Register
Register here for the annual meeting and to begin or renew an ASA membership
Register here to submit a proposal through the ASA's 2012 submission site.
Register here for JHU Press and ASA membership services, including online access to American Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online.Register here to join an ASA community. Only current ASA members may contribute to the community blogs. Registration is not required to submit display or text ads or news and events or to view many pages. We will refuse posts that are not of professional interest to ASA members.
Click here for membership FAQ's
Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Baldwin, Davarian L. "Chicago's New Negroes: Race, Class and Respectability in the Midwestern Black Metropolis, 1915-1935," New York University, September 2001.
“Chicago’s New Negroes” examines migrant intellectuals turn to the mass marketplace to produce alternative visions of respectability through the gospel, film, and beauty culture industries in the black belt community, between 1915 and 1935. Because blacks shared a similar position of marginality within Chicago’s economic structure, twentieth century notions of respectability reflected class struggles over acceptable public forms of language, dress and behavior. However, changes in national urban culture at the end of World War I marked the beginning of a mass consumer culture that gave migrants access to new commodities and technologies in expanding film, recording and chemical (lye) industries. Gospel, film and beauty cultures within the mass marketplace became a refuge for the creation of a new Negro intellectual class whose power lay in the denied consumption habits and desires of the black masses. Moreover, it was through these cultures that Chicago’s new Negroes challenged older distinctions even while creating new kinds of exclusions within the black belt’s changing socio-economic structure. Battle lines drawn over musical rhythms, cinematic images and hairstyles, produced within the fluctuating mass marketplace, demonstrate the changing boundaries around class, respectability and the racial community in the early twentieth century. This project extends scholarly debates about the form and institutions in which black intellectual scholarship took place in the early twentieth century. Alain Locke’s The New Negroe: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance has stood at the central point of investigation for any artistic and intellectual activity of the period. While critical scholarship has continually offered necessary interventions to Locke’s oversights, it merely pinpoints the way in which mass culture has relegated to an object of literary and artistic form and it inadvertently re-centers 1920’s Harlem as the model. Whereas, my focus on gospel, film and beauty culture offer the circuits of mass consumption and production, as equally important spaces for Black intellectual formations.
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]
Encyclopedia of American Studies
Encyclopedia of American Studies [editorial site]