Teaching & Learning Guide for

Author's Introduction Migration has shaped the physical, cultural, and literary landscape of what is now the United States from the transcontinental movements of indigenous peoples, to the arrival of Europeans, westward expansion, and the urban migrations of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries. In the past century, stories of transnational and internal migration helped to define the modern American city; the concepts of race, region, and ethnicity; and a changing national identity. These stories both influenced and were influenced by the burgeoning fields of social science, which attempted to explain the vast changes associated with immigration and urbanization. ‘Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century’ traces the relationship between literature and social scientific thought, focusing on African American, southern white, and Chicano narratives of movement within the United States. As teaching tools, these stories of internal migration can be situated within a larger curricular framework that draws upon transnational narratives and that explores questions of mythological archetypes, ethnic modernism, and multiculturalism. Author Recommends: Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993). This work of interdisciplinary cultural criticism examines the intersections of urban literature and urban sociology in Chicago at mid‐century. Focusing on Chicago novelists James Farrell ( Studs Lonigan ), Nelson Algren ( Never Come Morning ), and Richard Wright ( Black Boy/American Hunger ), Cappetti challenges the critical marginalization of these writers and their social protest mode. She redefines the category of literary naturalism by showing how these writers used sociology as a vernacular source and as a window into the urban slum. Through adept close readings of the novels and the published and archival writings of Chicago School sociologists such as Robert Park, William I. Thomas, and Louis Wirth, Cappetti probes the tension between the progressive ideas of multiculturalism and the pathological model for understanding migration, social deviancy, and urban unrest. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Verso, 1997). See especially Chapter 7: ‘Grapes of Wrath: “The Art and Science of Migratin”’. In this encyclopedic survey of the cultural wing of the Popular Front, Denning argues for the enduring influence of this Depression‐era movement through what he calls the ‘ laboring of American culture’ (xvi). Denning defines the Popular Front as a social‐democratic movement based on anti‐fascism, anti‐lynching, and industrial unionism, and he finds evidence of its aesthetic in postwar mass culture industries such as film and television. Immigrants and southern migrants, as well as the autobiographical narratives they created, were at the heart of this cultural transformation, Denning argues. Chapter 7 examines the shift from the representation of the migration experience through the ‘grapes of wrath’ story codified by John Steinbeck, to the self‐representation of migrants and migrant workers in autobiographical writings by Woody Guthrie, Carlos Bulosan, and Ernesto Galarza. James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). In this groundbreaking work of social history, Gregory traces the migrations of both black and white southerners in the twentieth century. Focusing on the categories of employment, housing, religion, and popular culture, he analyzes both the congruencies and divergences in their experiences. Gregory's findings belie the negative stereotype of the maladjusted migrant, which was widely disseminated by sociological theory and the mass media, and suggest that migration was by‐and‐large a successful endeavor for both black and white Americans. However, he is careful to document how white migrants reaped the benefits of racial privilege while black migrants faced discriminatory practices in northern cities. This is an excellent overview of black and white migration that combines census data, quantitative research, oral history interviews, and media analysis, and that takes a novel comparative approach. Farrah Griffin, ‘ Who Set You Flowin’? ’ : The African‐American Migration Narrative (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995). Griffin examines the literature, images, and music of the African American Great Migration, organizing her study into four key moments in the migration journey: reasons for leaving, the urban encounter, the creation of ‘safe spaces’ in the city, and visions of new possibilities. Offering readings from a wide array of texts, Griffin traces the development of the genre over time, from the ‘urban pathology’ model for understanding migrant problems early in the century to the celebration of African American communities and their shared southern origins in the postwar era. A great introduction to the voluminous literature of African American migration, this book includes both canonical and obscure works, and places them in a coherent historical and theoretical framework. Mark Andrew Huddle, ‘Exodus from the South’, in Alton Hornsby (ed.), A Companion to African American History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). This historiographical essay traces African American migration scholarship in the twentieth century, from sociological studies early in the century by pioneers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Johnson, to synthetic histories at mid‐century focusing on race relations, to social histories and community studies of the 1970s and 1980s, to more recent diasporic approaches. In general, scholars have shifted away from associating migration with urban problems and have come to view it as a historical process with migrants themselves as the primary agents of change. Huddle's essay offers a wide survey of the field and is a great starting point for students doing research on the subject. David R. Maciel and Maria Herrera‐Sobek (eds.), Culture Across Borders: Mexican Immigration and Popular Culture (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1998). This collection of essays illuminates the cultural dimension of Mexican immigration to the United States, including analyses of migrant autobiographies, novels, films, humor, and ballads. The editors’ introduction includes a useful historiographical essay on Mexican immigration in the twentieth century. Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997). In his study of the novels of the African American Great Migration, Rodgers situates this prevalent literary theme into a historical and thematic framework. Chapters proceed chronologically, each analyzing a pair of novels that are thematically linked. Paul Laurence Dunbar's Sport of the Gods and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex‐Coloured Man establish the geographic and character prototypes early in the century, while Jean Toomer's Cane and Nella Larsen's Quicksand represent the contributions of the Harlem Renaissance to migration literature. The form comes into full flower in the Depression era, with Richard Wright's Native Son and William Attaway's Blood on the Forge exploring the figure of the ‘fugitive migrant’. Rodgers brings us into the postwar period with analysis of the ‘communal migrant’ in Dorothy West

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