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To what extent does African American literature serve as an expose to the African American Tradition
Essay on african american literature
Literature And Society
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Toni Cade Bambara, a well known author and social activist, uses language and experience to incite change in a warped society that marginalizes its people based on language, race, and class. With the utilization of African American English (AAE), Bambara sheds light on some questionable prejudices and problems with capitalism in American society. Bambara’s works are noted for their use of traditional AAE and its support in teaching the overall “lesson” and the underlying message to the public. The majority of Bambara’s works were inspired by and written in response to her experiences of growing up a black woman, of lower class status, in Harlem. Her short story, “The Lesson,” is no exception. Bambara uses first person narrative, omission of tense markers, and African American English to prove her point that even with education, wealth and prosperity are unevenly distributed throughout the United States. Bambara’s short story, “The Lesson,” published in 1972 in her collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love, was definitely a product of cultural and social issues of the time. Sparked by prejudices of race, class, and society, many of Bambara’s works deliberately incorporate colloquial language as a way to educate the reader of the issues poor, uneducated African Americans living in urban areas of the United States have to deal with on a daily basis. While “The Lesson” focuses more on the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States, her stories are generally focused more broadly on the lives and injustices facing African Americans. Bambara’s stories tend to feature adolescent, black children, from underprivileged and uneducated backgrounds. In this compilation of short stories, the narration is generally in first... ... middle of paper ... ... be revered as self-exclusion from popular thought. Works Cited Bambara, Toni Cade. “The Lesson.” Gorilla, My Love. New York: Random House, 1972. 85-96. Clark, John Taggart. “Abstract Inquiry and the Patrolling of Black/White Borders Through Linguistic Stylization.” The Language, Ethnicity, and Race Reader: A Reader. Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton. Eds. New York: Routledge, 2003. Grave, Roy Neil. “Bambara’s THE LESSON.” The Explicator. 66.4 (2008): 214-218. Proquest. SEMO Kent Lib., Cape Girardeau, MO. 12 April 2009. . Wright, Katy M. “The Role of Dialect Representation in Speaking from the Margins: “The Lesson” of Toni Cade Bambara.” Style. 42.1 (2008): 73-87. Proquest. SEMO Kent Lib., Cape Girardeau, MO. 12 April 2009. .
Amina Gautier has been awarded with Best African American Fiction and New Stories from the South; in addition, she has successfully created At Risk. Gautier’s story is based on the African American community and the different types of struggle families can realistically face. However, if a white person would have written this exact story it could have been misinterpreted and considered racist. Stereotypes such as fathers not being present, delinquencies and educational status are presented in the various short stories.
Richard Wright grew up in a bitterly racist America. In his autobiography Black Boy, he reveals his personal experience with the potency of language. Wright delineates the efficacious role language plays in forming one’s identity and social acceptance through an ingenious use of various rhetorical strategies.
In “Once Upon a Quinceanera” Julia Alvarez follows the Hispanic coming of age tradition for females to explore how evolution of culture has shifted throughout generations. By doing this Alvarez discovers perceptions are influenced by cross cultural boundaries. In “Leave Your Name at the Border” Manuel Munoz, discusses the barriers between Mexicans and Americans when it comes to language and how it affects future generations. He does this by acknowledging socially expected norms for Mexican Americans in public and the tensions created when assimilating to such norms between a non-dominant and dominant group. In “What’s Black, Then White, and Said All Over,” Leslie Savan discusses how black talk and pop talk is connected because white people
Racism is more than just blatant comments and police brutality. It is also found in the subtle things, like the lack of opportunities in education. Graduation by Maya Angelou and I Just Wanna Be Average by Mike Rose both address this issue of opportunities and race. In St. Louis, Missouri, Maya Angelou went to an all-black school during the 1930s and 40s, while Mike Rose is a second generation Italian immigrant in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Both wrote about their experiences with systemic racism in education. Both authors are given low expectations and have no power over their futures, which shows how systemic racism sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy of underachievement.
