It was wonderful seeing A.J. Estep, a student in last year's class, join Emily Chadwell, Voni Cook, Will Jones and Ben Smith, four students from this year's class, at this event. Estep's classmates created the documentary "Tuscaloosa: The Nineteenth Century City" and this this year's students are making a music video. As true last year, Tuscaloosa is in the starring role.
My students know I readily admit that my interest in Tuscaloosa's role in emerging urban life is best pursued with them by my side as the trailer for the class's music video, which is presented in this posting, demonstrates. See the students "discovering" Tuscaloosa's landscape and pushing their thinking about this city's urban and rural past and present - and their own. The music video features the music of Bible Study, a local band. It premieres at 5:30 December 3 at Jemison Mansion, 1305 Greensboro Avenue in Tuscaloosa. Light snacks and beverages and a student art exhibition will be followed by a Q & A.
Tomorrow we will continue exploring Clarence King's life and that of his wife Ada Copeland King in New York City during the Gilded Age. King was a geologist for the U.S. Geological Society who "passed" as an African American in order to marry a woman who was a born enslaved. I am greatly interested in how the students are able to insert King and his wife into the story of emerging urban life. It is worth it, too, to think about King's interest in "slumming," (i.e. visiting African American neighborhoods; in his case lower Manhattan).
His quiet excursions appears to be an across-time phenomenon. Certainly over the Fall Break I read with great interest a story in Vanity Fair about the American-born George Whitman who opened the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris in 1951. Prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Generation were among the writers who frequented the shop, which is now run by his daughter.
His quiet excursions appears to be an across-time phenomenon. Certainly over the Fall Break I read with great interest a story in Vanity Fair about the American-born George Whitman who opened the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris in 1951. Prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Generation were among the writers who frequented the shop, which is now run by his daughter.
As it turns out - according to the article at any rate - Whitman was born in New Jersey in 1913 and raised in Salem, Massachusetts. He spent four years trekking around North and South America (King might have been his nineteenth century counterpart up to a point). His curiosity about the world around him and perhaps those who are quite different from himself manifests in his interest in "urban back alleys." He shares such a desire not only with King, but with Carl Van Vechten, a white photographer-patron of the Harlem Renaissance. I think, too, about the women who appear in Carla Kaplan's recent study on 1920s Harlem (students in my graduate course will read excerpts from this book next Spring). Andy Warhol's friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat also flirts in this direction.
At the risk of collapsing time too much, I have already asked the students to be curious about popular interest in black life and moreover, the ability of whites on both sides of the Atlantic to engage themselves in what generally surfaces as "black" music. As I asked them, what "work" does the "city" do in such encounters? Last week, I presented the 1991 Alan Parker film "The Commitments," which finds a white Irish band in Dublin playing 1960s R & B and the recently released documentary "Muscle Shoals," which unveils white musicians backing many African American greats in rural Alabama.
At the risk of collapsing time too much, I have already asked the students to be curious about popular interest in black life and moreover, the ability of whites on both sides of the Atlantic to engage themselves in what generally surfaces as "black" music. As I asked them, what "work" does the "city" do in such encounters? Last week, I presented the 1991 Alan Parker film "The Commitments," which finds a white Irish band in Dublin playing 1960s R & B and the recently released documentary "Muscle Shoals," which unveils white musicians backing many African American greats in rural Alabama.
Muscle Shoals. Dublin. Harlem. Late nineteenth century and postwar race, class and gender dynamics. Let's come to class tomorrow ready to pull these connections apart, and if we are lucky, make some time to watch a bit of one or both movies. Thank you, Librarian Brett Spencer, of UA's Gorgas Library, who will soon be leaving for Penn State, for always ordering films and videos for this course and other courses. The History Department will miss you!
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