Charting the Territory: Writers of the Bronzeville Renaissance
FAIN: FT-55703-08
Richard A. Courage
Westchester Community College (Valhalla, NY 10595-1550)
This project involves archival research and writing a chapter in a co-authored (w. Robert Bone) book arguing the importance of South Side Chicago as a cultural milieu marked in the 1930s/40s by astonishingly creative ferment across the arts. This chapter will focus on the novels of William Attaway, Arna Bontemps, Willard Motley and Richard Wright and the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Marshall Davis and Margaret Walker and follows completed chapters on musicians and visual artists and another on the institutional milieu that I am currently writing. The book as a whole, including four background chapters drafted by my co-author, intends to challenge the current fragmentary view of early twentieth-century African American cultural history and offer an alternative perspective stressing both continuity and contrast, in which both the Harlem Renaissance and Bronzeville Renaissance are seen as part of a larger movement unfolding in two phases as responses to the Great Migration.
Associated Products
The Muse in Bronzeville (African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-1950) (Book)Title: The Muse in Bronzeville (African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-1950)
Author: Richard A. Courage
Author: Robert Bone
Abstract: A dynamic reappraisal of a neglected period in African American cultural history from the early 1930's to the cold war, is the first comprehensive critical study of the creative awakening that occurred on Chicago's South Side. This highly informative and accessible work, enhanced with repro-ductions of works of art of the same period, examines Black Chicago's "Renaissance" through richly anecdotal profiles of such figures as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Charles White, Gordon Parks, Horace Cayton, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, and Katherine Dunham.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Type: Other
Prizes
ISHS Superior Achievement in Scholarly Publication Award
Date: 1/1/2011
Organization: Illinois State Historical Society