Quotidian Expenses: Residential Repertoires and Domestic Pedagogies in Great Migration Chicago’s Kitchenettes

Abstract

This essay analyzes subdivided apartments known as “kitchenettes” that Black migrants to Chicago inhabited during the Great Migration era. By examining the interiors of kitchenette buildings as presented in archival photographs and literary fiction, the author locates sites at which Black Chicagoans developed distinctive residential repertoires and domestic pedagogies, drawing attention to the quotidian expenses of these embodied practices. Further, the author offers that interrogating domestic repertoires through analysis of the built environment has the potential to yield powerful insights into the quotidian workings of urban racial capitalism in space and place in the mid-twentieth century.