Spring 2015 beckons

Tera Hunter's important study takes us to postbellum Atlanta.

This spring, I will be teaching black urban history for the first time as a graduate course.  It is titled "Gender, Race and the Urban Space."

I plan to rely greatly on excerpts from the growing literature on urbanization and African Americans in urban settings. This is partly because I really want the students to home in on "city" as a category of analysis while keeping other categories like gender and race front and center. 

I welcome the challenge.

This course is an outcome of my joint appointment in the University of Alabama's Gender and Race Studies Department.

Whether we read social, political, economic or cultural histories, the students will be pushed to see how the urban space functions alongside the experiences, attitudes, trials, triumphs, motivations of people of African descent. 

Over sixteen weeks, we will thoughtfully and rigorously see them in anticipated and unexpected narratives. To help me get myself going, I can't help but turn to one of my favorite soundscapes: Marvin Gaye's What's Going On/What's Happening Brother.

And just looking at the titles in my prelim summaries, I get excited about this rich literature again. With able minds beside me, I get to roll up my sleeves  and really pull apart an incredible body of scholarship and re-piece a critical narrative in the "American" story. 

This task is welcomed as I slowly pivot from studying the migratory experiences of African Americans in antebellum Cincinnati, which is my first research project, to 20th century Miami, my second one.

For now, I press on through the Fall semester (and watch the growing list of things to do for the Spring).

taking a story full circle

Paris is the month of April in my 2013 calendar.
I love these drawings.

Sometimes delays are worth having. I finally have the reflection from Aaron, a student in this course,  who also reflected on the ways in which Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and Kanye West’s Grammy Award-winning hit about Paris resonates against this week’s readings on antebellum life, and above all, race relations, in Cincinnati and Buffalo. Like me, Aaron was drawn to the lyric, “we ain’t even s’posed to be here,” which  metaphorically references the success both performers have had in spite of their membership in a historically oppressed group – African Americans. Aaron noted how the wealth that permits Carter and West to travel to Paris counters the movement of the French to the Cincinnati described in  Nikki Taylor’s study. The French, he said, traveled to the land that became the United States in part to build their wealth. Sometimes they relied on the forced labor of people of African descent. Press fast forward (with the hazards of reductive anachronisms fully before us). Though their success is partly enabled by the struggle of earlier African Americans, West and Carter can travel to Paris, already wealthy. Wrote Aaron, “It is as if Jay and Ye [take the story of people of African descent] full circle…They come from two of the most violent cities in the United States – Jay from the notoriously-impoverished Marcy Projects in Brooklyn (West from Chicago)…They end up in Paris, the city of glamour…Historically [speaking], they shouldn’t be able to “ball so hard” in this city.” Next week, we continue examining African American life in cities. Using Dolen Perkins-Valdez's Wench:A Novel and Yael Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South, we will investigate the idea of movement in the years surrounding and during the Civil War. PS Aaron, I just found your original paper. Sorry I misplaced it. I am not yet one of the "pros from Dover."