Randall Kenan born in Brooklyn, NY 1963 was raised by his grandparents in a rural community in North Carolina. In 1985, he graduated the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in English and creative writing. One of his instructors recommended him for a job for and editor at Random House where he was an eventual assistant to senior editor’s prestigious subsidiary, Alfred A. Knopf. (Fountain) Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989, and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, followed in 1992. He has written five other works and has received numerous awards. (RandallKenan.com) Randall Kenan is a talented African-American author of the present era who writes about the human condition. He not only writes about what it is like to be a black man in the south, but he throws in homosexuality into the bible belt. Kenan repeatedly pits homosexual characters against an oppressive, closed minded community that is against new views of acceptance and equality of the times. With these themes of racial and sexual identity, forgiveness and acceptance; “Kenan, perhaps one of the first Southern authors to openly analyze the struggles of homosexuals, he subtly intertwines common concerns and ideals from the Civil Rights Era and parallels the Gay Rights Movement of today.” (Turley)
In the literary work “The Foundations of the Earth” by Randall Kenan we find Maggie McGowan Williams, an old black woman(seventy-three), Gabriel, the
¨You can't hide from crime.¨ This book is called Ghost by Jason Reynolds. This book is a very well thought out and not that long 180 pages. This book is written in first person, and is realistic fiction.
Applying Class Concepts to “Where the Spirit Lives” Provide as many specific examples of each of the following concepts from “Where the Spirit Lives”: Framework: How the dominant group maintains power (Both Pharr and Weber’s frameworks): Institutional Power Political control: laws/policies/criminal justice system - The “Whites” lawfully took the children from their Native land - The school creating rules forbidding native practices of the Indian children Ideological control: control of ideas through education, religion, media, etc. - The ideas and practices of Christianity were completely forced on the Native American people.
When we have strong love for others, we take risks, we go against our beliefs, we put ourselves in danger, and we let our loved ones go. Without love, there would be none of that. In this book, The Dead and the Gone, written by Susan Beth Pfeffer, a comet smashes the moon closer to earth and it creates all sorts of problems. Alex, a teenage boy with two sisters, starts a long journey of survival and risks. This story is so realistic, at times was hard to read. You start to ask yourself these tough questions, like what you would do in a specific situation. Through out the whole story, love is definitely a recurring theme. It shows you how well love can hold a family is distress together.
In Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits, there are two definitive classes of people that are present throughout the novel. The poor class, including the peasants of Tres Marias and the socialist party members, has continual resentment towards the other class, which is the wealthy aristocratic class. The wealthy division of the novel shows little humanity towards the poor, treats the poor as servants, and control all politics involved in the country. The wealthy’s treatment of the lower class shattered the peace experienced by Chile because the poor and the wealthy maintained a struggle to co-exist with such division between their
From our text, Race, Class, and Gender, we read Unit III E: The Structure of Social Institutions; The State and Violence: Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization; The Color of Justice; Rape, racism, and the Law; and Interpreting and Experiencing Anti-Queer Violence : Race, Class, and Gender Differences among LGBT Hate Crime Victims. We also encountered and excerpt from Social Work Practice With a Difference; The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. The first four reading from our text explore the association of the manner in which state power organizes race, class, and gender. We also get a view of how the intersectional approach of race, class, and gender may help us to understand some forms
As the rapid development of science and technology, our world is becoming a global village, people within the village can easily access to the opposite part once they can access the Internet. However, the border between geographic may be weakened while the border between culture still exists. The book Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman tells us a true story of culture shock regarding health care.
What would it be like to come to a country and not understand anything about its health care system? In The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman brings to light the conflicts between a Hmong family’s cultural beliefs, and that of the traditional western medical beliefs of the American doctors they come into contact with. Fadiman shows the consistent tug of war between the Hmong culture and the Western American medical practice. The Lee family comes from a culture that believes in holistic healing. They have an animalistic view in regards to health and medicine. The cultural barriers between the two eventually leads to the detrimental fate of the Lee’s daughter Lia.
