University of Illinois Press The Black Chicago Renaissance (New Black Studies Series)

Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivalled the cultural outpouring in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The contributors to this volume analyze this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial centre that gave a unique working class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. This collection's various essays discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and placed the development of black culture in a national and international context. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940. Review "This landmark anthology, the first to comprehensively gather work on the Black Chicago Renaissance, ratifies that topic's ascendant stature within recent African American and American historical study. A tremendous achievement for its editors and contributors, and an indispensable scholarly resource for generations to come." --Adam Green, author of Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 About the Author Darlene Clark Hine is Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies, professor of history, and chair of African American Studies at Northwestern University. John McCluskey Jr. is professor emeritus of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.