Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban LifeAs 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
1 | |
Mapping the Black Metropolis A Cultural Geography of the Stroll | 21 |
Making Do Beauty Enterprise and the Makeover of Race Womanhood | 53 |
Theaters of War Spectacles Amusements and the Emergence of Urban Film Culture | 91 |
The Birth of Two Nations White Fears Black Jeers and the Rise of a Race Film Consciousness | 121 |
Sacred Tastes The Migrant Aesthetics and Authority of Gospel Music | 155 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African American amusement athletic Baptist Baseball basketball beauty culture became black community black film black film culture black metropolis black women Booker Broad Ax Chicago Defender Chicago’s black Chicago’s New Negro church Club Colored Company consciousness consumer patrons context di√erent Dorsey Dorsey’s exhibition Foster Frazier Freeman Gospel Blues gospel music gospel sound GPJC hair Harlem Harlem Renaissance History images industrial Jack Johnson jazz Joyner July labor larger League leisure Leland Giants Madam C. J. Walker mass consumer migrants movie moving pictures National Negro spirituals O’Neal o√ered old settler respectability old-line Oscar Micheaux Pekin play players political popular production professional public sphere race films race pride race riots racial reform Rise of Gospel Rube Rube Foster Sept Smith social songs space sporting strategies Street Stroll style theaters tion uplift urban vaudeville vision Washington working-class