Analysis Of The Book ' Crossing Western Space ' Essay

As Malcolm X describes the racial prejudice currently within the black community in his new home, he uses imagery to accurately portray the glaring discrepancies between the “ghetto” blacks and the Hill “elite.” For example, when he describes the arrogance and misguided haughtiness the Hill elite possess, he states that “foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen...acted, striding around…” (Malcolm X 196). This comparison shows how prideful

Among the critical responses to Home to Harlem, W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticism of Claude McKay’s text seemingly speaks from an essentialist perspective. Du Bois simply found that McKay’s representation of black culture within his novel reproduced stereotypical and crude images which white audiences desired in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. In response to Du Bois, McKay argued that the novel was created for a black audience, but, to delve even deeper outside of Claude McKay’s views, it could be argued that Home to Harlem does not produce a single identity at all. Rather, Home to Harlem’s perpetual mobility and movement invests in the idea of black “identity as ‘production’” rather than as the exhibition of a “collective ‘one true self’”

In Chapter 4 of his book, which is aptly titled “Postwar Passions”, Daniels chooses to focus on the experiences of African-Americans in the post-WWI era, specifically focusing on race riots that occurred during the “Red Summer” of 1919. (104) There is a long-standing history of racial discord between whites and African-Americans, but the post-WWI years are a unique time. It has been more than fifty years since slavery has been abolished, but it will still take another forty plus years before discrimination on the basis of race is made illegal in America. Industrialization after the turn of the century and blatant racism in the South led to the migration of millions of African-Americans to northern

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B DuBois pioneers two concepts that describe the Black experience in America— the notions of “the veil” and “double-consciousness.” The meaning and implication of these words not only describe the plight of being Black and American then, it also refers to what it means to still be Black and American today – the remnants of the past live on. DuBois explains the veil concept in reference to three things: the literal darker skin of Blacks, which is the physical demarcation of the difference from whiteness, white people’s lack of clarity in order to see Blacks as “true” Americans, and lastly Blacks’ lack of clarity to see themselves outside of what white America prescribes for them. The idea of double consciousness refers to the two-ness, caused by our nations flawed and polarized system, felt by many Blacks. I argue that although DuBois was the first to coin these two terms, it is clear through analyzing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 12 Years a Slave that these two significant concepts gave a name to what African-Americans had been feeling for years but previously could not define.

Black Movements In America is written by Cedric J. Robinson, who is a professor of Black Studies and Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Robinson traces the emergence of Black political cultures in the United States from slave resistance in the sixteenth and seventeenth century to the civil rights movement of the present. He also focuses on Black resistance which was forged from a succession of quests such as The return to Africa; escape and alliances with anti-colonial Native- American resistance; and eventually emigration. This is a historical primer whose subject matter is well-indicated by the title. The Narrative focuses on the chronological poles of robinson 's ranging, chronological and compelling narrative of movements in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries maroon societies, and urban community organized during the 'late ' years of black power movements.

Expectations were met with severe disappointment for most blacks in America following the Civil War. Rather than gifting African-Americans with the freedom they dreamt about and fought hard for, the Emancipation led to an achievement of an ambiguous status in society, which created a larger problem of race that W.E.B Du Bois discusses in The Souls of Black Folk. In order to introduce this problem, Du Bois employs the use of a metaphor that compares the post-war life of Blacks in America to being stuck within a Veil as most held distorted images of self and self-worth. His use of the Veil metaphor emphasizes the severity of the “Negro Problem” in an attempt to convince white Americans that, in order for real progress of American industry and culture to take place, the problem must be solved.

The life of African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries has been a truly storied past. One of the most astonishing aspects of African American life, in this period, is the degree to which it was heterogeneous. The experiences of African Americans differed widely based on geographic location, class, gender, religion, and age. Despite a high degree of variability in the experiences of Blacks in America, if one were to consider the sociopolitical fact that Black people as a group in America were a subordinate caste in dominant society, then it becomes possible to make certain overarching connections. One such connection is the presence of secretive subversive ideologies and actions. The existence of these secretive subversive activities is apparent if one examines the labor tendencies, the folklore, and the outward societal projections of black people. By briefly examining the labor practices of Black women in Atlanta during the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, The Uncle Remus tales, and cultural icon Louis Armstrong, one can deduce that secretive subversive actions and beliefs were an integrated aspect of Black existence during this period.

