“New Sounds to Imagine”: Coalition, Coltrane, and Mediating Personhood in San Francisco’s Fillmore District

Abstract: Processes of displacement and gentrification, often framed as projects of urban renewal and preservation, have long shaped the demographics of San Francisco in often drastic and inequitable ways. Once known as the Harlem of the West and today commemorated as the city’s historic Jazz Preservation District, the city’s Fillmore neighborhood has long been saddled with racialized narratives of blight and poverty related to its palimpsestic histories of primarily Japanese and Black communities, even as it continues to hold space for specifically coalitional institutions and services. This article examines two of those bodies, the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church and the community radio station KPOO, as interconnected mediative nodes in a network of sound, place, and personhood that work together in the generation of aural imaginaries that make possible anti-hegemonic reinterpretations of what it means to belong in San Francisco. Working with sources in human geography, cultural studies, sound studies, and public history, I contextualize and analyze a broadcast of the devotional program Uplift to better understand the existential value of these nonprofit organizations for San Franciscans facing large-scale erasure and their capabilities to generate new geographic possibilities that counter reductive, top-down narratives of local identity.