In his 2016 song “Child’s Play”, Drake explores the complications of his relationships with women given his status in the music industry, boasting about how easy it is for him to buy expensive things to impress one nameless woman in particular. Drake details how he could “take you to the mall and get you a…
Author: jdeakin17
Indigo’s Passion as a Blue Moon
In the opening lines of the Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, the reader is introduced to Indigo, one of the sisters of the novel who owes their names to Carolina flora. Immediately, the reader is made aware of a connection that Indigo shares with the moon: “there [is] a moon in her mouth”, and as…
“Art and Such”: ‘something to marvel over.’
Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 essay, “Art and Such” details how Hurston believes African American art and its creators are treated by white audiences and how she believes they should be treated. In her description, Hurston conveys some of her points in a sarcastic and sardonic tone, which drives the argument of the essay more. She…
Science Fiction Meets Black Matter
Using the short story “Space Traders” as an exemplary text, discuss the potentially unique ways in which the genre of science fiction might enable us to think through questions about blackness and its relationship to the material and what matters. Science fiction allows for a satire that is in many ways ridiculous but also in…
White Chicks and Black No More
The 2004 comedy “White Chicks”, directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, features two black male FBI agents, Kevin and Marcus who undergo a prosthetic transformation including whiteface in an effort to disguise themselves. as two stereotypical white women for a case. Although this movie is a comedy, and does not feature much profound racial or…
The Soul of Double Consciousness in America
In one of the most well-known passages of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois expounds on the ideas of what it is like to be black and American in a racist America of the early 1900s. In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”, Du Bois describes a “double-consciousness” in which African Americans can only “[see themselves]…
Henry Box Brown’s Harrowing Narrative
Henry Brown’s experiences in Chapter 2 at the mill bring to light the nuances of slavery in a harrowingly casual way. The painful and tragic specifics of the lives of slaves make the horrors of slavery within the narrative especially horrifying. Between candidly describing forced incest: “consequently they were all related to each other”…
Baker’s devices in Beyoncé’s “Formation”
In the song and video for “Formation”, Beyoncé uses excellent examples of both mastery of form and deformation of mastery. Her use of Mastery of Form allows her to put herself in places where historically, she does not fit. She “conceals, disguises, [and] floats like a trickster butterfly” (Baker, 50) on the porch of what…
Black Matter 