Gwendolyn Brooks: From Bronzeville to the Warpland

This chapter examines the centrality of Bronzeville, Chicago and its people to the late modernist poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, paying particular attention to her representations of living spaces and the public spaces of the city’s streets. When considered as a whole, Brooks’s work reveals Bronzeville – the heart of Chicago’s Black Renaissance – to be a mutable and transient phenomenon, a place-in-process that is shaped and reshaped by the city’s histories of migration, racial segregation, and urban redevelopment in the period from the end of the First World War until the 1960s. During the period of the struggle for Civil Rights, however, her geographical imagination is largely decoupled from the streets and kitchenette buildings of Bronzeville, turning instead to the allegorical landscapes of the American Warpland and the wider solidarities of the African diaspora.