Pearl Cleage's Flyin West Literary Analysis

Robert and Bessie Brown, who are the paternal grandparents of the author’s wife, made their home in Bradley, South Dakota, a farming community and rail hub on the eastern Dakota prairie. Bessie grew up on a farm near Bradley, whereas Robert, subsequent to service in the Great War, arrived in Bradley as a young adult seeking a livelihood by acquiring the community’s Ford dealership. After becoming husband and wife, they remained in the small town where the civic-minded couple took on leadership roles in their church and numerous service organizations. Foremost in Robert and Bessie’s lives were their four children: Mary, Robert, Eldred, and Verna. They nurtured their children through the challenging times of the Great Depression and, as they matured into adulthood, guided them through the turbulent years of World War II.

Melba Beals, a young African-American, was part of the Little Rock Nine: a group of nine African-Americans who integrated into Little Rock’s renowned all-white school, Central High. In Beal’s memoir Warriors Don’t Cry, the main character Melba desperately survives through the acts of prejudice brought towards her in her white environment around her. These terrifying experiences throughout Melba’s journey reveals to the reader that a successful journey of one is always heavily assisted by important figures around that person.

It is strange that two of the most prominent artists of the Harlem Renaissance could ever disagree as much as or be as different as Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Despite the fact that they are the same color and lived during the same time period, they do not have much else in common. On the one hand is Hurston, a female writer who indulges in black art and culture and creates subtle messages throughout her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. On the other hand is Wright, who is a male writer who demonstrates that whites do not like black people, nor will they ever except for when they are in the condition “…America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.” Hurston was also a less political writer than

To simply answer the question, the answer would be that they had very little success in creating their ‘National Community’. Between the years 1933-39 the Nazi party set upon an idea of creating their own race of racially pure Germans, an Aryan race. And to do this they had to remove all the people they had thought of as unfit and against what they saw as the Aryan race, and create a Volksgemeinschaft. Volksgemeinschaft was a people’s community, where everybody was equal in race. The Nazi party was prepared to go to extreme lengths to ensure that they got this racially pure race, killing unfit Germans was a solution.

In the 1940’s and the 1950’s, America was going through a world war and several difficulties that included problems in civil and woman rights on the home-front. In two different nonfiction memoirs by female authors, we see different yet similarities in the novels. Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone is a memoir by a Japanese-American woman, in which she describes her childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood while growing up in a Japanese immigrant family in Seattle, Washington in the 1930 's. In the second narrative, Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody is a memoir by an African-American woman whom writes about her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood life and growing up in her home state during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s. Moody and Sone had childhoods that lacked positive influences in certain areas and tell their stories to help others in understanding the issues that surrounded them as being minority women in a society that don’t accept them.

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

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,

Mammie, Jezebel, and the ever ready prostitute and Sapphire. In “Four Women” Nina Simone links the history of black women in America as defined

“Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination” written by American author, feminist and social activist, bell hooks, dissects the dichotomy of black and white culture in a westernized society. Hooks utilizes the term ‘whiteness’ throughout her piece as an acknowledgment of the domination, imperialism, colonialism, and racism that white people have asserted among black people. This discipline progressively has evolved from history; through slavery and forth, leaving an imprint in

Zora Neale Hurston's aim in The Gilded Six-Bits is to counter the lingering; glad; darky generalization by which African Americans was respected in her time. In particular, she refutes the plainly condescending attitude of the white store clerk toward the end of the story who needs to be similar to the African Americans, obviously effortless and continually laughing. Such a recognition is rendered silly and crazy by Hurston's story of the inside turmoil brought on by a demonstration of conjugal disloyalty and the unprecedented efforts of Joe and Missie May to revive their love and recovery their marriage.

World War I was the most violent, deadly, and costly war of its time. World War I was a result of multiple causation; militarism, alliances, nationalism, imperialism, and the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. All the causes of World War I come to light as the European powers began to industrialize. As industrialization began, these nations would go to other countries to get the resources they needed. This allowed imperialism to occur. Imperialism is when a strong nation tries to dominate a weaker nation, economically, socially, or politically. These weaker nations couldn’t fight back because they were not industrialized. However, the race for resources led to a competition between the European powers. France and Germany competed

Over time, it has become relatively easy, almost second nature, for people to devise strict societal barriers and categorize people, cultures, and ideas into separate boxes. In Jean Toomer’s “Portrait in Georgia”, however, this is exceptionally challenging for the reader to do so. With his poetic paintbrush, Toomer describes a beautiful woman, but he intentionally blurs the racial lines of black and white in order to illustrate an underlying theme concerning the deep-rooted problems of racism in America. To help convey this theme, Toomer utilizes the literary tool of imagery, and he does so masterfully. Each image is meticulously placed and organized to provide the most powerful impact possible. While certain images emphasize the beauty and grandeur of a woman, others bring up unbelievably violent, gory, and horrific images of death associated with the treatment of African Americans during the time of Jim Crow Laws. Overall, Toomer’s use of imagery brings “Portrait in Georgia” to life, grabs the reader’s attention, successfully demonstrates an extremely powerful message, and causes society’s darker parts to be questioned.

When you live in the suburbs of Atlanta, it was easy to forget about whites. Whites were like those pigeons: real and existing, but rarely seen or thought about…everyone had seen white girls and their mother coo-coing over dresses; everyone had gone to downtown library and seen white businessmen swish by importantly, wrists flexed in front of them to check the time as though they would change from Clark Kent into Superman…those images were a fleeing as cards shuffled in a deck, where as the ten white girls behind us were real and memorable (179).

The plot, or basic storyline, of this short story is about a black woman, Annie Johnson, based in the United States before 1905. Her marriage had collapsed due to her husband leaving her to pursue religion in Oklahoma and leaving her with very little money. The plotline develops on to show her struggle to support herself and her two sons and how she has to use courage to support herself and her family.

In The Pearl, by John Steinbeck, evil transforms certain humble citizens into envious savages. It is this evil which moves the story along and adds drama. It causes the beginning of a happy spirit, but the downfall of goodness and humanity.