Planning: Black Women, Home, and the Aesthetics of Space in Mid-20th Century Chicago

Abstract

Planning examines Black women’s visions and desires for quality housing in mid-20th century Chicago. In Chicago, Black people across classes and cultures were hemmed into a narrow section of the landscape. Such spatial congestion produced avenues for aesthetic and political collectivity—what scholars have termed the Chicago Black Renaissance—but also remained a significant structural problem for Black residents in their everyday lives. My dissertation shows how Black women theorized the structural issue of space through a set of acts that I understand collectively as planning: seeing, inhabiting, critiquing, and reimagining the built world on their own terms. In the introduction, I turn to visual art and photography to describe the extent of the spatial problem Black women faced in Chicago. In chapter one, I argue that Gwendolyn Brooks’ use of the “plan” and its language in her first poetry collection A Street in Bronzeville (1945) intervenes in housing reform discourses that depersonalized the matter of home for the Black underclass, and that framed Black women and girls’ domestic lives as evidence of social decline. Through the language of planning, the poet animates Black women’s worldmaking beyond the limits of confinement and surveillance in urban space. Building from Brooks, chapter two centers a suburban Black women’s club, and how members subverted the racial politics of property and ownership to secure a house for young Black domestic workers outside their white employers’ homes. Chapter three focuses on a surrealist painting of a Black woman’s eviction, and it asks what the genre of surrealism does for something as visceral and tangible as expulsion. Chapter four reads Lorraine Hansberry’s stage play A Raisin in the Sun (1959) as a confrontation with the patriarchal, capitalist, and heterosexual constructions of a traditional household as an ideal. In my reading, Hansberry frames the apartment as a site for re-negotiating what it means to have a quality life in a landscape of racial, economic, and sexual inequality. I conclude with a critical reflection on my own family history related to home and displacement, and I contemplate the forms and functions of Black women’s spatial planning today. The archive assembled in this dissertation enables us to see how instrumental Black women’s narratives have been to the visual and spatial politics of home in the 20th century. This project aims to show how Black women reimagined the structures of the cities they inhabited to make more physical and psychic space for Black living.