Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation is a work of cultural sociology, focused on the relationship between social transformations and the racial self. Specifically, I examine the conditions under which the African American Great Migration emerged, and the ways in which this historic process has impacted African American identity, culture, and subjectivity. Exploring the ways in which African American identity was negotiated and transformed during this era of massive demographic, political, economic and cultural change, I reframe the African American Great Migration as cultural and demographic process, arguing that it must be understood alongside its historical contingencies with racial slavery. Over the course of 30 months of extensive fieldwork, I conducted 152 audio-recorded oral history interviews in more than thirty cities across the country, with African American individuals between the ages of 60-90. The participants in my research all share the same community of origin—the Appalachian region of southeastern Kentucky—and were subject to an acute mass out-migration from their community of origin between 1940 and 1970, concomitant with the second wave of the Great Migration. Over five empirical chapters, I show how 20th century racial transformations, such as school desegregation, mass migration, and the discursive transformation of identity from Colored to Negro to Black to African American, impacted this generations’ subjective understanding of their identity, culture and worldviews. This research brings together major debates in the sociology of culture, race, migration, and knowledge. In particular it draws upon the cultural sociology literature to rethink the African American Great Migration. Migration scholars tend to situate this event solely in demographic terms, focusing on the social and economic consequences of this macro-structural transformation. This outcomes-based approach analyzes the Great Migration within the context of the industrialization of the American city and the emergence of the racially segregated residential and urban labor markets. This dissertation forges a new direction in the study of race and migration by examining the cultural causes and consequences of the Great Migration and the ways in which it impacted African American identity, culture, and subjectivity throughout the 20th century.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)
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Citation
Brown, Karida,
"Before they Were Diamonds: The Intergenerational Migration of Coal Camp Blacks"
(2016).
Sociology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0G15Z8T
