"to them we are more cookie cut than Pillsbury"

Adiche was born in Nigeria.

Yesterday we completed our spoken word presentations. Excerpts from the students' reading are posted in the YouTube clip above. While recording, I accidentally covered up the mic so I had to do a voice-over while editing. 

Cole recasted Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City." Iesha recasted Will Smith's "Welcome to Miami." And Dachelle recasted B.B. King's "Sweet Sixteen Blues." Dachelle's presentation was a timely performance because we just finished the second third of B.B. King's memoir. Indeed, we had a lively discussion after I encouraged the students to try and insert King, a Second World War vet and musician, into the postwar narrative that Thomas Sugrue describes in his study on the origins of the urban crisis in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities. While some students believed King's biography was a coded appeal to the mainstream, others did not totally buy it. Few can argue that his initial move from his home in the Mississippi Delta to nearby Memphis does figure into the ways in which many southern blacks left rural communities for cities even though his experiences did not entirely parallel to African Americans who were harmed by a deindustralizing postwar America. As Sugrue writes, when whites, jobs and businesses left urban spaces between the 1950s and 1960s,  capitalism posed special burdens for many people of color who were left behind.

King's thoughts about life in America proved interesting. For example, he says he does not believe fellow Mississippian Elvis Presley stole anything from African American musicians. Notably, King also performed at benefits for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.


Next week, we will finish B.B. King's autobiography while also turning to the different ways that "blackness" has been understood in the United States and other places across time. To get this conversation going, we will read an excerpt from Aline Helg's study on black Colombians, watch an excerpt from Melvin Van Peeble's 1968 "A Story of Three Day Pass," view an excerpt from the 1959 film "Black Orpheus" and read an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's well-received Americanah.