Black Midwestern Studies: A Reading List

The Midwest has long been cast as the symbolic heart of American identity—so-called “flyover country” of amber waves of grain and imagined whiteness. Indeed, national anxieties about what “Middle America” thinks are often a proxy for how white Americans in the middle of the country live. Within this framework, the lives of Black Midwesterners and other marginalized communities are routinely elided. Cities such as Milwaukee or Detroit—home to large Black populations—are frequently decried as “horrible” places, reinforcing dominant narratives that center whiteness and pathology, while Black Midwestern rurality remains underexamined in discourses about the region.

This reading list interrupts that narrative. It treats the Black Midwest not as periphery or demographic footnote but as a site of radical epistemic and ontological experience—a place where refusal, care, rupture, and geography converge. It offers a vision of Black Midwestern Studies shaped by the theory and praxis of Black feminist thought and activism.

The works collected here resist the assumption that the Midwest is a space of normative whiteness. Instead, they illuminate how Black Midwestern women, girls, and families make meaning through the emotional, affective, relational, and spiritual dimensions of life in the afterlives of slavery as theorized by Saidiya Hartman. Together, these texts offer a vision of the nascent field of Black Midwestern Studies—its questions, methods, and commitments as they take shape.

The list begins with foundational Black feminist works that examine the interior lives of Black women. It then turns to readings focused on Blackness in the Midwest: its cities and communities, histories of migration and labor, and the everyday negotiations of care, containment, survival, and refusal. By centering Black feminist theories of interiority, this list affirms that Black Midwestern Studies is grounded not only in region or demography, but in the emotional, intellectual, and relational worlds through which Black life in the Midwest is lived and imagined.

Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” The Radical Teacher, no. 7 (March 1978): 20–27.

Smith outlines the critical necessity for a Black feminist literary practice that takes Black women’s experiences, aesthetics, and political conditions as central rather than marginal. Smith’s intervention foregrounds the absence of Black women in both feminist and Black nationalist traditions and, in doing so, creates epistemic space for subsequent scholars to define Black feminist thought as a distinct intellectual tradition. This essay opens this list because it not only calls for the naming of a tradition but also insists that literary criticism rooted in lived experience is both valid and necessary. Smith’s argument that Black women write “against the grain of everything” reverberates throughout the following entries.

Patricia Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 745–773.

Building on Smith’s call for a distinct critical framework, Collins offers a theory of Black feminist epistemology grounded in everyday experiences, community, and lived truth. She names the mechanisms through which Black women have produced and transmitted knowledge outside institutional settings, emphasizing that these epistemologies emerge under conditions of oppression but are not reducible to them. Collins’s concept of “outsider within” status becomes especially resonant when read through the context of the Midwest—a region where Black women’s knowledge and presence have often been rendered invisible.

Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 912–920.

Hine’s foundational essay is a pivotal bridge between the theoretical and regionally grounded lived experience. Focusing on Black women in the Midwest during the Great Migration, she identifies a “culture of dissemblance”—a strategic masking of interior life developed as a protective mechanism against racialized sexual violence and social scrutiny. Hine not only offers a language for understanding Black interiority but also places the Midwest as a site where such strategies were both necessary and cultivated. She shows how Midwestern regional and historical conditions give shape to the production of interiority as a legitimate form of Black feminist knowledge.

Crystal Moten, “‘Kept Right on Fightin’…’: African American Women’s Economic Activism in Milwaukee,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 2, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016): 33–51.

Moten grounds Black feminist theory in the material realities of the postwar Midwest, focusing on Black women in Milwaukee who navigated both gendered labor exploitation and racial exclusion while building coalitional grassroots economic resistance. Picking up from Hine’s insights on dissemblance, Moten introduces a politics of the everyday in which Black women’s labor, organizing, and affective ties become strategies of survival and assertion in a region where they are both hypervisible and undervalued. Here Milwaukee is a terrain of contested belonging, making this piece crucial to understanding how Black Midwestern interiority is entangled with both economic structure and community care.

Erik S. McDuffie, “The Diasporic Journeys of Louise Little: Grassroots Garveyism, the Midwest, and Community Feminism,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 146–170.

McDuffie’s portrait of Louise Little—activist, Garveyite, and mother of Malcolm X—offers a generational and diasporic lens on Midwestern Black feminist praxis. Through Little, he illuminates how early twentieth-century Black women mobilized pan-African consciousness, feminist resistance, and grassroots organizing in cities like Omaha and Milwaukee. This essay extends the timeline backward while also globalizing the stakes: the Midwest becomes a node in a diasporic network of Black thought and activism. Positioned after Moten, McDuffie’s work frames Black Midwestern feminism not as reactionary or isolated but as globally entangled and ideologically generative, with community feminism rooted in both migration and memory.

