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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Naick, Patrick. "Representations of the Black Metropolis: Place and African American Identity on Chicago’s South Side," American Studies, University of Iowa, December 2008. Advisor: Barbara Eckstein
Like Harlem, Chicago’s South Side has been a noted center of African American cultural activity since the Great Migration and produced an equally significant contribution to the arts and letters. My research examines the relationship between location and literary production by asking how a sense of place inspired African American writers living in and writing about the South Side of Chicago in the mid twentieth century. It integrates cultural geography and African American literature by applying notions of scale to the South Side, analyzing the area on the varying microscopic levels of buildings, neighborhoods, and city streets, rather than as a whole, monolithic region. It argues that both individual and collective identities are not only the product of location but vary according to these different geographic scales, finding that these “platial” components can both oppress African Americans and afford them opportunities to contest dominant paradigms. Applying scalar conceptions to literary texts by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Frank London Brown, Richard Wright, and Iceberg Slim, this project shows how many of Chicago’s African Americans as represented by these writers began to realize more precisely the power of scale in shaping urban life.
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