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.
This essay argues that the study of urban poverty is too often characterised by the disappearance of specific people and bodily politics from our analytic frames, rendering modes of life and politics ...illegible to scholars. We call for attention to the embodied politics of knowledge production, as neighbourhoods surrounding universities are exploited first as laboratories for poverty scholarship—exemplified in the relationship between the Chicago School’s theory of human ecology and the racialised real estate markets—and then as devalued spaces for creative industries. Following work at the intersection of urban studies and American studies, we call for a relational reading of the archives of dominant poverty scholarship, and for scholarship attentive to the body—as a knowledge project only ever partially recorded in fieldnotes or the archives—as a key site for politics.
Today colleges and universities are the dominant employers, real estate holders, policing agents, and educational and health care providers in major cities where they once played a less prominent ...role. Neighborhoods of color surrounding urban campuses are left most vulnerable to the for-profit developments of higher education, because the land is cheap and the citizens hold little political influence. This essay examines the long-standing relationship between the University of Chicago (U of C) and black communities surrounding the campus to chronicle the rise of what I call “UniverCities.” The U of C’s historic control of urban development on the South Side helps explain why higher education must be placed alongside the state and the financial sector as a key institutional catalyst shaping the growth and development of the twenty-first-century city.
This essay investigates the campaign by the University of Chicago to shift the semantics and language of historic preservation from the literal and common understanding that "preservation" means the ...preserving of spaces, buildings and the material artefacts of places of historic and cultural importance to the gentrification-driven redefinition of "preserving a sense of the institution while destroying its materiality and its physical home." To many within the field of historic preservation, the planned demolition of the Checkerboard Lounge, a historic blues venue and signature showpiece of the historically Black "Bronzeville" neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, the controversy may hardly seem surprising. U of Chicago's claim to be "saving" the Checkerboard by moving a few of its signs and ephemera into an archive is not historic preservation but ham-handed gentrification, reflecting the growing power of institutions of higher education in shaping urban development and redevelopment at the expense of African American and black historic preservation efforts. OA
In the penultimate scene to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the normally composed and gentlemanly mulatto Lieutenant Governor Silas Lynch can no longer contain himself. He has become the ...leader of a rising “black South.” “Drunk with wine and power,” his maddening ambition for political dominion seethes over into the ultimate desire that seems to drive any black male quest for authority throughout the film: Lynch exclaims, “I want to marry a white woman!” True to the deceptive nature of the duplicitous mulatto, he does not want to marry just any white woman but Elsie, the daughter of his abolitionist mentor, Austin Stoneman. Though Elsie comes from a lineage of radical advocates for equal rights, a proposal of marriage goes too far and she jerks away, offering him only a “horsewhipping for his insolence.” Lynch is outraged. Her rejection sends him into a lecherous frenzy, determined to abduct Elsie if she will not come willingly. For a moment, he regains some composure and with a snide veneer of arrogance, saunters over to the window and pulls back the curtain to reveal white residents cowering in fear to an overwhelming and bloodthirsty reign of black terror. Lynch points outside and proclaims: “See! My people fill the streets. With them I will build a Black Empire and you as a Queen shall sit by my side.”
Using the University of Chicago as a case study, this essay examines the racial foundations of sociological thought during the discipline's rising academic legitimacy and cultural authority, in the ...first half of the 20 th century. Much more than critical hindsight, the basic theories and methods developed by the “Chicago School” and Robert Park in particular did not just construct racial categories, but were constructed by national anxieties about racial differences in urbanizing America. From this anxiety emerged a “second wave” of Black social scientists who both offered important and under recognized critiques of the “Chicago School” outlook, while reinforcing its industrial framework of organization and civilization in ways that marked “Black” identity as maladjustment, deviance and dysfunction. By stripping away this overarching sociological framework and resituating the “data” derived from “Black subjects” within its migrant and urban context, this essay ends with thoughts about how Chicago's Black residents theorized themselves, their neighborhoods and the larger world in ways that challenged both White and Black sociological visions.
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.
Baldwin discusses two texts that place black cultural production at the center of study. They are Barbara Foley's Spectres of 1919 and Joel Dinerstein's Swinging the Machine.
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