UC Berkeley

Kitchenette Building: A Cultural History is an interdisciplinary investigation of kitchenette buildings on the South Side of Chicago during the 1940s and ’50s. Kitchenette buildings were the primary habitation for black southern migrants establishing themselves in the densely populated Black Belt. In the project, I contend that the kitchenette building of mid-twentieth-century black Chicago is the material, discursive, and symbolic representation of black exclusion from the modern nation manifested in a local urban setting. I examine literary, archival, and visual texts of the era using performance and design theories, and I offer a theoretical framework of black spatial affordance for the interrogation of these domestic spaces. This project, driven by the unique demands of analyzing the site and symbol of the Black Belt kitchenette, engages the Great Migration, the Chicago Black Renaissance, the Chicago School of Sociology, urban design, and local and federal policy.

While countless scholars have dedicated attention to Chicago’s housing projects, few have investigated the domestic spaces that preceded them and that in many ways precipitated the city’s mid-century housing policy. Until now, the nuances of kitchenette living have been underexplored, although the vast majority of black residents in Chicago’s Black Belt in the mid-twentieth century had connection to kitchenette buildings: through residence, proximity, enterprise, or advocacy. Kitchenette Building: A Cultural History addresses this lacuna in scholarship on Chicago’s history of housing, urban race and space relations, and black domesticity. Furthermore, it revisits the centrality of representation in the making and documentation of black life in Chicago.

Moreover, I argue that the ongoing desires, struggles, and strivings for homemaking that took place in or in association with Black Belt kitchenette buildings belie the struggle for inclusion in the modern nation black Americans aspired to during the mid-twentieth century. I suggest that the kitchenette offers entree into the geographical, social, economic, and political landscapes of Chicago in general, and of black Chicago in particular. The kitchenette exposes the contours of black domesticity and spatiality as they intersect with American urban modernity.