Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Blues bars and blues blocks have become one leading edge of this rhetorical redis-
covery(see Figure3.2 below).Offeredasplacesofraw,authenticblackcultureandper-
formance, they have been strategically sanitized as milieus for “outsider” public con-
sumption and recreational pleasure. These clubs, in the process, have been served up as
metaphors for the new South Side outsider (incoming black gentrifiers and leisure seek-
ing North Siders and tourists) to live or recreate here. Working through the go-global
rhetoric, this push has been steady and aggressive.
Yet,weshouldnotinterpretthelocalgovernance'sattempttoremakeChicago'sSouth
Side blues-scape as an attempt to break down the city's long entrenched racial divi-
sions.Chicagohasalong,virulenthistoryofsegregatingworking-classandpoorBlacks
that has been personified in the systematic constructing and isolating of its South Side
“Black Belt.” By the early 1930s, this area, bounded by 31st Street on the north, 63rd
Street on the south, and between State Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, housed more
than 300,000 Blacks (Bennett 2006). By 1960, this number had increased to more than
750,000 (U.S. Census Bureau 1960). In this space, paraphrasing historian James Barrett
(2012), black life in all its vibrancy, hopes, dreams, and despairs became confined and
cordoned off. Formal government policies and informal social stigma that created and
maintainedthissegregatingpersiststothisday(Wilson2007).Theseareoverturestore-
make the South Side's blues-scape and seek to extend the affluent's consumption realm
to new terrain, nothing else. Today in neo-liberal Chicago, there is a heightened priv-
ileging of the upper-income's residential, commercial, and recreational desires which is
manifest in this South Side “cultural rediscovery” (Wilson 2007).
Search WWH ::




Custom Search