Racism In James Michener's Tales Of The South Pacific

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Even before our team met to go over our ideas on what direction we were going with South Pacific I decided to sit down and read the libretto. I was already decently familiar with South Pacific, but I decided to watch the 1949 musical as well. I felt comfortable with the material and I sat down to start some background on the play. I quickly found information that the play had been based off of a book by James Michener called Tales of the South Pacific, so I picked it up and decided to skim through it and see the stories behind the musical. Pursuing the internet a little bit more I found the story behind how Rodgers and Hammerstein came to know Tales of the South Pacific. Based off of this and the background from reading the novel I wrote a background paragraph with this information and included the production history. While I found a decent amount on the history, I could not find any specific …show more content…

With that in mind, we worked out several ideas and decided to use contrast in colors as our metaphor. Because of this decision I wanted to do a little research on the issue of racism. I once again turned to my grandfather and my reading to dig up what information I could. I did two small paragraphs on this issue to give the rest of the team some background into the issue; one paragraph on the racism of African Americans and one on the Japanese. Everyone knows the basics of the racism towards the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor; Japanese were placed into internment camps in the mainland of the United States and on the island of Hawaii, where the attack occurred. On the subject of African Americans, it was the standard racism that everyone is familiar with before the civil rights movement. I did find it interesting however that African American soldiers were not allowed to be placed in high level positions and they were often given simple tasks and

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