“I’ve had a history of resistanceâ€: Amy Stelly and the Claiborne avenue alliance’s fight against the Claiborne expressway in Tremé, New Orleans

Parvathy Binoy

Environment and Planning C, 2025, vol. 43, issue 8, 1639-1657

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Black feminist geography; Tremé; New Orleans; Claiborne expressway; fractured solidarities; environmental justice; slow violence; urban renewal; oral history; activist ethnography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:8:p:1639-1657

DOI: 10.1177/23996544251374992

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