Make Buckhead great again: Phantasmagoria and the geographies of authoritarian urbanism

Abstract

This article engages with the spatial dynamics of reactionary authoritarianism in white urban secession movements around Atlanta. These movements seek to incorporate, annex, de-annex, or otherwise utilize municipal boundary change to carve off exclusive communities from a diverse metro. Such movements have, for almost two decades, traded largely on the austerity logics of neoliberal urbanism and privatized governance; recent secessionist efforts, such as the movement for a so-called Buckhead City, have instead taken on more explicitly reactionary valences. Drawing upon the Frankfurt School—particularly Walter Benjamin’s conceptual development of phantasmagoria—I seek to position the recent Buckhead City movement as an attempt at realizing what the geographer Natalie Koch calls ‘authoritarian univocality’ in service of the reproduction of possessive geographies of whiteness, demonstrating how a critical practice of [un]grounding can help geographers to challenge emergent formations of racial authoritarianism at multiple scales.