Haunting Interruptions: Race, Infrastructural Violence, and Spatial Memory in Ferguson, Missouri, United States

ABSTRACT This article engages race, infrastructural violence, and spatial memory in Ferguson, Missouri—the St. Louis suburb where police killed 18‐year‐old Michael Brown, Jr. in August 2014. It examines Black communities' use of blockades, space‐based protests, and infrastructural disruption in Ferguson before and after the teenager's execution. It argues that Black subjects deploy tactics of spatial intervention not only to claim space in Ferguson but also to haunt its geography and collective memory. I interrogate how Black people disrupt space to remember and expose the legacies of racialized violence in the local geography. These disruptive practices—what I call “haunting interruptions”—impede infrastructures to indict the racist logics undergirding (sub)urban life and to perform a public recollection of irreparable, place‐based violence. Examining historical and contemporary protests in Ferguson, I showcase how Black subjects employ haunting as an essential mode of refusal and critical memory in anti‐Black geographies.