In the novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange, Indigo makes the following statement to her mother when her mother tells her to put her dolls in the attic, and to start worrying about things that a girl her age should be more concerned with: “Every time I tell you something, you tell me…
Author: zampanti
(Pop-Up Challenge) Social Media: A Form of Escapism
In Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda successfully “runs away” from slavery without actually ever running away at first. Without anybody ever knowing about her whereabouts (with the exception of her grandmother) after she escaped the wrath of Dr. Flint, Linda hides in a crawl space in her grandmother’s attic,…
(Pop-Up Challenge) Ruthless Lyrics With Meaning
I’m sure everybody is well aware of the song Forget You! by Cee Lo Green, and was especially aware of it nine years ago (it’s been a while) when it first came out in 2010. This is probably due to the fact that it was constantly played on every radio station, all day and every…
Understanding Cordelia From The Outside-In and Inside-Out
In the literary collection FIRE!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists (1926), Wallace Thurman’s “Cordelia the Crude” bluntly portrays the main character Cordelia as a prostitute in Harlem, New York. From the story’s introduction, we are provided with a third person limited perspective of who Cordelia is— a 16-year-old, light brown-skinned girl from Charleston, South Carolina…
Differences in Mediums Contribute to a Genre’s Way of Commenting on Racial Questions
In Derrick Bell’s short story “The Space Traders”, the genre of science fiction enables us to think through questions about blackness and its relationship to the material and what matters. In Derrick Bell’s short story as a literary piece alone, the elements of the science-fiction genre allow the reader to think about our understanding of…
The Veil: A Self Conscious Metaphor
In W.E.B. Du Bois’ work titled The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois initially applies the metaphor of ‘the veil’ to represent an existent color-line in the aftermath of the Civil War. On page two of the first chapter, titled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”, this idea of ‘the veil’ is introduced to the reader…
The Emotion Underneath The Story
In the Narrative of the Life of Henry “Box” Brown, Written by Himself, Henry “Box” Brown reflects upon a merciful overseer he once had as a slave. “Bennet was followed as overseer, by one Henry Bedman, and he was the best that we had. He neither used the whip nor cheated the hands of what…
A Deformation of Mastery: Gun Violence in America
In Childish Gambino’s “This is America”, Donald Glover employs a deformation of mastery on gun violence in America. In the official music video, Childish Gambino points a gun at and shoots a black man playing a guitar (0:52). Later in the video, Glover is seen again with a gun, this time an assault rifle, dramatically…
Black Matter 