Chicago's New Negroes
Subtitle: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: April 2, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 363
ISBN-13: 9780807857991
Subjects: Black studies; History of specific racial & ethnic groups; Social history; c 1900 - c 1914; Social Science; Ethnic Issues; Sociology; Illinois; Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - Histor; United States - 20th Century (1900-1945); United States - State & Local - Midwest; Chicago; New Negro Movement; Black Metropolis; Great Migration; Bronzeville; Harlem Renaissance; beauty culture; gospel music; film exhibition; vaudeville; early twentieth-century filmmaking; Negro spirituals; radio; sports; athletics; recreation; policy; Discrimination & Racism; Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General; United States - 20th Century; 20th century; African Americans; Chicago; History; Migrations; Social conditions
Description: "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.