More titles for new graduate course

Here are some more books to which we will turn in the new graduate course "Gender, Race and the Urban Space." The students and I will read lots of thick excerpts this time around as I partly want to help them see the abundance of literature in the growing field of urban history, but also help them see the many ways of studying "city," "gender" and "race" as categories of analyses separately and collectively. 

Some of the titles are imagined works and others are historical monographs ranging from the colonial period to postwar America. 

We will even look for transnational correspondences between the ways in which certain bodies are policed. For example, while bodies marked "Other" on the basis of race, gender and sexuality are under surveillance in the United States during the rising Jim Crow period at the turn of the century, bodies some might deem similar are under surveillance in Ponce, an urban space in Puerto Rico at the same time, as Eileen Findlay Suarez' study of Ponce reveals. Above all, we will be greatly interested in how the urban space and particular bodies encounter one another.

As I have talked to prospective graduate students, I have been impressed by their wide-ranging interests. Some of them plan to delve into the issue of gender and the urban space during the Civil War, for example. I am encouraged by these early conversations. Along the way, I wonder how much of my interest in this subject was sparked by my delight in reading Lynda Barry's The Good Times are Killing Me in my early 20s. I first discovered this book in Books & Books, an independent book chain in my native South Florida. 

Some of my experiences as an elementary student at Biscayne Gardens Elementary in then-Miami-Dade county resonate against the narrative about an African American girl and white girl in late 1960s-early 1970s Seattle. At the time, I was one of several dozen African American students in then-northwest Dade County being bussed from our predominantly black community to then-predominantly white schools in North Miami.  A good many of my classmates were white. Some were Jewish, but many were of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent, too. I do not recall knowing anyone from any other Caribbean country, although before and after World War II my own relatives arrived to South Florida not only from Mississippi and Georgia, but the Bahamas. Indeed, I spent the first five years of my life in the Coconut Grove community of Miami.

As I have written earlier on this blog, I did not know that the kids from my neighborhood in the then-northwest Dade community of Carol City (now the city of Miami Gardens) were integrating these North Miami schools. I just remember the white students and teachers mostly being open to us being there. My first best friend who was not from my neighborhood wore the same Winnie the Pooh dresses I wore. She had blonde hair and blue-grey eyes. I can still see her waiting in front of the school for the yellow bus bringing the black children. I was one of those children.

As I got closer to our sixth grade graduation, and moving on to a middle school closer to my neighborhood, I heard and saw things that made me think of racial differences more.

Why then, I now wonder? The year was 1979. What was happening in America? What had earlier happened in America? What would happen next in America? I think now of the Marielito boat lifts, the Arthur McDuffie riots and the role that African American young men from poor communities played in the rise of the University of Miami football program, which all contributed in some way to a changed Miami-Dade County (although not always in ways some people hoped). The graduate students and I will explore these many subjects together. 

But first things first. Did someone say "Fall Break?'

"...I can remember when the houses White, White, White, Japanese, White, White...."

Self portrait of artist Lynda Barry

The snow has melted. While it was here, we had lots of time to catch up on our reading since the University was closed for two days. I really look forward to seeing how the students in this class thought through the Robin Kelley Race Rebels reading (by the way, Kelley will be on our campus 7 pm Thursday in Gorgas Library 205 in conjunction with an exhibit on the Scottsboro boys). 

Kelley draws our attention to  black working class labor issues in postwar Los Angeles. We will pivot from him to Lynda Barry's wonderful picture book The Good Times Are Killing Me, which is also set after World War II in an unnamed city (feels like it is also the West Coast). As mentioned earlier in this blog, one of my favorite parts of the book finds Edna Arkins, a young pre-adolescent girl and protagonist, saying: "...I can remember when the houses White, White, White, Japanese, White, White....Then it seemed like just about everybody kept moving out until now our street is Chinese, Negro, Negro, White, Japanese, Filipino and about the same but in different orders for down the whole street and across the alley." I fell in the love with this book after buying it in a university bookstore when I was an undergrad at the University of Miami many years ago. 

I selected Barry's book for this coming week because it allows us to think about another issue that has been important to African Americans across time: housing. As I told the students, for many years whites and blacks lived beside each other and sometimes in a peaceful manner as James Horton and Hartmut Keil's look at pre-Civil War Buffalo, New York, our second reading for this coming week, demonstrates. 

19th century Buffalo, Perry-Casteneda Map Collection

What permitted blacks and German Americans in the particular to live peacefully beside each other before the Civil War? What makes it more difficult for blacks and whites to sometimes live together by the time we get to the late 1960s-early 1970s world Barry paints in her book? Moreover, how can we tie housing issues together with ones concerning labor, resistance and identity, the three themes in earlier readings? 

No matter how we do it, we will want to do it fearlessly as our midterm exam is Feb. 12. One of the five questions the students may pick from for their short essay on this first exam allows them to write a poem. Seeing as Barry as allows her students to draw in class, I think she would approve. Check it out.

on history and culture

I am uploading documents to the University's Blackboard system today, preparing to teach this course for a second time. The students will have many of the readings that I used last spring, but also two books, one of them an autobiography that blues singer B.B. King wrote with David Ritz and a picture-storybook by Lynda Barry titled The Good Times Are Killing Me. King's life will, among other things, allow us to see how his migration to Memphis from Indianola, Mississippi, helps tell a particular story about urban life for African Americans in the lower south during the first half of the 20th century. Barry's book, which concerns a friendship between a white girl and a black girl, permits us to to tackle many issues that concern the urban space, high among them, housing, identity, kinship and race. Notably, Barry, a noted cartoonist-artist,  brings black musicians into her narrative and because she does, I thought it would be great to pair these two books together. Together, they both create many opportunities to understand the difference between what it means to learn about culture as opposed to "history." I thought it would be important for the students to learn the difference as this is truly a history course even though the word "culture" is in its the title. While there is some overlap in what these two words mean, at stake will always be helping them to see how ideas, things and people change across time. That's what we try to do in a history class. As an aside, I will attend a B.B. King performance in Birmingham about two weeks into the semester. His life resonates partly because my maternal grandfather was one of his childhood playmates in  Mississippi. It will be good to see how seeing him live pushes my thinking about black life across time in the United States - especially in cities.

"across the street and down the next two blocks"

This is only my fifth blog entry and I have often referenced some development concerning African Americans in cities and how it reminds me of another. Though not entirely, Neil Levi’s thoughts about memory as it relates to comparisons especially those concerning the Holocaust resonate. He writes, “If you know stories about other nations, the story of one will inevitably remind you of the story of another. Stories of national singularity rarely sound as singular as those who tell would wish.” I want to now emphasize my own awareness of how  context and other issues are very important to how we understand that which seems “similar.” That said, I return again to the idea of how African American bodies in the United States have appeared beside non-African American bodies, and do so by focusing on residential arrangements in cities via two literary works:

“…I can remember the houses went White, White, White, Japanese, White, White. Across the street and down the next two blocks were about the same except there was more Japanese, two Chinese and a Philippines house on the corner by the woods. Down Crowley was where all the Negro houses started.”  – Lynda Barry, The Good Times are Killing Me

 “The house had been let go a bit. A white neighbor, Maureen Iris Vistin, who lived on the corner across the street, had come over several times to clean Mary’s room or bring her something hot to eat, or just fruit, juice, or soup. Mr. Lee at the grocery store gave her credit when she needed it. He knew he would be paid.” – J. California Cooper, Some People, Some Other Place

Which details permit us to possibly identify where these communities are located and when? Are the narrators telling a similar story? If so or not, why?