“I’ve had a history of resistance”: Amy Stelly and the Claiborne avenue alliance’s fight against the Claiborne expressway in Tremé, New Orleans
通过口述史和移动民族志,研究艾米·斯特利领导草根运动拆除新奥尔良特雷梅区I-10克莱本高速公路,揭示基础设施如何造成种族化环境伤害,并展现黑人女性以修复性空间政治对抗慢暴力。
This article examines Amy Stelly’s longstanding grassroots struggle—through the Claiborne Avenue Alliance—to remove the I10 Claiborne Expressway from Tremé, New Orleans, as a case of Black feminist geography in action. Drawing on oral histories, “driveandtalk” mobile ethnography, and archival/contextual analysis, I situate Stelly’s activism within Clyde Woods’s account of the “neoBourbon” political economy to show how interstate infrastructure produces racialized environmental harm and slow violence. Centering Black women’s embodied knowledge and leadership, the article conceptualizes fractured solidarities to name the tensions, uneven kinship, and isolations that organizers navigate inside historically Black neighborhoods subject to disinvestment, surveillance, and gentrification. I argue that Stelly’s praxis—alongside allied women business owners in Tremé—enacts a reparative spatial politics that reclaims memory, public space, and planning literacy against toxic infrastructures that sever community life. The analysis contributes three interventions: (1) a feminist rereading of highway removal as environmental justice grounded in Black women’s placebased knowledge; (2) an articulation of fractured solidarities as a durable, if opaque, form of collective action; and (3) an applied framework for pairing oral history with mobile ethnography to inform policy debates (e.g., “Reconnecting Communities”) and public health/urban design assessments. In centering Black women’s testimonies as theory, the article expands Black feminist geographic accounts of repair and offers a methodology for ethically collaborating with communities confronting infrastructural racism.