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Preface Gwendolyn Brooks, a lifelong resident and Bronzeville native, once wrote, “If you wanted a poem, you had only to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.”1 Brooks did an interview much later in life where she was asked if she were disturbed by this environment to which she replied, “In my twenties when I wrote a good deal of my better-known poetry I lived on 63rd Street—at 623 East 63rd Street—and there was a good deal of life in the raw all about. You might feel that this would be disturbing, but it was not. It contributed to my writing progress. I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then on the other. There was my material.”2 She recalled receiving the letter at this address from publisher Harper and Brothers accepting A Street in Bronzeville for publication, after which she ran into her kitchenette apartment building’s “community bathrooms, locked the door, and gasped through the gold of a firm acceptance.”3 Poverty-stricken, segregated, and bursting at the seams with migrants— Brooks’s Bronzeville is the community that provided inspiration, training, and work for an entire generation of diversely talented African American authors and artists who came of age during the years between the two world wars. Willard Motley, poet, novelist, and nephew of famed painter Archibald Motley Jr., the first African American trained at the Chicago Art Institute, wrote,“There is a small group of young Negro artists in Chicago that will be heard from one of these days. At present they are struggling in garage and top-floor tenement studios. . . .They paint for the love of it.There is much talent in the group.”4 Many of these artists and authors went on to become the leading names in their fields and in so doing earned for the United States a reputation as the creative wellspring of twentieth-century African American art and literature.Yet, until late, the majority of Chicago’s Schlabach_AlongtheStreets_text.indd 9 5/6/13 1:29 PM x preface African American writers and artists and their Renaissance movement had remained in relative scholarly obscurity. Along the Streets of Bronzeville fills this void in African American cultural arts’ scholarship while it delineates new modes of artistic thought and aesthetics. The project contributes both to current efforts to expand upon the history of African American cultural production during the twentieth century and to theories of race, identity, and geography. Reading across a wide range of visual, literary, and popular texts, from some of the world’s most popular African American authors and artists, Along the Streets reads the artistic legacy of the Chicago Black Renaissance as a configuration of subjectivity and identity that retheorizes the relationship between artistry and place. This project demonstrates what Chicago’s artists, authors, and musicians were doing that pushed Harlem to the background and Chicago to the foreground of black cultural production. It shows that Bronzeville, specifically, became a distinctive place with a distinctive aesthetic for African American Cultural production in the mid–twentieth century. The Chicago Black Renaissance had a unique Midwestern conceptualization of space,which enables a new understanding ofAfricanAmerican cultural and literary history. Part of recovering the Chicago Black Renaissance means adding important dimensions of study to this space—describing a Midwest artistic movement where artists and authors such as Gwendolyn Brooks are fully at home and artistically potent in the segregated urban metropolis.This study finds that Chicago’s African American artists and authors shared a common question,a common theme,and a common politics—that their art should always present black reality from the vantage point of African Americans in Bronzeville. Thus the movement is richly textured by its sociohistorical setting; the South Side of Chicago’s streets, alleyways, and institutions are the threads that bind the Chicago Black Renaissance. Together these arguments map Chicago as the logical hotbed of African American Renaissance creativity—unrivaled by any city throughout the mid–twentieth century. As a conceptual category, the “Chicago Black Renaissance” first gained prominence in 1986, when it was articulated by Robert Bone, a scholar of African American literature.5 Since then, the Renaissance has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, but it remains largely unknown to the public, even in Chicago itself. Samuel Floyd...

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