"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.

on race and place

 Marpessa Dawn played Eurydice in "Black Orpheus."

Aline Helg's study on race in Colombia

In last week’s readings, we explored how the “meanings of blackness” for people of African descent can change depending on several factors including class and geography. As Aline Helg demonstrates in her study of the Caribbean rim of Colombia, many people of color identified themselves based on region rather than skin color even though they encountered some of the same stereotypes and oppression that people of African descent have generally experienced across time. The students saw how the latter idea played out in Colombia and Jamaica, but also Brazil. They watched the 1959 film “Black Orpheus,” a French re-telling of the Greek myth, which is set in Rio de Janeiro.  Lauria, one student, observed how dark skinned Brazilians featured in this imagined work seemed to have “worse off living conditions.” Roosevelt, yet another student, took the idea of complexion further by drawing our attention to the experiences of lead character Eurydice, a fair-skinned women of color (His observation struck me as I would like to see this class better tackle the issue of women and gender. I feel even more strongly about this as I just attended a women’s and gender conference at my home university in Illinois). The departure point for Roosevelt’s observation was his witnessing the horrific ending to Eurydice's life. Noting that Eurydice's experiences fit the "tragic mulatto" trope, which, among other things, incorrectly blames race-mixing - rather than racism - for the troubles endured by biracial people, he said some of the challenges she faced stemmed from her not being “fully black" (i.e. her seemingly beautiful fair skin, an outcome of her being of mixed race, contributed to her fate). Tiffany, another student, brought the idea of skin complexion together with geography and racial politics. Returning to the Helg reading, she thought about the ways in which people of African descent often lacked unity in Colombia because of the "territorial fragmentation" in their country. But Tiffany was still attentive to how people of African descent also separated themselves based on race. She wrote, “People often assume that people of color are automatically unified based on the fact that we have often been identified as [the] ‘other.’ …This idea is both true and false…Whenever something ‘bad’ happens involving a ‘black person,’ some [black] people rush to lament [those] who  make… us look bad. But, …black people [still see difference even amongst themselves when they separate] themselves into categories [like] light-skin, dark skin [and] brown skin.” As we go forward, we will hopefully keep thinking about how race, place and gender intersect in discussions involving cities. We will also think about how certain bodies' association with urban spaces in this course thus far are most often related to labor needs or desires (certainly Eurydice's streetcar driving Orpheus, and the working women in urban Jamaica and Colombia, demonstrate as much). As we continue, we will also see how that narrative changes. Next week's readings take us to the experiences of postbellum washerwomen of color in Atlanta and an interracial couple residing in Gilded Age New York.

"he made the sun rise"

The 1959 motion picture, Black Orpheus, will offer an opportunity for students taking this course to explore the political and social meanings of "blackness" in and outside the United States. Here is a clip featuring the final scene from the movie, which is set in the city of Rio de Janeiro during the festive Carnaval celebration. It retells a story about the Greek musician and prophet Orpheus and his wife, Eurydice.