Chicago's new Negros: Race, class and respectability in the midwestern black metropolis, 1915--1935 (Illinois).

详细信息   

• 作者：Baldwin ; Davarian L.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2002
• 导师：Kelley, Robin D. G.
• 毕业院校：New York University
• 专业：American Studies.;History, Black.;Sociology, Theory and Methods.
• ISBN：0493480862
• CBH：3035278
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：17347323
• Pages：436

文摘

This study examines how Chicago's new Negro intellectuals turned to the mass marketplace to produce alternative visions of respectability through the gospel, film and beauty culture industries in the black belt community, between 1915 and 1935. Because blacks shared a similar position of marginality within Chicago's economic structure, twentieth century notions of respectability reflected class struggles over acceptable public forms of language, dress and behavior. Changes in national urban culture at the end of World War I gave migrants wider access to a mass consumer culture that included new commodities and technologies in expanding film, recording and chemical (lye) industries. Gospel, film and beauty cultures within the mass marketplace became a refuge for the creation of a new Negro intellectual class whose power lay in the denied consumption habits and desires of the black masses. Through these cultures, Chicago's new Negroes challenged older distinctions while creating new kinds of exclusions within the black belt's changing socio-economic structure. Battle lines drawn over musical rhythms, cinematic images and hairstyles, produced within the fluctuating mass marketplace, demonstrate the changing boundaries around class, respectability and the racial community in the early twentieth century.;My dissertation extends scholarly debates about the form and institutions in which black intellectual scholarship took place in the early twentieth century. Alain Locke's The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance has stood as the central point of investigation for any artistic and intellectual activity of the period. While critical scholarship has offered necessary interventions, it merely pinpoints the way in which mass culture was relegated to an object of literary and artistic form and it inadvertently re-centers 1920's Harlem as the model. Whereas, my focus on the marketplace, explores the ways in which the circuits of mass consumption and production were part of larger Black intellectual formations. Members of mass culture do not control its production but they do control the way culture is used—how it is consumed in everyday life. Black working-class migrant's behaviors and lifestyles produced new community institutions, dissident public voices and alternative routes to social mobility all within the urban mass marketplace.