly the category that is enforced through the divisive production of space : blackness.

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How does this visualization (including caption) advance ethnographic insight? What message | argument | sentiment | etc. does this visualization communicate or represent?

Thursday, March 5, 2020 - 5:14am

The image, a newsletter from the 1950s, shows us the detail with which certain spaces propogated specific communities to invest in certain futures. Strinkingly, the newsletter ties up the quality of (social, public) housing with "WHO" lives in it, and there is little room for ambiguity in the depiction that accompanies the text: blond-headed white children. The community called to invest in making Manhattanville a "better place to live in" will first and foremost (as made clear by the size of the font) do so by "bet[ting]" on themselves, by embodying through their very "whiteness" a better[ment]".

This image is a piece of ethnographic evidence in that it exposes what is actually contained in the idea of "better", "blight"-free housing infrastructure: the materiality of the derilict and blighted housing to be transformed, but also and more importantly still, the "undesired" inhabitants that beg for replacement. 

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