While Washington, D.
C., is still often referred to as Chocolate City, it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade.
Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.
C.\'s Black residents..
Summers also analyzes how blackness--as a representation of diversity--is marketed to sell a progressive, cool, and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center.
Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation\'s capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities.
In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital.
In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.
C.\'s shift to a Post-Chocolate cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street\'s economic and racial developments.
In D.
C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor.
While Washington, D.
C., is still often referred to as Chocolate City, it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade
