L3 - Literature, Theory and Practice
Topic outline
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1- Twentieth Century Poetry 1.1 Modernist Poetry: T.S Eliot's "Game of Chess" from The Waste Land 1.2 World War Poetry: W. B. Yeats' "The Second Coming" 2. Twentieht Century African American Poetry 2.1 Richard B. Wright "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, an Autobiogrphical Sketch" 2.2 Integrationists: James Baldwin "Autobiographical Notes" -
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- Course: Literature: Theory and Practice
- Title: The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, Autobiographical Sketch by Richard Wright
- Duration: 1H15
- Timing: 14:30-15h45
- Class: FAD 3
- Course Objectives: Introduction to the writing of Richard Wright and analysis of his autobiography. This introductory course aims at familiarizing the learner with Wright's autobiographical sketch and pushing the learner to reflect on autobiography. The second ai mis the study and understanding of the African American experience as well as extraction of the writing style and principles from the text by the learner directly without the assistance of the teacher.
- Outline:
- Part One: from 14:30 to 15:15
- Step one: Very short overview of African American Literature
- Step 2: Discovery of the text by Richard Wright
- Step 3: Approaching the text as an autobiography
- Step 4: Reflecting on the events and affects
- Step 5: Extracting elements from the text/
- Part Two: Video discussion on TEAMS
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Part One: Begins at 14:30 and ends at 15:15 -
Look at the instructions below
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This lecture goes through different steps. The first step begins at 14:30 in which you have to read the overview of African American literature below. This task should be completed within 10 minutes.
Step 2: Use 10 minutes to read the summary of the essay in this link Wright's Autobiographical Essay
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Twentieth century African American literature reflects a period of change and rebellion for the African Americans. It included narratives written by African Americans about the status of this minority in the United States, living under the spectrum of racism, segregation, social inequality and identity crisis. The twentieth century witnessed different periods and movements in the rise of such writing. It evolved from what was previously known as Slave narratives in the nineteenth century, and which recorded the experiences and struggles of the slaves who wrote their own autobiographies, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. The subsequent century (Twentieth) witnessed the abolition of slavery and the liberation of African American slaves, however, the problems of colour and racism were persistent until the second half of the twentieth century.
WHAT IS IT?
African American literature is different from African Literature. While the first is written by, and about, African Americans living in America, the second reflects the struggles and lives of the Africans in the continent of Africa, and reflects themes of colonialism, identity, resistance, and African tradition. In June 1976, a survey designed to answer several questions about African American literautre distributed to University Professors, received answers that classify it as a "discipline without a home". This reflects not only the status of African American literature itself as a literature but also the statuts of the subjects that is described in such movement, the African American as an individual belonging to no specific culture for his status as the marginalized in America, and the deterritorialized in Africa. Critics and social theorists argue that the African American individual developed an identity of his own through time, that neither belongs to the white American culture, which he is was excluded from, nor to the African culture which he would like to belong to. Some African Americans knew very little about Africa and developed a dialect and an identity that they assumed reflected Africa.
Historical Context
Twentieth century African American literature was highly affected by the turn of events in the twentieth century, most particularly by the post-reconstruction and the Jim Crow era , the Great Mgration, the Civil Rights movement, and the World War (leading to the Jazz age and the Harlem Renaissance).
The post-reconstruction and the Jim Crow era from 1877 to the early 1900s was a period of segregation and racism for the blacks in America. The Jim Crow Law attempted to regulate the lives of the African Americans among the whites while it consisted of a code of behaviour that was fashioned to avoid their death in a white society. The law included a dismantling of the rights of the African American in the southern states, cancellation of the right for suffrage in addition to other oppressive restrictions. These were translated into themes in African American literature, including Black American experience, segregation, struggle for survival and resistance.
Some of the works of this period were written in local African American dialect to render the tension and to reach the white audiences. Resistance and protest became defining features of the literature of this era.
The Great Migration 1910-1970 The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the exodus of around 6 million African Americans in two waves from the rural south to eastern cities, most precisely New York and Chicago looking for better life conditions, work, but most importantly, escaping the Jim Crow rules, terror, and segregation for a more decent living. This migration created a strong concentration of African Americans in Harlem theatres where a new wave of artists, musicians, and playwrights arose. The literature of the period included themes of alienation and disillusionment for the difficulty of making a living in America, but also featured stories about traumatic experiences of slavery and racial inequality in the south. These stories also reflected the contrast between life in the south and the expectations of freedom and better life in the northern states. This period featured writers like Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Elison, Zora Neale Hurston.
The Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968 this period was characterized by resistance on the side of the African Americans. Incidents like the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 and the March on Washington raised the debate on the African American's identity and position in white society. Writing became a form of activism and multiple writers used essay writing and autobiographical tracts to argue about the role of the African American intellectual in the Blacks' experience. Writers like James Baldwin joined the Integrationsit movement and argued in this writing for the opinion that "[...] integration in the context of the mid-century “slave rebellion” of the Civil Rights movement was primarily a social and political response to policies and practices of racial segregation" (McIvor 88). He called for an integrationist movement where the African American speaks more like a simply American citizen with high intellectual skills rather than dwelling on the debate over identity and belonging.
African American Literary Movements and Periods of the Twentieth Century
The New Negro Era (1900-1920)
This movement was fuelled by authors like W.E.B Du Bois and came as a reaction against the oppressive Jim Crow Law. It started after the publication of Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation , which included essays, poetry, fiction and art produced by African American authors. This book was published in the earliest years of the Harlem Renaissance and is considered as the basis of this movement. The influence of the book led to the birth of the New Negro Movement, which included activism and cultural innovation by African American artists as a form of assertion of the self and of their identity. It paved the ways towards the bloom of the arts during the period of the Harlem Renaissance, although some historians will use the two concepts interchangeably due to their historical and thematic proximity.
