Black literature of revolutionary protest from Chicago's South Side: A local literary history, 1931--1959

This dissertation argues that the Chicago Renaissance (1935-1953) is a defining moment in the history of African American political aesthetics. Propelled by the work of the South Side Writers Group, brought together by Richard Wright in 1936, the Chicago Renaissance emerged from the city's intensely segregated conditions and freedom struggles. The SSWG developed a distinctive form of "Afro-Marxist cosmopolitanism," shaped by their fusion of black vernacular culture and traditions of protest, as well as the radical political and artistic theories of the interracial Old Left. Like the "New Civil Rights History," which focuses on grassroots movement histories, this dissertation places an emphasis on collaborative networks, black women's activism, and the role of local culture in resisting oppression.;Each literary text in this dissertation engages with grassroots freedom and labor struggles. Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing," the SSWG's defining artistic declaration, calls for a specifically movement-oriented black literature that confronted the tensions between black nationalism and Marxist political and aesthetic theory. Published in the short-lived but influential New Challenge magazine, "Blueprint" articulates a dialectical approach that attempts to distinguish the Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance. While Wright exaggerated the differences between the two movements, texts like Margaret Walker's For My People, Theodore Ward's Big White Fog, and Wright's Uncle Tom's Children demonstrate how Chicago conditions and SSWG collaborations gave rise to an aesthetically powerful and influential literature that actively contributed to political activism. A child of the Chicago Renaissance years, Lorraine Hansberry devised A Raisin in the Sun to take up the political and artistic concerns of earlier South Side writers, reworking the 1930's mix of leftist and nationalist materials with a diasporic consciousness to forge an "aesthetics of segregation." This aesthetic responds to racial oppression in Cold War Chicago by testifying to realities of segregated life and undertaking the revolutionary task of imagining alternatives to the present social order---including desegregation, black self-determination, and socialism.