spring semester and a new course are upon us

Spring course advising is upon us. I am excited about a new course, Bebop to Hip Hop: Young America and Music. Since the early 1990s, many artists have "sampled" music created since World War II - especially music from the late 1960s-early 1970s. The students will explore the social and political issues that influenced music created during this window, and even earlier or later. Among their questions, "How do we find meaning in the beatnik, counterculture, Civil Rights movements and rising conservative politics as the century marched to a close? And what was on the minds of young people, even the musicians themselves, along the way?" Using sheet music from a University of Alabama archive as well as recordings accessed via Youtube and assigned readings students will write a substantial and tightly focused research paper. The two required texts for this undergraduate course are Hettie Jones' memoir and a book of poems by Tupac Shakur. I will also teach Gender, Race and the Urban Space, a graduate course for the second time. I have modified the readings a bit to invite students to focus more closely on a particular category of analysis. Indeed, in this course race, gender and space will always be in front of us, but sometimes it is worth it to home in one of these categories more than the others. Both courses overlap with my next research project, which explores racial and spatial politics in greater Miami from the late nineteenth century to the present day. I am deeply interested in how bodies marked "Other," among them ones of African descent, encounter the urban space even as cities nationally are slowly emptying of lower income residents on the heels of gentrification. This dynamic is occurring alongside of this country's ongoing diversification. According to PewResearch predictions, white Americans will comprise less than 50 percent of the United States' population by 2050. In the neighborhoods in which I grew up, South and Central American immigrants are familiar faces, possibly redefining the word "ghetto" in the minds of many. Which factors figured into cities unveiling this phenomenon? Are there correspondences in any other part of the world? Are they happening with the same intensity as ones here in the States? I am also curious about new movements that have appeared since the 1980s? Are urban people restless, and if so, which ones and for what reasons. How do anger and joy show up in music? I look forward to answering such questions with the students. This will be especially exciting because the courses will be offered around the time I will finally see a music documentary on which I started working on with a Detroit-based crew in 1995 to the marketplace. See the trailer below. And below it: old cut on heavy rotation inspiring my ongoing interest in the urban space.