Excavating Mecca: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Spatial Sensitivity

• Published in: Institute of British and American Studies Vol. 48; pp. 55 - 78
• Main Author: 김의영(Kim Eui Young)
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Korean
• Published: Institute of British & American Studies Center for International Area Studies Hankuk University of Foreign Studies 28.02.2020; 한국외국어대학교 영미연구소; 영미연구소
• Subjects: 학제간연구; 게토; 모더니즘 건축; the ghetto; 그웬돌린 브룩스; 도시계획; architectural modernism; In the Mecca; urban planning; 메카에서; Gwendolyn Brooks
• ISSN: 2508-4135; 2508-5417
• DOI: 10.25093/jbas.2020.48.55

This essay explores Gwendolyn Brooks’s reconstruction of the Mecca flats in her long poem “In the Mecca.” It seeks to supplement previous readings that emphasized the symbolic and metaphorical dimensions of the poem by examining Brooks’s accurate rendition of the Mecca as a built environment. This shift in focus is achieved by reading “In the Mecca” along Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs suggests that the common areas of high-rise buildings are interior streets. The safety of such areas depends on surveillance provided by the residents, something that the Mecca lacks. Pepita’s disappearance goes unnoticed, and the fruitless search for the girl exposes how the design of the Mecca has resulted in subjective withdrawal of its residents. After exploring both the failed promises and fundamental flaws of the architectural logic behind the Mecca, Brooks notes that the demolition of the Mecca in real life left untouched the way space is organized in the ghetto. The ending calls for an overcoming of the linear and symmetrical aesthetic of architectural modernism by upholding an alternative, uneven approach to space. KCI Citation Count: 0