“Incidents”

In her play, Harriet Jacobs, Lydia R. Diamond draws parallels between Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. While Diamond includes emblematic images and characters that resonate with Jacobs’ autobiography, such as the garret and Jacob’s children, she also includes other images that are not mentioned in the original text. For example, in…

Art is a Vicious and Exhausting Cycle: a presentation on Fuego

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk to some students about what it was like to be on Fuego del Corazon. Fuego del Corazon, or Fuego, is a latin dance team in Boston College and is celebrating 16 years since its inauguration. This year, after so much hard work, Fuego won the…

What Happens When We Take The BITCH Out the Way

Listen to THIS FIRST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw429JGL5zo “Move bitch, get out the way ” – Ludacris, Word of Mouf. Since 2001, Ludacris has been trying to get the “bitch” to move. I decided to help him out and, quite literally, took the word ‘bitch’ out of the song . But instead of only imagining the ‘what if’s’…

The South in her is what Matters

The novel ” Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo” starts off with the youngest of all sisters: Indigo. Unlike her sisters and mother, Indigo is very independent and does not conform to the norms of the older, white society. Instead, she perceives her family’s life as mundane, a constant “back and forth” ( 4) and, from a…

First Class Ticket in a Second Class Coach

Gwendolynn Bennett’s short- story, “The Wedding Day,” revolves around one black- male character and his resentment of the white-American race. The story uses tired gender norms of masculinity to portray Paul’s innate strength, short-temper, and heroic attitude. He seems invincible when it come to his white-male enemy. Paul beats up any white americans who use…

Tragic Trade

Where does girlhood begin and where does it end? For Harriet Jacobs, or Linda Brent, her girlhood ends early in her youth. Early in her life as a slave, Linda Brent lived with her mother’s mistress who treated her fairly and taught her how to be literate. After Linda’s kind mistress dies, she is sold…

Slender Chains

“Space Traders” by Derrick Bell highlights, through its genre of science fiction, the bizarreness and unfairness of our American history and, possibly, our future. The short story uses extraterrestrials as a new form that embodies oppression while using the white- American community as moderate and undefensive of its black brothers. In his short story, Bell…

Loss of Liberty or Liberty through Loss?

In his compilation of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Dubois explains how many African- Americans come to understand and define themselves through the norms of the white American experience. In his first chapter, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Dubois addresses that his goal as a black, American man is neither to “Africanize America” nor…