1919

Abstract

Eve L. Ewing, a professor of sociology at University of Chicago, is an academic, a comic book writer, and a poet. Her first collection of poetry, Electric Arches, was a whimsical and dynamic foray into Black life: aliens abound, descending upon neighborhoods filled with Black youth asking questions of their origins; basketball players reimagined as poetic narrators; there is a manifesto for shea butter; and Erykah Badu appears in an epigraph. Yet, with 1919, Ewing shows an increased depth with her poetry. Divided into three sections titled “Before,” “What Happened,” and “After,” Ewing presents Black life in Chicago before, during, and after the 1919 race riots. Taking as her starting point a report from 1922 written by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relation and a Race Riot, Ewing presents a case study of Black life as it was experienced and as it was documented. Ewing’s academic work is repurposed in this wellresearched poetry collection. The intertextuality of each poem opens a space for deep engagement with the archive and its absences, ultimately enabling Ewing to develop her own critical fabulations of the time period. “Sightseers,” from the second section, begins with an epigraph from the 1922 report. In the first stanza, the speaker states