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.

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).

miami: another postwar case study

I attended the UM when we won our 2nd  championship.

Mohl builds on Arnold Hirsch's study.

I am looking forward to next week's class and not because it is the last class of the semester. I will really miss the students, some of whom are graduating seniors. I am also looking forward to talking to them about black urban culture as it relates to Miami, my hometown. As mentioned earlier on this blog, my next research project involves an exploration of race and space in Miami across time.  At some point along the way, I will be attentive to the impact of the University of Miami's football program on race relations in South Florida. Whenever I say as much, many people mention ESPN's 30 for 30 documentary on the University of Miami, which certainly addresses this issue in passing. 

Miami in 1919, Perry Castaneda Collection, UT-Austin

The students will not only see this outstanding documentary next week, but will also read an excerpt from University of Alabama at Birmingham's Raymond Mohl and Mark Rose's study on interstate highway politics in South Florida. They will also read a Mohl essay on how Arnold Hirsch's second ghetto thesis relates to postwar housing patterns in Miami (Teresa Van Dyke, a librarian in Special Collections at Florida Atlantic University and one of Mohl's MA students, has also used Miami as a site to explore the second ghetto thesis).

As also earlier mentioned, my family's own migratory patterns in Miami-Dade County certainly demonstrate the belief by Mohl and others that the movement and relocation of African Americans from segregated housing, or "ghettoes," to other areas that eventually became segregated, or "second ghettoes," was a result of many factors including racial hostility via public policy and realtor practice. 

What new things can we learn about the postwar housing experiences of African Americans in urban areas? How can our new understandings of the ways in which "blackness" is understood differently in a county like Miami where people often come from Latin and Caribbean communities push our thinking on this issue? 

The map pictured here depicts Miami before the Second World War, shortly after some of my paternal ancestors relocated to Miami from the Bahamas. Other ancestors would arrive from Georgia and after the war, from Mississippi. 

Just seeing the words "Atlantic Ocean" on the map makes me long for the smell of salt in the air. My family originally lived in the Coconut Grove section of Miami before relocating to then-Carol City, which is in the "second ghetto" about which Mohl writes (neither are pictured on the map). To us, it was wonderful step up as this neighborhood was mostly middle class and filled with three and four bedroom houses. Carol City is now in the City of Miami Gardens. You can always tell how long someone has lived in South Florida. If they call Miami-Dade simply "Dade County" or Carol City simply "Carol City," they have been there for a while.

the "impersonal and mechanical city"

Gilbert Osofsky's 1962 study of Harlem.

Since W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1899 study  “Philadelphia Negro,” an abundance of scholarship has been produced on the subject of  African Americans in cities.Unlike in previous weeks when  students taking this course typically learned via case studies by various scholars, last week they were introduced to three issues on which historians, sociologists and political scientists often focus when studying black urban life: race, ghettos and class. In doing so, the students discovered now-classic writings. Tiffany, one member of this class, was especially drawn to Richard Wright’s introductory essay in St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s classic 1945 ground-breaking study of the Chicago, the “Black Metropolis.” Wright, as she wrote, was well aware of the sociological issues affecting people of African descent in the "impersonal and mechanical city." By the 1960s, Gilbert Osofsky looked  at Harlem and observed a “tragic sameness” about black urban life. Osofsky's position was critiqued by later researchers who were more attentive to the ruptures and richness of black life in urban spaces. Their ideas and others, among them, William Julius Wilson's "underclass" arguments, or his generally greater concentration on class and not race,  were juxtaposed against clips from Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever.” Most students saw the ways in which debates about race, ghetto and class figured into this 1991 American drama concerning Flipper (Wesley Snipes), a successful African American architect who commits adultery with Angie (Annabella Sciorra), his white administrative assistant. Their moments of indiscretion are placed alongside Flipper's life in Harlem, and Angie's  life in a white Italian Brooklyn community. Thinking of Osofsky's work, Lauria, one student, was struck by how white immigrants “participated in [racism] in [order to] ...become more ‘Americanized.'" Raven, another student, thought about how race figured into a white cop’s thoughtless behavior toward Flipper after responding to a 911 call about an "Afro"-American assaulting a white woman (Flipper and Angie were actually just play-fighting). Shariyah also thought about race when she observed that for many whites,  “a black man must be committing a crime when hanging [with] or communicating with [a] white woman.” Christin lamented how no matter their individual accomplishments, “black men were viewed [negatively] by society as a whole.” Also thinking of Osofsky, Roosevelt observed the more difficult aspects of black “ghetto” life in scenes of the Taj Majal, a crack den frequented by Gator (Samuel L. Jackson), Flipper’s older brother. Interestingly, after watching this film, Alexis,  recalling a not often evoked stance by Osofsky, observed how ghettoes were “not just a place filled with trouble, but a community.”

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.