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A Raisin in the Sun

The part of Act I that I want to talk about, is scene 1. The scene sets the tone for the entire Act. You get to meet the characters in their raw state of habitation because they are in the comfort of their own home. Bennie and Walter have that typical brother and sister relationship. They care about each other like no other but on the other hand they know exactly what buttons to push on one another. That reminds me of the relationship I have with my little brother. No one on this planet can irritate me like my brother does. However, then there are times when we are the best of friends and we get along so well. Then we have Mama and Ruth who seem to have a special relationship with each other. Even though they aren’t blood, they pretty much are just as close. Mama and Ruth serve the purpose of being the voice of reason for each other. They tell each other the truth and they have conversations about life and the American dream, well their own American Dreams. That’s definitely something that I’m learning from this play is that the American Dream for a Black person is totally different from the American Dream for a White person. Well no, actually its different between the privileged and the oppressed people. Black or colored people have always known to be oppressed. And one thing from scene one that coincides with that statement is when Ruth said “Walter Lee said that colored people ain’t never going to start getting ahead til they start gambling on some different kinds of things in the world like investments and things”. However to be able to do that you need money. I enjoyed learning about these characters in scene one. Simply because it was raw, you got to see what they were really feeling and what real thoughts were on their minds. 

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Nov. 9 Reading

What i found to be very interesting about this reading was the idea around the Ouija Board.  The Ouija Board is always said to bring harm to whoever is using it. Its supposed to bring demons and unwanted things to the users of the board. However in this reading it was different. It unintentionally brought two people together in love. Like he said in the reading, when Klondean approached the table, he was instantly arrested by her appearance and unwavering eye contact. That was the real beginning of Klondean and Bill White. Even though the history of the Ouija Board is very known and popular, it had a different effect in their love story. Instead of bringing then horror and a life of evil, it brought them togetherness and a life of love. 

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The Cultural Front

According to Demming, the Cultural Front was a common metaphor of the time combining two meanings of the word “front”. Those two meanings were the military metaphor designating a place and the political metaphor designating a group. The “cultural front” referred both to the cultural industries and apparatuses. The notion of the cultural front itself was an attempt to theorize the relation of culture to politics. 

I think that this text and the text on Jamestown are similar in a way. In Jamestown there were two different cultures. The people of Jamestown and the Pilgrims of Plymouth. I would say that Jamestown was the politics of this era and the Pilgrims were the culture. Even though, they were opposites, at the end of the day they influenced each other. The Jamestown people were the ones who did everything by the book and the Pilgrims did not. They believed in culture. 

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A Queer Harlem Renaissance

This text was extremely hard to read. However, the part of the introduction that I read and understood the most was "Criminal Intimacies and Fugitive Sociality: A Queer Harlem Renaissance". In the first line of this section it mentioned something that Henry Louis Gates Jr. famously wrote. "Surely as had as it was black, not that it was exclusively either of these." As I read further on into the section I began to understand those words a little bit better.

Many of Halrem's most prominent writers had same-sex relationships and explored same sec desire in their literature. And in these literatures, they can all.be seen to provide insights into the formation of non-normative sexual subjectivities. This was geared more toward blacks and black gay and lesbian literature of course and how the it had and how it was influenced by the Cabaret Schools.

Criminal intimacies are relations and relational narratives that are not legible or recognized as valid by dominant discourses and social institutions. The carabet is one of the places where this criminal, public Intimacies were invented and elaborate d as a collaboration between spectators and performers. The phrase "criminal intimacies" evokes the long history of the criminalization of homosexuality, the policing of minoritairian space, and the discursive maintenance of social pathology.

Something that got my attention was when it goes to mention able slaves. It said that to be fully human, to be free, made the slave a criminal. To me that was very interesting to read because I never looked at it that deeply. Which is a shame since I am African American. Blacks in many aspects were looked at as criminals. However, their owners who were doing the crime were not. Then futher on it mentions something that Moten wrote, "to be black, to engage the ensemblic necessarily social performance of blackness, is to be Criminal." All of these things put it into more perspective how blacks were treated. And how they came so far from what it was. Just being black back then was a crime and many things that blacks participated in were unlawful. It's sad but also very interesting to read about.

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Primary Sources (Triangle Factory Fire)

I chose two primary sources that were testimonies from 2 young women who worked at the sweatshops. The first testimony was called “Days and Dreams”. I was about a young woman, Sadie Frowne, who worked in Allen Street (Manhattan). Sadie was a cheerful young woman that was so tired from working hard as she did, but still tried to keep a positive attitude about it. To me this was extremely interesting giving the working environment that these ladies had to endure. How did such a hard working young woman still manage to keep a smile on her face? The other testimony I read was called “Among the Poor Girls”. This was about a young farmer-child, Susie L, who moved to New York to work. When Susie lived on the farm with her parents, she was full of life. Her skin was pure pink and white and her lips were red with rich life-blood of heath. However, after working in a sweatshop her body started to deteriorate. She was no longer the girl full of happiness and life, but the young woman whose eyes had the sign of death inside of them. If wasn’t more than a year that she was away from home before she died. 

These two testimonies are polar opposites of each other but started off the exact same way. They both were happy go luck young women before they began work, except one didn’t let the downside and unsafe work conditions drag her down. Instead she turned that misery into happiness with help of a young man who kept her occupied. She was able to stay focus on her dreams and stay healthy to purse them. On the other hand, the other young woman let the misery of the job take over her health and it ended up killing her. It’s really sad to see such young people losing their lives spiritually before physically. As young people we are supposed to stay healthy and be able to take more than others. I guess back then as well you never really get to experience being a child for long. Reading about this fire was so heartbreaking and I’m glad now there are rules and laws in place so that we don’t have to go through these harsh work conditions as well. 

