The Chicago Black Renaissance: Exercises in aesthetic ideology and cultural geography in Bronzeville, 1932--1945

This dissertation aims to recover the Chicago Black Renaissance from a problematic black mythical geography heavily reliant on the divisions of north/south, east/west, and urban/rural. The Chicago Black Renaissance, a rich artistic and cultural movement, finds itself sequestered between these spaces and has been vastly under-theorized, making it, as a result, an invisible black space. My recovery of the Chicago Black Renaissance means adding important dimensions of study to this invisible space---describing a Midwest artistic movement where artists such as Gwendolyn Brooks are fully at home and artistically potent in the ground between the rural south and the urban metropolis. This dissertation intends, then, to position the Chicago Black Renaissance as an alternative geographic and cultural moment that disrupts the binaries of east/west, north/south, urban/rural, and pop culture/high culture. This expansive narrative responds to the challenge of dismantling simplistic rigid geographical axes along which we have typically studied black cultural output.;This dissertation focuses primarily on the geography and cultural setting in which the Chicago Black Renaissance took place to explore the degree to which Bronzeville figures as a unifying theme throughout the movement's creative output. This dissertation reads the texts---literary, visual, and musical---of the Chicago Black Renaissance through a materialist lens; it ties cultural production to the materials or environment informing the literature and arts. Authors, artists, and musicians of the Chicago Black Renaissance owe debts of gratitude to myriad institutions, financial patronage, thriving in 1940s Chicago as well as their aesthetic predecessors of the Harlem Renaissance, such WEB DuBois and Langston Hughes. DuBois and Hughes' aesthetic philosophies combined with Bronzeville as a thematic referent drove Bronzeville's remarkable cultural creativity to such a success that Bronzeville easily assumed the title of America's most thriving center of African American culture and arts in the mid twentieth century.