Mississippi Delta Culture And Ethnography

In 2016, Kimberly Brown stated, “geography happens to black people.” With this assertion, she described how space has been used as a social construct to restrict black movement, confining black bodies to spaces that become racialized and connected to sociospatial pathologies that are misunderstood and used to support the marginalization of people of color as the societal other. Black people have responded to these restrictions by relocating to new areas or protesting in the very spaces that they were denied. Further, black people have also formed new cultural spaces as a form of resistance, detailing the ways in which space has been used against them, through music that was birthed out of the sociospatial conditions and geoculture in their …show more content…
As well, the harmonica and bottleneck guitar, that are unique to the Mississippi Delta, built the musical form and framework that, working in tandem with the lyrics that communicated these experiences, produced the traditional blues sound characteristic of the space in which it formed. Thus, blues and its connected subculture denote a specific geocultural identity, socioeconomic narrative, and place attachment connected to black identities, which are representative of the Mississippi Delta, creating what scholars now recognize as black cultural geographies. Furthermore, the spatial diffusion of geoculture and the sociospatial narratives of southern blacks spread through the Great Migration, leading to new cultural geographies of blackness and placed based identities particularly to places like Chicago. This produced unique forms of black music and culture, while offering different ways to cope with new forms of spatial restriction, articulating the distinctive experiences of black geographies of urban cities in the …show more content…
First, I will research the emergence of house music on the South Side and how it helped to bring forth a safe space for black males in Chicago who identified sexually as gay and/or queer. I will zero in on The Warehouse, the first house music club in Chicago, and how it became a site of resistance against the spatial restrictions placed on gay and/or queer black males, from the African American communities that they were a part of and the larger city of Chicago. Detailing how house music and its subculture have transcended beyond just a safe gay space for black males in Chicago will also be examined, particularly through the global spreading of house music, how it has been co-opted by the white heterosexual community and as a form of ethno-tourism in Chicago. Secondly, I will shift towards the geoculture and music of Chiraq; an all-encompassing adjective and portmanteau to illustrate the blighted conditions and violence of the South Side of Chicago. This will deepen the larger dialogues surrounding how black youth in Chicago use music to describe the spaces in which they live as sociospatial pariahs and how it becomes a medium to build protective, insular communities for the most vulnerable through relatable spatial narratives. Further,