Alex Moffett-Bateau, “Black Folks in Chicago,” in Redefining the Political: Black Feminism and the Politics of Everyday Life (Temple University Press, 2024), 81–108.

Moffett-Bateau sharpens the focus on the political dimensions of Black interior life, arguing that Black Midwesterners, especially poor and working-class Chicagoans, enact a form of everyday politics rooted in refusal, improvisation, and relational ethics. Her methodology is theoretical: she defines “the political” not as state-based action but as the affective and social practices of Black survival. This reframes previous entries in the list on labor, migration, and family as expressions of political life, challenging assumptions that Black Midwesterners are passive or apolitical. Following McDuffie’s emphasis on community feminism, Moffett-Bateau gives it harder edges: a feminism that speaks through mundanity, care, rage, and strategic withdrawal even as it remains structurally ontologically political.

Terrion Williamson, “Bla(n)ckness and the Illogics of Black Teenage Motherhood,” CR: The New Centennial Review 16, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 97–122.

Williamson’s essay is a critical pivot point in this list: it brings to the surface the psychic and representational violence enacted on Black Midwestern girlhood through the locus of teen pregnancy. She interrogates how both media and scholarly discourses conflate place, class, and sexuality to render Black Midwestern girls as unintelligible figures who “cannot be read.” Her conceptualization of bla(n)ckness names a condition of erasure that is not absence but overdetermination, a kind of visibility that hollows out meaning. Building on Hine’s culture of dissemblance, Williamson foregrounds a reading practice attuned to distortion, fantasy, and projection. Here Black Midwestern interiority becomes a site of illegibility, and that illegibility is theorized as politically and epistemically consequential.

Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 177–218.

Moten provides the ontological frame that haunts much of the preceding work: the notion that Blackness is not a category within being but a rupture of it. He challenges representational logic itself, arguing that Blackness precedes and exceeds visibility, capture, and normative being. Read through the lens of the Midwest—and especially in dialogue with Williamson—Moten helps us understand the ways that Black interior life may not be “hidden” so much as structurally disallowed from legibility.

Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81.

Spillers’s landmark essay names the grammar of racial-sexual violence that underpins US modernity that echoes throughout this entire list. She theorizes the ungendering of the enslaved, the symbolic weight of the Black maternal figure, and the distortions produced by white cultural inheritance. In the Midwestern context, where respectability politics, migration, and structural abandonment converge, Spillers helps us understand how Black family life was already rendered grammatically incoherent, well before Daniel Patrick Moynihan attempted to correct it in the infamous The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, also known as The Moynihan Report (1965). Her work anchors the list’s deeper philosophical undercurrent: that language, feeling, and kinship have all been sites of epistemic theft and creative refusal.

Tiya Miles, “Beyond a Boundary: Black Lives and the Settler-Native Divide,” The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 416–426.

Miles complicates regional imaginaries by unsettling the very boundaries that define Indigneous and Black life in the Midwest. She challenges settler frameworks that separate the histories of Native genocide from the afterlife of slavery, asking what gets lost when we fail to see these systems as intertwined. While the previous texts focus on interiority, dissemblance, and erasure within Black communities, Miles turns our attention to the politics of relational geography—not just where Black life unfolds, but what histories and structures that land already bears. Her essay invites us to think about the Midwest not only as a site of Black displacement or migration but also as a contested settler zone, where Black life is caught in complex logics of complexity and survival. This shift doesn’t unmoor this list’s focus on Black feminist interiority; instead, it forces us to confront how geography is itself a racialized and gendered construct.

David A. Nichols, Dawn E. Bakken, and Admiral S. Wieland, “There Are Many Midwests: A Roundtable on the 2021 Midwestern History Association Conference,” Indiana Magazine of History 117, no. 3 (September 2021): 208–220.

This roundtable captures the urgency and fragmentation that characterize current attempts to define the Midwest as a coherent analytic object. The contributors wrestle with how the region is overdetermined (by whiteness, nostalgia, presumed ordinariness) and yet deeply unstable, making it fertile ground for redefinition. This piece affirms the necessity of centering Blackness in any serious attempt to rethink Midwestern studies.

Toni Morrison and Nellie McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Contemporary Literature 24, no. 4 (1983): 413–429.

In this interview, Morrison models a way of speaking across genre, discipline, and form. In dialogue with McKay, she reflects on Black inner life, narrative agency, and the deep responsibility of representation, themes that echo through every prior text. Her attention to memory, desire, and the texture of everyday life makes it plain that storytelling is itself a theory of being. The interview also reframes the list as a narrative project: one in which Black Midwestern life is not merely archived but curated, conjured, and interpreted. She doesn’t theorize the Midwest directly, but the majority of her works are set in the Midwest, and her commitment to holding the interior as sacred, unfinished, and real makes her an ideal closing voice.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.

The post Black Midwestern Studies: A Reading List appeared first on JSTOR Daily.