Representations of the black metropolis: Place and African American identity on Chicago's South Side

"Representations of the Black Metropolis" examines how a sense of place inspired African American writers living in and writing about the South Side of Chicago. It addresses a gap in the scholarship on the South Side that traditionally overlooks the relationship between literary production and place. I meet this need by integrating African American literature and cultural geography to argue that identities—both individual and collective—are not only the product of location but vary according to different geographic scales. Drawing on notions of scale and scalar construction developed by Neil Smith, Sallie Marston, Neil Brenner, Doreen Massey, and David Harvey, my work offers a new understanding of the South Side. These scholars' observation that place and scale are not static concepts but part of a continual dialectical process has prompted me to analyze Chicago's South Side as a system of scales—buildings, neighborhoods, streets—rather than as a unitary region. This perspective reveals the degree to which distinct platial components can both oppress African Americans and afford them opportunities to contest dominant paradigms. Such a microscopic view highlights the importance of a network of places in the development of the city's character and its residents' social personas. Applying these scalar conceptions to literary texts from the South Side, we see how African Americans grappled with and came to terms with spatial and societal shifts and began to realize more precisely the power of scale in shaping urban life for many African Americans in the World War II and post-war eras. In addition to cultural geography, my dissertation furthers its interdisciplinary approach by incorporating urban theory and planning and sociological studies of race and gender to examine works by: Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Frank London Brown, Richard Wright, and Iceberg Slim. Concentrating solely on scalar relations on South Side facilitates an intrinsic understanding of the physical dynamics of place. In limiting my discussion to the work of African Americans, this project studies how issues of race and racism affect a significant segment of Chicago's South Side population.