On Limits and Possibilities: Black Chicago's Kitchenette Apartments

Dr. Amani Morrison received her Ph.D in African American and African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to her current work with the Colored Conventions Project as a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Data Curation at the University of Delaware, she was a 2018-19 Postdoctoral Fellow in African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Morrison holds expertise in 20th-century African American literature, race and space studies, performance studies, cultural studies, and the urban and digital humanities. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridians and African American Review and has been supported by the Mellon Foundation. Her book manuscript is the first cultural history of kitchenette apartments in Great Migration-era black Chicago. Through a framework of what she coins as “black spatial affordance,” a critical expansion of design theory with an attention to spatial manifestations of race, Morrison contends that analyzing quotidian performances within mid-twentieth-century Chicago’s kitchenette buildings sheds light on the built environment’s impact on black domesticities and ways of being at home.