Hope Leslie

Racism was a major issue during Ellen’s time period, and remains so today. In Ellen Foster, Gibbons uses Ellen’s experience with Starletta and other African-Americans to suggest the idea that racism can be transcended by looking at oneself before judging others. She communicates this through several elements of the story, including motifs, characters, the setting, and the overall plots.

One of the themes used in the book is of racism towards the Natives. An example used in the book is of Edward Sheriff Curtis who was a photographer of 1900s. Curtis was interested in taking pictures of Native people, but not just any Native person. “Curtis was looking for the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the imaginative construct” (King, 2003; pp. 34). He used many accessories to dress up people up “who did not look as the Indian was supposed to look” (King, 2003; pp.34). He judged people based on his own assumptions without any knowledge of the group and their practices. Curtis reduced the identity of the Native Americans to a single iconic quintessential image of what Native meant to white society. The idea related to the image of this group of people during the 1900s consisted of racism in terms of the “real looking Indian”. This is not

The story begins with a recounting of the story of Tatica, Reyita’s grandmother, and her trial of being abducted from her native Africa and brought to Cuba to be sold into slavery. Tatica’s story sets a precedent that is upheld by the next generations of her family of racial discrimination, struggle for survival and equality, and political activism. Reyita explains that her grandmother’s love of Africa instilled in Reyita a

In contrast to D’Ortega, Lina, a captured Native American, values courage and commitment to the community. To Lina, Vaark’s sumptuous plantation represents everything negative the European

As hardworking women living of the prairie, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters can relate to Mrs. Wright’s situation. They know personally that long days of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning can become very tiresome (Hedges 91). They realize that living on the prairie can force a woman to be confined to her own house for weeks at a time, and because Mrs. Wright never had children, the grueling loneliness that she suffered must have been excruciating. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters both experience the constant patronization and sexual discrimination that most women in the early twentieth century lived with. They empathize with the difficulties of Mrs. Wright’s life and almost immediately a bond is formed with a woman they do not even know.

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, America’s first Female Native American writer and poet, exemplifies a unique multicultural influence in her writing as a result of her intermarried parents. Robert Dale Parker (2009), in his paper “Contemporary Anticolonialist Reading and the Collaborative Writing of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft,” describes her controversial writings “as representing the cacophonous medley of internal contradictions that she lived in” (p.52). Specifically, that of her poem Pensive Hours, which exhibits the layered nature of her works, shown through her Anglo-American heritage (with an emphasis towards Christian) tones hidden alongside her native spirituality, establishes Jane Johnston Schoolcraft as an American poet influenced by more than English Romanticism.

The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context of selected creative literature. I will be discussing the various aspects of them and to aid in my analysis, I will be utilizing the works of Nella Larsen from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Jessie Bennett Redmond Fauset,

Mary Prince was a slave in the West Indies in the early 1800s. In her book, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, she talks about her life as a slave, and the treatment she received from the different families she lived with. This paper focuses on the cruel treatment of Mary by her slave owners, specifically the Inghams, Mr. D- and his wife, and the Woods.

Chapter 4 of A Shining thread of hope explores the the 19th century as it relates to African-American women. It is broken down into subsections: Origins of the movement, Sojourner's sisters, outside the movement, the underground railroad, another world, another culture,and before the dawn. Each time period followed a certain formula. First, a generalization about the time, followed by a

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Unfortunately Native Americans have deep roots with racism and oppression during the last 500 years. “In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven,” Sherman Alexie tries to show racism in many ways in multiple of his short stories. These stories, engage our history from a Native American viewpoint. Many Native Americans were brutally forced out of their homes and onto Reservations that lacked resources. Later, Indian children were taken from their families and placed into school that were designed to, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” In the book there are multiple short story that are pieces that form a larger puzzle that shows the struggles and their effects on Native Americans. Sherman Alexie shows the many sides of racism, unfair justice and extermination policies and how imagination is key for Native American survival.

     Throughout Ceremony, the author, Leslie Silko, displays the internal struggle that the American Indians faced at that time in history. She displays this struggle between good and evil in several parts of the book. One is the myth explaining the origin of the white man.

Harriet Wilson’s novel Our Nig, follows the life of Frado, a young mulatto girl in the household of a white family in New England. She is abandoned to this family at the age of six because her mother could not afford to care for her and resented her and the hardships to which her birth had contributed. The mistress of the household to which Frado is left is a cruel and spiteful woman, especially towards blacks. When Frado is left in the care of the Bellmont residence as a young girl, she has no idea of the troubles she would have to face for most of her life. From the very beginning, neither Mrs. Bellmont, the main antagonist, nor her equally cruel daughter, Mary, show any hint of compassion or even mercy for the young girl. The story follows Frado and her life in the Bellmont household.

It is easy to see that current events and issues of the world around them have had an impact on authors and what they have written from the stories in this time period. The Native American authors wrote stories describing life during and after white man came to America. We read Oratory’s by two Native American’s COCHISE and CHARLOT. They gave heart-wrenching speeches, giving great details into the history of the tribes and the devastating effect the white man had on them. Author Zitkala Sa gave us a powerful interpretation of her life as a Indian and how the white’s coming to America affected her life.

Schiff’s article specifies on Butler’s use of fiction to expand the portrayal of slavery in order to give the audience a new perspective on colonialism from the oppressed view of Dana. Therefore, Schiff argues that Butler utilizes the expressive freedom of fictional ideas such as time travel to reveal the extent and harshness of slavery. Parallel to Schiff’s argument, Thelma Shinn Richard’s “Defining Kindred: Octavia Butler 's Postcolonial Perspective” underscores Butler’s ability to utilize the postcolonial perspective of an African-American woman to expose the reality of slavery. Richard argues that our current perspective is limited as we have not witnessed the extent of colonial racism, but have simply been educated from a historical standpoint. Richard’s article combines the focuses of both the other articles as she aims to educate her audience on the cruelty of slavery from the empowering perspective of a female slave in a society fueled by white patriarchy. Altogether, the articles aim to analyze Butler’s use of perspective and literary techniques in order to reveal the repressive extent of slavery in the past.

Haley’s Roots is a pastoral, placed at the intersection of historiography, ethnography and genealogy. While narrating the history of the Afro-American, he plays with antinomies of fiction and facts with an eye of a mythologist. There is a vast catalogue of people, places and incidents in Roots and the time movements are non-linear. The story shifts from Africa to America and vice-a-versa repeatedly, foregrounding the relationship between the rural agricultural life patterns that mark the seasonal routines of both people of Mandinka origin and plantation slaves. For example Haley shifts abruptly from the story of Kunta to that of Kizzy of Chicken George, trying to become coherence in the present by being is coherent to the past. It combines