april l. graham-jackson

“Black Life Beyond The City” is an epistemological critique of the origins of the urban question and how Black life, migration, and settlement are theorized through Chicago as the definitive model of urban-regional space developed by the Chicago School of Sociology. Through a historical and geographic analysis of Black suburbanization, this interdisciplinary and multi-sited project explores Black suburban placemaking and the spatial imaginaries of Black people who built suburban settlements in the post-Reconstruction, from 1877 to 1915, and post-Civil Rights eras, from 1965 to 2008, in Chicago Southland—a suburban sub-region of the Chicago Metropolitan Area. This includes Robbins—the first Black municipality in the North governed by Black people and home of the first Black-owned airport in the United States. This study also challenges how the Great Migration between 1915 and 1970 overshadows Black migration beyond the city and questions how spatial limits are placed on where social theorists historically map Black life and the archival and methodological blind spots these approaches produce. By directing attention to Black suburbs as a scale of analysis and historic Black spatial form, “Black Life Beyond The City” broadens the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological scope of a Black sense of place and the geographies of Black American life.