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Heather Stoneberg-Henry
Ethnic Studies / History

Susan Hardwick, Mentor

Spatializing ‘Race’: Cartographies of Power in Portland, Oregon, 1905-1952

This research addresses the problem of how Portland’s urban landscape came to be racialized along a black/white binary by the end of World War II. The Pacific Northwest represents a rich location for understanding transnational relationships, modern subjectivities, and the development of hybrid communities. Various historical moments in Portland’s shifting racial geography, such as the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition and the 1942 relocation of the Japanese-American community, reveal a complicated narrative of power relations in which spatial constructions of social identity were contested by people inhabiting urban places inscribed with both gendered and racial meaning.