Description: Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.
Review Quotes: In Erasure by Design, V. Mitch McEwen wanders and invites readers into that practice of trying to see the "surface and protocols of erasure." How do you map a void? How do you mark erasure (of living, of resistance, of planned removal, and more) without producing another erasure? From Southwest DC to MoMA to Los Angeles to the plans for Negro removal and Japanese removal and incarceration (and so much more), McEwen attends to the languages, strategies, and materialities of erasure, and builds a connective web across time, space, and geography that is resonant and capacious and able to show us in astonishing clarity the spatial projects, the design, of total violence subtended by antiblackness.--Christina Sharpe