Encountering Juneteenth: Cultivating Homeplace in the Face of Spectacular Violence

Abstract

This article examines how the social protests of 2020, which occurred against the backdrop of George Floyd’s police lynching, challenged the author’s understanding of home. Drawing upon bell hooks’ framing of homeplace, this autoethnographic analysis explores how the need to identify homeplace under the specter of societal violence motivated the author to view Juneteenth celebrations as sites of homeplace cultivation. By placing three Juneteenth encounters within the context of her identity as a Black mother to Black sons, the author examines how her conceptualization of homeplace evolved over time and context. In framing each encounter through the themes of Black Joy, Black Pain, and Unapologetic Blackness, the author shows how Juneteenth sites provided a counterspace where she could reconceptualize her understanding of homeplace. Substantively, the paper illustrates the significance of Black spaces as sites of (self)knowledge and restoration, particularly in moments of social unrest. Theoretically, the paper illustrates how homeplace cultivation is a conceptually elastic framework that can be applied to home in the conventional sense and home as an unbounded space, cultivated as a response to social unease.