Chicago is a city of migrations. Whether of goods, people, or ideas—from the anarchists of Haymarket to the Midwestern transplants in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie to the Pullman Porters delivering the Chicago Defender in the Jim Crow South—Chicago has long been both a point of departure and arrival. This course will explore how migration stories have been told and circulated and then in turn how they shaped new movements in art, culture, and politics.
We will begin with boomtown Chicago in the Gilded Age, when the city’s population doubled every decade, and more than three-quarters of its residents were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. We will then examine Modernist Chicago, when a new generation of artists and thinkers imagined the city in fresh ways, including writers such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks who both came to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. We will explore stories from the mid-twentieth century federal American Indian Relocation Program and conclude the seminar portion of the course with readings from the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s and ask once again about how these narratives of migration raise questions about whose stories or protests are heard and legitimized. Readings may Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Mother Jones, Willa Cather, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Jun Fujita, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Cronon, Isabel Wilkerson, Liesl Olson, and Simon Balto, among others.
Along the way, we will also explore the Newberry’s collections. With attention to questions of genre, point of view, and audience, we will consider accounts of and responses to migration, in fiction and non-fiction, in newspapers and maps, in letters and diaries. What sorts or things are in the archive, and what is left out, what topics, papers, documents, personal writings, etc? We will ask fundamental questions about the archive, particularly what journeys and intersections the archive records through its collections, its arrangements, and its absences. These questions will then propel students as they develop and write their own archival research essays in the second half of the course.