Pan African Agency and the Cultural Political Economy of the Black City is a dissertation study of Detroit that characterizes the city as a 'Pan African Metropolis' within the combined histories of Black Metropolis theory and theories of Pan African cultural nationalism. The dissertation attempts to reconfigure Saint Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's Jr's theorization on the Black Metropolis to understand the intersectional dynamics of culture, politics, and economy as they exist in a Pan African value system for the contemporary Black city. Differently from the classic Black Metropolis study, the current study incorporates African heritage celebration as a major Black life axes in the maintenance of the Black city's identity.Using Detroit as a case study, the study contends that through their sustained allegiance to African/Afrocentric identity, Black Americans have enhanced the Black city through their creation of a distinctive cultural political economy, which manifests in what I refer to throughout the study as a Pan African Metropolis. I argue that the Pan African Metropolis emerged more visibly and solidified itself during Detroit's Black Arts Movement in the 1970s of my youth (Thompson, 1999). Its emergence crystalized a variety of Black life socio-political enhancements for the Black community.These enhancements were especially noted in the way it cultivated Black racial pride and love within a Pan African Diasporic solidarity what I refer to in the study as Black agency. This was achieved in major part through its constructions of various Black place-making and the creation of Afro-centric marketplaces that constitute a long trajectory of adaptive-vitality (Karenga, 2010) in the cultural and economic formation of Detroit.This thesis is supported through a qualitative case study of Detroit's African World Festival (AWF) and conducts field research and direct observational study of the annual festival's producers and consumers. In doing so, the study draws from a primary field research study of Detroit and applies interdisciplinary African American Studies' mixed methodologies that combine Africana philosophy, cultural studies (Morley, & Chen, 1996) and qualitative observational methodologies of grounded theory to arrive at significant conclusions about the Black city.The conclusions observed here constitute three insightful revelations about the key themes of Pan African agency, Pan African place-making and/or African heritage celebration/preservation. The concept of Pan African agency engulfs the later two themes of Pan African place-making and African heritage preservation. As such, the findings conclude that the Black city's Pan African agency reveals alternative norms and values about Black culture in Detroit that are not represented in mainstream representations. Additionally, the dissertation offers representative interventions in the ways that Black cities are understood, or misunderstood, and finally these conclusions for the study relate to wider systems of power, in this case the challenges to self-determination, equality and political freedom attended by Black cultural nationalism.
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