Chicago's new Negroes : modernity, the great migration, & Black urban life / Davarian L. Baldwin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baldwin, Davarian L.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Illinois--Chicago--History--20th century.

African Americans.

African Americans--Illinois--Chicago--Social conditions--20th century.

African Americans--Migrations--History--20th century.

Migration, Internal--United States--History--20th century.

Migration, Internal.

African Americans--Migrations.

History.

Social conditions.

United States.

Chicago (Ill.)--History--1875-.

Chicago (Ill.).

Chicago (Ill.)--Social conditions--20th century.

Chicago (Ill.)--Population--History--20th century.

Chicago (Ill.)--Race relations--History--20th century.

Illinois--Chicago.

Physical Description:

xiv, 363 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2007]

Summary:

As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship.

Baldwin explores an abundant archive of cultural formations where an array of white observers, black cultural producers, critics, activists, reformers, and black migrant consumers converged in what he terms a "marketplace intellectual life." Here the thoughts and lives of Madam C. J. Walker, Oscar Micheaux, Andrew "Rube" Foster, Elder Lucy Smith, Jack Johnson, and Thomas Dorsey emerge as individual expressions of a much wider spectrum of black political and intellectual possibilities. By placing consumer-based amusements alongside the more formal arenas of church and academe, Baldwin suggests important new directions for both the historical study and the constructive future of ideas and politics in American life.

Contents:

Introduction: "Chicago Has No Intelligentsia"?: Consumer Culture and Intellectual Life Reconsidered 1

1 Mapping the Black Metropolis: A Cultural Geography of the Stroll 21

2 Making Do: Beauty, Enterprise, and the "Makeover" of Race Womanhood 53

3 Theaters of War: Spectacles, Amusements, and the Emergence of Urban Film Culture 91

4 The Birth of Two Nations: White Fears, Black Jeers, and the Rise of a "Race Film" Consciousness 121

5 Sacred Tastes: The Migrant Aesthetics and Authority of Gospel Music 155

6 The Sporting Life: Recreation, Self-Reliance, and Competing Visions of Race Manhood 193

Epilogue: The Crisis of the Rlack Bourgeoisie, Or, What If Harold Cruse Had Lived in Chicago? 233.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [297]-353) and index.

ISBN:

0807830992

9780807830994

0807857998

9780807857991

OCLC:

71237288