Considering Linda’s means of escape from slavery by hiding in the garret in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, think of a technology today that allows you to run away without going anywhere. Linda’s means of escape, hiding in the garret above her family home, allowed her avoid her slaver, while also…
Author: emilywigham
Don’t Play Me Like That: Gender Performativity in the Sassafrass Chaper.
Performative gender is a motif that runs throughout Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. We see it first in how Indigo strikes out against it in the beginning, when she first meets Crunch and Spats and joins the Geechees, and again as Cypress embodies it in her ballet dancing. However, I think where Ntozake Shange makes the…
Hurston’s Parody: Art and Other Such Frivolous Things.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s “Art and Such”, she continuously uses over-exaggeration to create an air of humor, even turning to parody romantic writers as a form of rhetoric. The point of Hurston’s essay is to combat the idea that black art has to be political – that artists can only focus on the negatives of…
Group 3: Black No More
The historically relocatable items we chose were as follows: The KKK or Knights of Nordica Bunny’s Wife as one of the last black women in America – an activist Beauty Products: Breck Shampoo – Blandine character, Kink no More Skin Bleaching Those we put in bold are the aspects we found most interesting in relation…
Trading Places: Written vs Visual Sci-fi
Question 1: The genre of science fiction allows for the exaggeration of both real and imagined concepts in order to portray either a futuristic or scientifically advanced version of our own world. In relation to the story Space Traders, the genre of science fiction allows the author Derrick Bell to delve into the racial issues of…
Souls of No Escape
McKittrick, Sean, et al. Get Out. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017. While my example does not fully encompass the extent to which Dr. Crookman manages to alter the lived experience of Black people through science, the movie Get Out holds a relative aim. In this movie, the physical appearance of Black people is not altered, however,…
The Art Behind the Veil
W.E.B Du Bois coins two phrases throughout his essays in The Souls of Black Folk, both of which seek to intensify the feelings of those oppressed by matter of race, while also clearly explicating the experience of the oppressed for the education of the racially non-persecuted. These phrases are ‘double consciousness’, first mentioned on page…
Simplifying History to Educate Our Children
Ellen Levine’s use of simple language, along with the illustrations done by Kadir Nelson in the children’s book Henry’s Freedom Box, creates a heart wrenching depiction of an already horrific tale of freedom. Throughout the short book, Levine picks only a handful of quotes that are directly referenced from the original text, such as Brown’s mother’s story…
Wigs: A Black Woman’s White Mask
Baker speaks of two ideas in his piece; mastery of form and deformation of mastery. Mastery of form is the complete proficiency in obtaining a certain form; becoming so good at performing something you simply blend in. Deformation of mastery is the rejection of the dominant form in a way that seems almost inappropriate. In…
Black Matter 