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The People of the Land

I enjoyed reading this text by Leslie Marmon Silko. I feel like this was a real story of the good and bad times of the Native American or “American Indians”. To me this reading differed from the Frontier, just by its point of view. I feel like the frontier, even thought most people were not wealthy there was a sense of the wealthy and the poor. The frontier was a sense of the beginning of making a new life, while this story by Silko was the hardships that the Native Americans faced. In this story she talks anout how there was no boundaries between the land and the people in the old days. By reading this text you can tell how she was telling the story of how people were trying to stay alive rather than make a new life. Especially with the Mexican Army’s genocide was on Yaquis. Hundreds of women and children were tortured and shot to death and many people tried to live to stay alive and keep their families together. Another great thing she mentioned in this text was how American-born Europeans didn’t understand what it meant to be part of a village, which in a sense is one big family. She also talked about the power of culture as well. How for them the power of culture was sticking together as one, even after the mountains have been left beyond. I do not believe that this text supports the main argument of Fredrick Jackson Turner. 

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Holiness Churches

In Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Levine spoke about Holiness Churches. He mentioned that “Holiness churches constituted a revitalization, movement with their emphasis up healing, gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and religious dance” (p.180). Pretty much these churches modernized the music that was being played. They kept the tradition of the salve’s past but also used the modern day instruments around them. Which brought a sort of upbeat tempo and all around vibe in the church. I believe that through this music, church goers were able to really feel the power of God through the music. Being a Christian and belonging to a baptist church, I would say that my church is definitely a Holiness church. Levine mentioned one of Langston Hughes’ newspaper clippings where he mentioned that during his first time being at a Holiness church that,  “the music of these less formal Negro Churches took hold of me, moved me and thrilled me” (p.180). Nowadays, most if not all black churches are Holiness churches. The music now is evolving as time goes on. Actually, gospel music as a whole is evolving as time goes on. Now there are different genres within the genre of gospel music and I think that that in itself is a really spectacular thing. Personally, I love gospel music because it to me, is a pick me up when your spirits are feeling down. 

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The Contours of Slave Songs

This part of chapter one was very interesting for me. In the beginning of this section it mentions that Thomas Jefferson once said, the musically the slaves are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time. Then it goes on to say that N***ers are good singers naturally and have better lungs than white folks and such powerful voices. To me this is extremely flattering. Even though I hate the N-word more than anything in the world, it’s flatter to know that there are people out there that believe my race are natural singers. However, that is not true for all blacks. Another thing in this section that stuck out to me was that for slaves, music remained a central, living element in their daily expressions and activities. Most of the time the songs they sung did not make any sense to the white folks. However, that was done on purpose. Frequently, slaves sang songs about each other which were incomprehensible to white listeners. “Negro takes frequently featured music as a device to get around and deceive the whites”. This was a very cool thing to learn about my ancestors and it was something that I originally before reading this, knew. I mean it makes sense as well. If you picked cotton and did things you didn’t want to do all day everyday, you would need to start finding ways to entertain yourself too. 

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Blog #4

For this blog I read chapter 13 of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. This chapter was mainly about Franklin’s introduction to scientific experiments and some bumps along the road to his success. One thing in this chapter that I found interesting was when, one of his papers that he made it to France. This paper was about the sameness of lightening with electricity. This paper fell into the hands of Count de Buffon who got it published. The publication offended the Abbe Nollet. It was not believed that such work could come from America. However, what i found to be interesting was that he was offended because of of a publication error. It was a mistranslationing, which caused a misconception of one another’s meaning. When publishing articles and writings in different languages, there should be a translator that is very good at what he does. Because this was a small misunderstanding. If it was something more serious it could have caused a world-wide disaster. 

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Blog #3

The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was very interesting to read. What stuck out to me was when Ben was introducing himself and when he began talking about his life in chapter 2. It was very enlightening to see how Ben grew up and how he came from nothing to something. One thing I found to be interesting was the fat that his father really wanted him to become a Printer. To me that was interesting because that was not Ben’s first choice in professions. It was amazing to see how little control men had compared to their elders. I enjoyed reading the beginning of this autobiography and look forward to reading a little more about it. 

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Jamestown Ch. 5 Blog

Something that I found really interesting about this chapter was all of the voyages to find the Americas. Many people from all different backgrounds were looking to find something that they could call their own. Most of this chapter was about the farming, starving times, and the naming and finding of the Oceans. I thought it was interesting that in this chapter it mentioned “The power to apply a name and make it stick implied ownership and control. Later i the chapter I found out that disease and hunger were the leading causes to the fall of Jamestown. All together, I thought this was a good chapter of the Jamestown project. 

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Blog# 1

In this blog I’m choosing to elaborate on Mary Helen Washington’s speech regarding the Presidential Address to the American Studies Association. Something that stuck out to me in this speech was when she began talking about “wonderful thinking”. She went on to say that she believes that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. To me that statement is very true especially within the ASA. Racism and segregation have always been a chaotic topics when coming up in discussions. However, these topics have allowed for very intellectual debates. Whites have always thought to have been the powerful race. The race that puts down other races for being different. When in fact it really doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is. Everyone from all different backgrounds have the ability to do pretty much the same thing. In Washington’ speech she spoke about how the ASA was subject to change because people weren’t afraid to act on what they believed. Many minorities believed that change needed to happen within this organization and because they were wise to the chaos, it promoted wonderful thinking. And that is something I find very interesting. When a small group of people come together and use the minds of everyone, there is really nothing that can stop them from changing the world.