The term New Negro symbolized the shift from the rural life of the African American in the south, and most precisely his status as a subject of racism to his new life in the north where the African American is allowed freedom, self-expression, and the ability to produce and consume art.
The Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age
The Harlem Renaissance marks an important phase in the lives of the African Americans. It symbolizes liberation and independence through Artistic creativity. It coincided with the Jazz Age where musicians would perfom in theatres in Harlem every night and amuse both white and black audiences with no segregation nor any restrictions. It started with the Great Migration where large numbers of African Americans moved to Harlem looking for work, and who started to perform different forms of art going from music to theatres, and paintings about the roaring twenties. Fuelled and affected by the New Negro movement (often used interchangeably) this movement reflected African American intellectual prosperity and production. Authors and artists from different parts of the world were attracted to Harlem to be perform and Black artists saw opportunity to write about themselves.
Literature in the Harlem Renaissance was represented by authors like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who were accused of showing excessive pride in their works, some critics would even consider them praising too much blackness in their writing. Langston Hughes wrote not to please the white but to cherish the black identity. He sought to portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes. As he wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” (Hughes Qtd. in The Poetry Foundation)
The period was affected by Jazz and Blues music as iconic african american genres. These helped the emancipation of the "new negro" or the new African American by giving him a new image. For the African American writers, Jazz was not mere artistic creativity but it represented a Model of thought. It was a of representing personal and individual experience, resisting clichés and stereotypes of the African American, and asserting a new definition of the African American.
Jazz music came as revelation for a complex blend of Blues Traditional sound and European harmonic system. The combination yielded into an original sound specific for Jazz on its own and that could not be reproduced by any other style where the lead singer's voice is blended and heard along with those of the group. The emergence of the performers' voices came in as a revolution in music which was also translated as a metaphorical revolution in the lives of the African Americans signifying freedom and liberation from stigmatization.
Central Themes of Twentieth Century African American Literature
African American literature of the twentieth century came to represent the experiences of the African Americans in an eloquent style showing off the artistic creativity and intellectual skills of the African American authors. This expression took different forms swinging from pride and resistance to integrationism and scholarly tracts.
Racial Identity and Double Consciousness
The works of Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Richard Wright reflect to varying degrees and in different styles themes of African American identity and consciousness. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison presents a protagonist who struggles to ensure a living for his family. In his struggle, he is casted aside and marginalized because of his colour, instead, the white society around him projects their fears and frustrations over his existence and he becomes an agent of instability in their environment. The novel clearly emphasizes the status of the African American in a white society and the racial segregation they are subjugated to.
Migration and Displacement
The works of Richard Wright like Native Son, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God among others from the early 1900s included themes of the migration and exploration of the self, self-discovery, and assertion in the myth of the American Dream. Emphasis on the theme of displacement highlighted the status of the African American individual in his forced mobility as a marginal whose right for identity and belonging is ripped. Some authors wrote about the right to return to the south and even imagined alternative realities that made such a return possible.
Richard Wright's autobiographical essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" highlighted the difficulty of survivng in a white society and the obligation of mobility and migration for work. The essay puts light on the violence and inhumane practices of the whites in the south during the Jim Crow era and traces in a sad frame the oppression of the African American. This mobility is depicted as a trap for the African American as the habits were the same everywhere, segregation was common and widespread because everywhere people would see the colour before the person when it came to the african American. This theme also explored the dream of success and wealth in the north against the deceit of the reality which shows a much harder and more difficult, like the threat of unemployment and different forms of racism.
Chracteristics of this literarture include specific detail and attention to personal experience, the use of the vernacular, and religious references as the only refuge for the African American individual.The Theme of memory and history
A recurreing theme in African American literature is that of shared/ Common memory and history. The African American hero often lives in the inner conflict of liberating himself from his past and the history of slavery that follows him on the one side, and on the other side the traumatic experience of being a slave or that of being subjugated to white cruelty. Representations of the theme of history also represent stolen history wherein the African American is deprived of identity, belonging, and ancestry. Representations of this theme appear in the essay of James Baldwin who feels neither belonging to African culture nor white American culture, and the sense of loss in between.
Shared memory occurs in novels like The Color Purple by Alice Walker, where the protagonists make a bond based on their common experience of segregation to protect each other and finally gain their self-dependence through their solidarity.
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Exceprt 1:
I was outraged, and bawled. Between sobs I told her that I didn't have any trees or hedges to hide behind. There wasn't a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn't throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again. And they were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle. Didn't I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn't be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn't kill me.
38All that night I was delirious and could not sleep. Each time I closed my eyes I saw monstrous white faces suspended from the ceiling, leering at me.
Question 1: Comment on the child's psychological condition after his incident
Question 2: What do you think of the mother's reaction to Richard? Why should Richard be cautious?
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Here my Jim Crow education assumed quite a different form. It was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel. Here I learned to lie, to steal, to dissemble. I learned to play that dual role which every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live.
Question: What is the impact of Jim Crow Law on Richard? What is the lesson that Richard is learning through these incidents?
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Excerpt 3:
The factory force of the optical company in Memphis was much larger than that in Jackson, and more urbanized. At least they liked to talk, and would engage the Negro help in conversation whenever possible. By this means I found that many subjects were taboo from the white man's point of view. Among the topics they did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. The most accepted topics were sex and religion.
Question: Richard now has a better understanding of his condition, in what terms would you describe his condition in his environment?
Question: Taboo subjects that must not be discussed between whites and blacks have a few elements in common, can you explain them? And why in your opinion are these subjects "tabooed"?
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The end of Part One.
Part Two begins at 15:15 - Return to the video discussion on TEAMS following this link: Meeting
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