Recently “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee has been everywhere. It’s definitely catchy, and I think it touches on important themes that people do discuss, think about and value. The lyrics are as follows: Ayy, ayy, ayy, ayy (ooh) Ooh, ooh, ooh, ohh (ooh) Ayy, ayy Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh Needless to say, I…
Author: rosedornon
Womanly Work as an Integral Structure: Weaving Together Society
We quickly learn that the loom in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is of particular importance. Each daughter possesses something that early on acts to signal to the reader the divergent paths they are to take. For Cypress this is dance, for Indigo her dolls that act as her link to a different world, and for…
Escaping the horde: Objectivity in Black art
I noticed in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Art and Such” references to Black Americans as a “horde” or “mass” (2, 9). However, her rhetorical use of these words is distinctly different than how I had noted these or similar terms being used before. Having examined black physicality and mass in Space Traders, I wanted to put…
The Absence of Black Matter and Importance of Narrative Medium
1) In engaging Derrick Bell’s “Space Traders” in our ongoing dialogue on the meaning of black matter, I examined two key images on the last page of his short story. While the Black Americans are being herded on to the beaches towards the Space Traders Bell describes their “vast empty holds… [yawning] in the morning…
The Noble Knights of Labor
Founded in 1869, this was the first significant labor movement in the U.S., originally their membership advocated secrecy as a way to avoid the retaliation of employers (“Knights of Labor”, Britannica). The group’s ideology held that producing groups, craftsmen and workers, should unify to form working cooperatives in opposition to capitalism (“Knights of Labor”, Britannica)…
Blackness as mass en masse
<<“Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman’s raid through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive…
Spectacle in the “Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown”
In returning to the preface of the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, what became obvious is the shift from the diction of spectacle in the preface to a more humble note in his own narrative. I looked specifically at the letter written by Samuel J. May, though the introduction itself overflows with overblown language, and compared this to Brown’s last…
“Power play in the gaze”: The role of position in establishing power structure in Beyoncé’s “Formation”
As she coasts past in the scene from 1:00 to 1:06, Beyoncé retains eye contact with the camera; her cool, deliberate gaze reeks of confidence and poise. This attitude seems at first to echo the shift in tempo of the song, the blank absence of the repetitive, almost claxon-like beat that has dominated the listener’s…
Black Matter 