In the spring of 2024, I worked with Northeastern professor Kris Manjapra and Black History in Action Cambridgeport (BHAC) to organize and run several community events centering the performing arts at St. Augustine’s, an historic African Orthodox church in the Cambridgeport neighborhood of Cambridge, MA. We spent the semester theorizing ways to use performance to combat gentrification in Cambridgeport and to help protect St. Augustine’s from predatory redevelopment, using these community events as proofs-of-concept.
We discussed this work in a recently-published article for Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora. You can read the full article here.
Boston Globe reporter Jeffrey Kelly then wrote an article about the role of performance in BHAC’s anti-gentrification work. You can read the Boston Globe article here.
