Sassafrass’ partner Mitch speaks a striking line from her section of the novel that illustrates both the materiality of Sassafrass’ craft and a reason for the discord in her relationship with Mitch: “You can create whole worlds, girl” (70). In context, Mitch intends to pressure Sassafrass into channeling her self-expression in writing rather than “all…
Author: alana
Bernard Shields: Personifying the News
Derrick Bell’s short story “The Space Traders” reads like a historical account, as he divides the narrative by indicating the date of each incident as the event unfolds from 1 January to 17 January. In this way, the text has a journalistic air, which makes it difficult to identify a particular bias beyond the historical…
The City of Atlanta: Personified in Time
(A continuation of my post called “The City of Atlanta: Both ‘North’ and ‘South’”) In terms of time, DuBois anchors Atlanta in history as “peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future.” “Peering” personifies the city in a way that sets up DuBois’ comparison with the figure Atalanta later…
The City of Atlanta: Both “North” and “South”
On page 75, DuBois introduces the fifth chapter “Of the Wings of Atalanta” – in which he symbolically compares the city of Atlanta, Georgia, with the mythical Greek huntress Atalanta – by poetically placing the city in space. He characterizes Atlanta as “south of the North, yet north of the South.” This clause is an…
Cognitive Dissonance in Christian, Slave-Holding Society
In the fourth chapter of the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Brown describes an overseer’s excessive physical abuse of an ill slave and offers an argument against the white paternalism defense of slavery at the time (1849). From his personal experience of both kind and cruel overseers and masters during his own…
“In the Making”: Proclaiming Black Strength in the Midst of Tragedy
Houston Baker distinguishes between the “mastery of form” and the “deformation of mastery” in black matter (literature, poetry, art, etc.) by applying the biological concept of allaesthetic characteristics to modern black expression. Baker connects the mastery of form with “cryptic” allaesthetic masks, positing that mastering any tradition involves learning a series of codes to conceal…
Black Matter 