Invited by the Department of History, Davarian Baldwin taught a 300-level course  entitled “Going to Chicago: the Great Migration and Urban Culture in the Black Metropolis” during second summer session. The 35 or so enrolled students were generally lively and engaged, and quickly adapted to Baldwin’s pedagogical style fusing lecture and discussion. Like a number of other MFFP fellows, he was fortunate his course topic intersected with that of his dissertation, especially since this summer and academic year represent the most intense phase of writing up his research.     

 Notre Dame offered Baldwin a year-long Erksine Peters Dissertation Fellowship to finish his writing, and so he will reside in South Bend, Indiana, making trips back to New York University periodically over the next year to meet with his advisors.  Despite his work’s strong ties to history, philosophy, African American studies, and sociology, his NYU Ph.D. will come from their American Studies program, notable for its innovative interdisciplinary work in cultural studies.

 “You’ve got people like Tricia Rose doing work on black popular culture, Robin Kelley examining history from a black working-class perspective, looking at resistance and agency outside the spectrum of formal politics; you’ve got Manthia Diawara looking at African American and third world cinema.”  Baldwin stressed the importance of collaborating with new thinkers in many different disciplines.  “My work really got filtered through all these people’s stuff,” he said.  “I’ve attempted to locate my work within the everyday lives of black folk, primarily through popular culture.  Extending the work of Paul Gilroy, I consider the formation of a black public sphere through discourses on race at the turn of the century.”

 “I had done a lot of research on black cultural production in the 20s and 30s, and it was always about Harlem,” Baldwin said, describing the reasons he chose to examine Chicago following the great migration. “Although there have been critiques of the Harlem Renaissance, for instance saying that Alain Locke’s bible of this period, The New Negro, excluded social movements, women, black radicalism, and blues and jazz music, the commercialized leisure, all of them seem like addendums to Locke’s book.”  Rather than inadvertently reassert the focal hegemony of Harlem, or of its high culture, as done in so many other inquiries, he chose to examine a fuller spectrum of black popular cultural production in Chicago.  His dissertation title is “Chicago New Negroes: Race, Class, and Respectability in the Midwestern Black Metropolis, 1915-1935,” and examines the contested forms of desirable behavior as envisioned by the old black settler culture with their Victorian notions of respectability, and the new migrant blacks who created a vibrant leisure class through the mass marketplace.  The new Negro intellectuals produced alternative visions of respectability.  Baldwin finds these values embodied in gospel music, film, and beauty industries; he noted that “while focused on Chicago, the methodology can be applied to urban centers throughout the African diaspora.”    

 While residing in Bloomington this summer, he made use of the Black Film Archive Center, the Lilly Library, the main library, and made research excursions to Indianapolis as well.  He said, “the time was instrumental in my academic development.  I truly enjoyed the conversations, intense dialogue and exchange of ideas with my students, graduate peers, and professors.  IU has a host of resources no one there should take for granted.”