Every story has its own taste: sweet, bitter, sour, hot, creamy, plain, etc. Some storytellers like to stick to one flavor throughout a whole story, while others might prefer to create their work by mixing some flavors together. In Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson creates a story that has the mixed feelings of darkness, desperation, compassion, and humor. This is a story about a man, refers to as Fuckhead, in his early twenties drowning in drugs, wondering from place to place with other junkie friends, making awful life choices, behaving like a naïve kid, but still seeking for redemption and meaning. This book consists several short stories about death, pain, and hope. Denis Johnson shows readers the great desperation through the damaged and
In this essay I will use Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, in order to analyze its rhetorical situations & effectiveness. This book is filled with lots of emotion, anger, betrayal, misunderstandings and compassion. It talks about a Hmong family who lives in America and has a daughter named Lia Lee that is diagnosed with epilepsy. Fadiman explains the difficulty with communications between the two different cultures. Before Anne Fadiman became a writer she was a student at Harvard University. After graduating, she became a worker as a wilderness instructor in Wyoming before returning to her home town New York to pursue he career as a writer. She has been a staff writer at “Life” and editor of “The American Scholar”
While reading “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” written by Anne Fadiman, I found how interesting it was to learn about the history of the Hmong people. These groups of people have been through a lot in history, and they fought to keep their culture alive when the Chinese people attacked them for not assimilating to their culture. The Hmong people have different birthing tradition then those of Americans. The Hmong people believed in “Dabs,” which is evil spirits that can steal the baby’s soul. When Lia was taken to MCMC for seizures, we see the conflict that both the doctor and parents had towards communication, which included different diagnosis by the doctors from the diagnosis of the parents. The Hmong people also believe that it is taboo to have surgery or blood
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down a Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman is a literary nonfiction story that takes place in Merced, California. The book centers around the Lee’s, a family of immigrants from Laos and Lia Lee, the Lee’s young daughter born afflicted with epilepsy.
The United States of America is a wonderful country; they allow people with different backgrounds to come make a new life here, although it may be very difficult to do. America is not the perfect country some Americans believe it is; it has its faults like everything else. This can be seen in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Her book tells the tragic, true story of Lia Lee, a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and her American doctors. The Hmong came to America in the seventies and eighties to escape Laos after the secret war. The Hmong were safe from the war dangers in Laos, but once they arrived in America they would face other kinds of problems. One problem would be the health care system. Anne Fadiman views assimilation for the Hmong as necessary, but difficult to accomplish.
Ghostly representations of “the other” imagine a social evil that has not been put to rest. These images reoccur in the Western canon, marking the persistence of slavery long after its abolition. Haunting, ghosts and skeletons in Benito Cereno act as a vehicle through which the suppressed return to the stage with a message. The ghosts carry with them all that the imperialists wanted to control, including emotions, and more precisely, the emotions of the oppressed. I argue that ghosts and skeletons comprise an area of tension in which the appearance of the “other” reveals that the dominant party’s control is incomplete. Yet, the presence is merely ghostly due to the constant policing and lack of respect for the Other. These ghosts also break through the boundaries of the dominant culture’s paradigms and identities (Harpham 17), signaling potential political crisis. This text signals the fear of the retaliation of the Other through ghostly representations by projecting on to the other, their own identities of brutality and irrationality. “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville overturns the racist images of the colonized by relocating evil in the order of slavery. Hauntings carry the perspectives and powers of the slaves by preserving the dead amidst the living and the past amidst the present, they muddle up the concept of time and therefore defy the Western dream of complete control.
In the short story Ghosts written by Edwidge Danticat a young man named Pascal and his family (mother, father, and a brother once a police officer, immigrated to Canada) live in an underprivileged area of Haiti called Bel Air. His parents once pigeon breeders, now own a restaurant in the neighborhood. The eatery caters to the working-class citizens as well as the local gang members. When Pascal is not working at the restaurant he is either attending computer programming school or working at the local radio station as a news writer. Pascal has the desire to have a program on the radio station, that he will use as a platform to discuss and alleviate the numerous issues within his community with guest such as; gang members, community leaders,
The story of Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen shows us a multitude of issues, whether the readers think the piece as a basic form of literature or believe that the scripture shows the issues and lies or the fighting facts of injustice in the text. The constant fight between free will and duty in this story triumphs the characters of Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders as they convene over what they think is right and what they are bound to do, even as the smaller character of Regine slightly deals with the same issue.