The Idea of Trap Culture

Keywords: trap, urbanism, Lefebvre, alienation, black culture
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In the 21st century, the boom of Atlanta trap culture has become just as crucial to maintaining its global influence as the city’s six decades of black political leadership. Despite their centrality to (re)producing its New South urban arrangement, Atlanta’s black cultural and political apparatuses face a crisis of displacement that is coterminous with the mass displacement of the city’s black spaces and people. This crisis illuminates a scandal in the conceptualization of a Lefebvrian “right to the city,” as it troubles the notion that urban cultural production is a sufficient means through which its producers might overcome alienation to assert a right to the commune. This paper thus interrogates Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the role of urban culture and creativity in relation to the right to the city, and argues that its political demand and theoretical intervention fails to account for the ontological reasons why Atlanta, as a black music mecca, fails disalienate The Slave, desegregate the urban commons, and prevent the displacement of blackness from its urban form.I draw on the work of Hortense Spillers, and Afropessimist meta-critique to problematize Lefebvrian and Marxist urban theory's failure to consider the ontological implications of anti-blackness in its conceptualization of alienation. Specifically, In ruminating on Spillers’s indispensable questions regarding (the idea of) Black Culture: “what is ‘black culture’ to the ‘West?’ And what is it to itself?” I ask, “what is ‘black culture' to the city? And what is blackness to “the urban”–which is to say, what is it to “itself?”