taking a story full circle

Paris is the month of April in my 2013 calendar.
I love these drawings.

Sometimes delays are worth having. I finally have the reflection from Aaron, a student in this course,  who also reflected on the ways in which Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Kanye West’s Grammy Award-winning hit about Paris resonates against this week’s readings on antebellum life, and above all, race relations, in Cincinnati and Buffalo. Like me, Aaron was drawn to the lyric, “we ain’t even s’posed to be here,” which  metaphorically references the success both performers have had in spite of their membership in a historically oppressed group – African Americans. Aaron noted how the wealth that permits Carter and West to travel to Paris counters the movement of the French to the Cincinnati described in  Nikki Taylor’s study. The French, he said, traveled to the land that became the United States in part to build their wealth. Sometimes they relied on the forced labor of people of African descent. Press fast forward (with the hazards of reductive anachronisms fully before us). Though their success is partly enabled by the struggle of earlier African Americans, West and Carter can travel to Paris, already wealthy. Wrote Aaron, “It is as if Jay and Ye [take the story of people of African descent] full circle…They come from two of the most violent cities in the United States – Jay from the notoriously-impoverished Marcy Projects in Brooklyn (West from Chicago)…They end up in Paris, the city of glamour…Historically [speaking], they shouldn’t be able to “ball so hard” in this city.” Next week, we continue examining African American life in cities. Using Dolen Perkins-Valdez's Wench:A Novel and Yael Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South, we will investigate the idea of movement in the years surrounding and during the Civil War. PS Aaron, I just found your original paper. Sorry I misplaced it. I am not yet one of the "pros from Dover."