Attached Paper Annual Meeting 2024

Long Stand the House John Africa Built: Secular Spatial Order and Insurgent Sacred Space in 1978 Philadelphia

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This paper examines the 1978 police raid of the West Philadelphia headquarters of MOVE, a Black radical religious organization, as a clash of competing spatial imaginations. Tracing the conflict between the secular spatial imaginary of Philadelphia’s carceral governance and MOVE’s insurgent approach to cultivating sacred space, I demonstrate the secular spatial logic encoded in zoning laws and their carceral enforcement by analyzing MOVE’s metaphysical reordering of urban space as a direct challenge to secular spatial order.