10. The Mapping Sessions: Chicago House Music Culture, Chicago’s Black Social Clubs, and The Great Migration

• In Event: 408 - Visual Media Poster Presentation

Abstract

The Mapping Sessions is the urban ethnographic project of the gallerized performance piece entitled Juke Cry Hand Clap: A People’s History of House & Chicago Social Culture. A series of monthly public workshops were hosted from January-July 2014. Various geographically disparate and intergenerational musical communities convened to dance, share memories, and map sites of musical and social development connecting spaces of house music with those of its parent musical cultures. Participants in the mapping sessions are asked to help develop a comprehensive list of social practices and aesthetic priorities related to Chicago music cultures.
The collaborators shape the materials gathered during the workshops, including individual worksheets, evolving paper maps and other ephemera into a digital mapping site. Partnering with the Mapping Arts Project, we will develop an online map including three primary data sets: sites of Chicago house memory, like record shops, clubs and places like Oak St Beach; individuals associated with the greater Chicago house community, like DJs, radio producers, promoters and dancers; and artifacts associated with sites and individuals, like promotional posters and pluggers, DJ mixes, records, mixed tapes, fashion and other ephemera. The online map is introduced in a series of public dialogues centered on documenting contemporary Americana, with House being a significant local example. The online map will continue to grow with community-derived data becoming a pedagogical and research tool available to the wider public and to Chicago Public Schools aligned with the integration of an Interdisciplinary African and African American Studies Curriculum mandated by the state.

Authors

• Abra Johnson, City Colleges of Chicago

• Meida McNeal, Independent Scholar

• Felicia Holman, Independent Scholar

• Aisha Jean-Baptiste, Independent Scholar

• Jo de Presser, DJ, Presenter