Gwendolyn Brooks
Courtesy of POETRY Magazine
My interests in the twentieth century concern the “cool” aesthetics of post-World War II/pre-Civil Rights Movement black fiction, and why this remarkable literary movement and its signature aesthetics—what I call “literary cosmopolitanism”—have been neglected in African American literary studies. What makes the now-known “Chicago Renaissance” different from the oft-studied Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the Black Aesthetic Movement of the 1960s? What social, political, economic, intellectual, and cultural developments coalesced to introduce such writers as Chester Himes, Marita Golden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Bob Kaufman, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, Frank Marshall Davis, Willard Motley, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin; and visual artists such as Roy DeCarava, Elizabeth Catlett, Norman Lewis, Lois Mailou Jones, Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden to America’s cultural scene? I will be teaching courses about this period and the literary-archival questions they provoke as the groundwork to my second book project, Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture during the 1940s and 1950s.
