on taking long walks on the "A" train

Here are excerpts from two students reading from their spoken word presentations after class this week. Elizabeth recast Duke Ellington's "Take the A Train" and Apryl recast Jill Scott's "A Long Walk." The ways in which both students  made their presentations personal and historical was quite impressive. 

Notably, Apryl used the University of Alabama as a political landscape to take a long walk. Among places she rhetorically visited was the "schoolhouse" door on Foster auditorium where Governor George Wallace stood in 1963 in an attempt to delay the segregation of the university.

Elizabeth was more drawn  to the difficulties of urban living as seen in the  dilapidated buildings often inhabited by African Americans in cities, and to the specific challenges that black girls and women face in a modern world anywhere. She used the "A" train -  which, as the song tells us,  goes to Harlem - as a metaphor for a new kind of journey that African American women and girls could take that would allow them to harness their stronger selves anywhere. As an aside, I was very proud to sit this week beside Elizabeth on a Black Feminism panel, which was sponsored by the Women's Resources Center here at the university. 

Jake and Shayla, two more students, also presented. Jake did a wonderful job recasting the 1950s rhythm and blues song "Kansas City" and Shayla recast Janelle Monae's recent hit "Q.U.E.E.N."

Tera Hunter's book on black female labor.

On another note, the class took up the issue of mobility again as it relates to life in and outside the urban space by discussing the upheaval that white and black Americans experienced during the Civil War as relayed in Yael Sternhell's Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South. We juxtaposed that book against an excerpt from Dolen Perkins-Valdez' Wench  that unveils the first time a group of four enslaved women enter the city of Dayton without the oversight of their white masters. Both readings put the idea of "transitions" squarely before us, something we will want to continue thinking about when we turn to an excerpt from Tera Hunter's To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War and Hazel Carby's look at how black women's bodies were under surveillance in urban spaces at the turn of the century. As we read, we will want to keep in mind how time figures into black mobility. We will want to wonder about the things that black bodies could and could not do before and after the Civil War. We should also wonder how gender pushes our thinking on this matter. With Carby in mind, we should also be very attentive to whether or not there is a monolithic black female experience, or whether there are differences, as Wench seems to suggest, in how some black women experience oppression. Finally, we should also be thinking about how geography figures into everything before us. For example, what makes the efforts of black laundry workers in Atlanta extremely significant for the "South"? I look forward to a hearty discussion on these and other issues
next week.