Chicago's new Negroes : modernity, the great migration, & Black urban life
Davarian L. Baldwin (Author)
"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" -- From the publisher
Print Book, English, 2007
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2007
History
xiv, 363 pages : black and white illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
9780807830994, 9780807857991, 0807830992, 0807857998
71237288
Introduction. "Chicago has no intelligentsia?": consumer culture and intellectual life reconsidered
Mapping the Black metropolis: a cultural geography of the stroll
Making do: beauty, enterprise, and the "makeover" of race womanhood
Theaters of war: spectacles, amusements, and the emergence of urban film culture
The birth of two nations: White fears, Black jeers, and the rise of a "race film" consciousness
Sacred tastes: the migrant aesthetics and authority of gospel music
The sporting life: recreation, self-reliance, and competing visions of race manhood
Epilogue. The crisis of the Black bourgeoisie, or, What If Harold Cruse had lived in Chicago?