The reader is introduced to a term coined and repeated by Pratt throughout the piece, "contact zones." She uses this term "to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today" (Pratt 584). Contact zones were not necessarily a positive interaction because these social interactions usually came out of ignorance resulting into an obdurate conflict. Dubois The Negro in the United States and Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation, and Pratt’s very own Arts of the Contact Zone correlate through Pratt’s terminology of contact zone, autoethnographic texts,

Rios’ chapter, “Dummy Smart”, he illustrates a contemporary analysis on the interpretation of working-class culture, and the emergence of “resistance identities” that these youth of color assume in order to resist the structures that constantly criminalizes and marginalizes them. To further this discussion on culture, he also interweaves Ann Swindler’s idea of “culture as repertoire”, successfully adding another layer on how youth of color purposefully act out in order to respond to the system that ostracizes them so frequently. When explaining how mainstream society shuns mainly Black males, Rios recounts the disheartening experience of Ronny in an attempt to getting a job and exclaims, “The youths demonstrated a yearning for being accepted by mainstream society and used the resources available to them in an attempt to do so [...] their actions were misinterpreted as acts of deviance” (Rios 105). Ronny’s painful experience demonstrates how culture is similar to a “toolbox” that can be either beneficial or detrimental to one’s socioeconomic mobility. In this particular case, Ronny was unable to successfully adhere to mainstream culture because he interpreted that a handshake would be disrespectful to a white woman, underlining the historical undertones of Whites demonizing black

George Lewis states in this article “Already active in the 1940’s, a group of radical young black American improvisers, for the most part lacking access to economic and political resources often taken for granted in high-culture to Western notions of structure, form, communication, and expression” (Lewis 92). I find this very impressive that

In the secular black Jeremiads, there is a hopeful tone that America will be the nation that it is destined to be. Baldwin focuses on three key aspects of the traditional black Jeremiad, hopefulness and persuasion of decline. Baldwin initates the Jeremiad with reflection on what this christian nation is and if we do not “all of us will abruptly stop living” (PG). He mourns the state of the nation whose obsessed with the “negro problem” (Baldwin, PG). Baldwin’s hopeful tone emerges as

Interesting, the business-type is not unlike “Mr. Nash” in Another Country -- the odious “impresario” in the nightclub scene where Cass Silenski admits to a subterfuge (in a novel of interweaving subterfuges) in which she has “been using Ida [Rufus Scott’s sister] and Vivaldo as smoke screens to cover her affair with Eric [so] why should not Ida use her, then, to cover from Vivaldo her assignation with Ellis (Baldwin 362).” This is the same scene we later learn that Ida, as the price of her ambitions, is humiliated by her fellow jazz musicians: “You black white man’s whore, don’t you never let me catch you on Seventh Avenue, you hear? I’ll tear your little black pussy up.” In any case, the “nigger-in-the-woodpile” image is introduced here as a conceptual nexus between Another Country and Leo Marx’s Pastoralism in America.

In exploring the problem of identity in Black literature we find no simple or definite explanation. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that it is rooted in the reality of the discriminatory social system in America with its historic origins in the institution of slavery. One can discern that this slavery system imposes a double burden on the Negro through severe social and economic inequalities and through the heavy psychological consequences suffered by the Negro who is forced to play an inferior role, 1 the latter relates to the low self-estimate, feeling of helplessness and basic identity conflict. Thus, in some form or the other, every Negro American is confronted with the

The African-American literary period of Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism, also referred to as the Age of Wright, was when the writers and artist would expose the realities and identities of living in America and the harshness of society. This African-American literary period would begin around the time the Great Depression ends and would end the year in the death of Richard Wright, which was 1960. One of the most notable writers of this period was, of course, Richard Wright. By his way of thinking and the way he wrote literature, “Wright [had] effectively executed his own blueprint by rejecting what Locke termed the ‘decadent aestheticism’ of Harlem Renaissance writers and by drawing on the presumably more ‘nourishing’ elixir of Marxism and social protest” (Gates, 97). Richard Wright’s Blueprint for Negro Writing appeared in the journal New Challenge that he and other African-American writers had published in 1937. Although Richard Wright’s Blueprint for Negro Writing was written before 1940, this literature work makes an excellent representation of Urban Realism. This text represents this literary period because it tells about the reality, but also the promotion of success in African-American literature by criticizing black culture and nationalism in literary works.

Having been amongst the first and most profound post-war, counterculture novels written, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, provides an interesting insight into the changing landscapes in the United States, and the extent to which America was undergoing a new paradigm. Kerouac’s novel outlines the anti-establishment lifestyle through the lense of the two primary characters, Dean and Sal, who are seen traveling around the country on their various escapades. However, the novel takes careful measure to display the extent to which America was becoming a capitalist and corporate nation, as reaping the benefits of such a massive war jump started the economy. The marginalization and racially-divided society that existed is a major theme throughout the novel, however, not in the traditional manner. In doing so, Kerouac tends to adopt a romantic appeal to the low-income and oppressed communities, without grasping the understanding of the privileged position he is in. In analyzing the extent to which Kerouac depicts a romanticized view of underprivileged and oppressed communities, it is apparent that he provides insight into the inherent issues of white privilege, subconscious suppression, and cultural appropriation that continues to plague American society in the modern day.