JID’s arrival to the hip hop scene was not a quiet one. Shortly after the release of his first album, The Never Story, critics pounced to compare him to Kendrick Lamar. The two both present immediately with the capacity to create songs with incredible hooks, versatile flows, but most importantly, lyrics that run circles around…
Author: danaconnolly
Spirituality and reclaiming Paganism in Indigo’s “Moon Journeys”
One of the most striking aspects of the first chapter of Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo is the addition of Indigo’s “cartographies,” which function as brief interludes to the story in which Indigo presents home remedies for the emotional qualms of her everyday life. These sort of “natural remedies” have become a trope in African American…
DuBois and the Disparate Visions of American Propaganda
DuBois questions his audience at the NAACP at the beginning of his speech, “Criteria of Negro Art,”. He asks, if you “suddenly should become full-fledged Americans,” meaning fully assimilated into the dominant white culture, what would you do? (5). While DuBois creates imagery of white obsession with “flamboyant” luxuries like powerful “motor cars,” and “elaborate…
Group 1 Project Checkpoint
For our project, we chose to research these 6 historically locatable narrative details: Richmond, Virginia in 1815 Understanding the political, social, and cultural environment in Richmond, Virginia in 1815 will inform the reader on how Henry perceived the world outside of his captivity, the people that he would meet outside of the tobacco factory and…
Black Materiality in Space Traders
Science fiction draws literary weight from the potentiality of unreal circumstances. Unlike fantasy, everything in science fiction is a plausible given the rapid pace of scientific advancement. That’s why Black Mirror is so popular; it presents a vision of our future that is so firmly rooted in our present that the dark vision of the…
The (un)apologetic Opulence of Max Fisher & Playboi Carti’s Lifestyle
This post contains some explicit language. Max Fisher shares something powerful with Playboi Carti: they both exist in a capital-driven society. While Schuyler implies in Black No More that Max’s schemes are driven by his love and rejection by white society, ands specifically white women, the true object of his affections is money. While Max exists in…
Obsession with Black Bodies and the White Gaze in Souls of Black Folk (Chapter 13)
Chapter 13 of W.E.B. DuBois tells the fictional story of two men named John, both born in Altamaha, both college-educated, one white, the other black. In the story, the black John returns from the institute carrying the sorrowful burden of the Veil, while the white John Henderson returns with a disdain for his small “town…
Musical Literacy in Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown
As a slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown boasts an impressive display of control of the English language. This uniquely American genre that told the exciting and perilous life stories of former slaves intended to show the great feats that that former slaves could accomplish, both literary and physical. Control and mastery of the English language was necessary at…
Fashion and Survival
Baker aptly contextualizes his theory of mastery of form versus deformation of mastery within the primal language of survival— that is exactly what these methods are to the black community: survival skills. In Beyonce’s music video for “Formation,” she demonstrates her knowledge of both tactics. At 0:36, Bey grounds a dance routine in a narrow hallway surrounded by dated pictures…
Black Matter 