Although there were numerous efforts to attain full equality between blacks and whites during the Civil Rights Movement, many of them were in vain because of racial distinctions, white oppression, and prejudice. Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi recounts her experiences as a child growing up in Centreville, Mississippi. She describes how growing up in Mississippi in a poor black family changed her views of race and equality, and the events that took place that changed her life forever. She begins her story at the tender age of 4, and describes how her home life changed drastically with the divorce of her parents, the loss of her home, and the constant shuffle from shack to shack as her mother tried to keep food on the table with the meager pay she earned from the numerous, mostly domestic, jobs she took. On most days, life was hard for Anne, and as she got older she struggled to understand why they were living in such poverty when the white people her mother worked for had so many nice things, and could eat more than bread and beans for dinner. It was because of this excessive poverty that Anne had to go into the workforce at such an early age, and learn what it meant to have and hold a job in order to provide her family. Anne learned very young that survival was all about working hard, though she didn’t understand the imbalance between the work she was doing and the compensation she received in return.
Geneva Smitherman of the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard University wrote in her paper “God Don’t Never Change”: Black English from a Black Perspective that English scholars and teachers should stop trying to correct “Black English” for being grammatically incorrect and assess the content for intellectual accuracy. She believes that no matter how different the grammar is from “White English”, “black English is still understandable and should be treated as if it is written correctly. Smitherman sites many examples throughout literary history highlighting moments where “Black English” has been battered for being incorrect, most notably using the story of a Wayne State freshman student who had a paper returned to them for being written in “Black English”. The student was told that the paper was grammatically incorrect and needed to be corrected without any further commentary. While Smitherman makes a strong argument for the equal treatment of “Black English” in literature, her writing is full of pathological bias and resentment toward her fellow English scholars causing her thesis to be overshadowed.
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. (Twain 2)
The trials and challenges of African Americans have a long and detailed history. Along with the brutal tales of the southern plantations, African Americans shared the struggles of life after their “divine deliverance.” By the 1960s, and much of the 1970s, Americans faced the ending of a deadly a war, and the emergence of many equal rights organizations. The plight of the African Americans took center stage in the spotlight of American media. Many African Americans, previously treated as second class citizens, demanded equal treatment like that of their Caucasian counterparts. In the story “Everyday Use,” by Alice Walker, the characters and story plot artistically demonstrated the events of the Reconstruction Era, the importance of formal education to emancipated slaves, and the divergence from mainstream religion and consciousness.
Today, blacks are respected very differently in society than they used to be. In “The Help”, we see a shift in focus between what life is like now for the average African American compared to what it was like for them to live in the 1960’s.“The Help” teaches readers the importance of understanding and learning from our history. The novel is a snapshot of the cultural, racial and economic distinctions between blacks and whites in a particularly tumultuous time in American history. “The Help” encourages readers to examine personal prejudices and to strive to foster global equality.
Civil rights activist, Malcolm X, once said, “The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.” Malcolm X, like many others, saw the destruction the white majority can cause on an individual’s sense of identity. The aftermath of the civil rights movement left many African American communities feeling resentful towards those who had mistreated their people and left them without opportunity. This animosity shaped the identities of many discriminated people, including young children. In Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” Bambara exposes the ways in which awareness of social status and seclusion from society can shape a young girl’s identity.
Without details, the words on a page would just simply be words, instead of gateways to a different time or place. Details help promote these obstacles, but the use of tone helps pull in personal feelings to the text, further helping develop the point of view. Point of view is developed through the story through descriptive details and tone, giving the reader insight to the lives of each author and personal experiences they work through and overcome. Issa Rae’s “The Struggle” fully emplefies the theme of misplaced expectations placed on African Americans, but includes a far more contemporary analysis than Staples. Rae grapples as a young African-American woman that also struggles to prove her “blackness” and herself to society’s standards, “I feel obligated to write about race...I slip in and out of my black consciousness...sometimes I’m so deep in my anger….I can’t see anything outside of my lens of race” (Rae, 174). The delicate balance between conformity and non-conformity in society is a battle fought daily, yet Rae maintains an upbeat, empowering solution, to find the strength to accept yourself before looking for society’s approval and to be happy in your own skin. With a conversational, authoritative, humorous, confident and self-deprecating tone, Rae explains “For the majority of my life, I cared too much about my blackness was perceived, but now?... I couldn’t care less. Call it maturation or denial or self-hatred- I give no f%^&s.” (Rae 176), and taking the point of view that you need to stand up to racism, and be who you want to be not who others want you to be by accepting yourself for who you are. Rae discusses strength and empowerment in her point of view so the tone is centered around that. Her details all contribute to the perspectives as well as describing specific examples of racism she has encountered and how she has learned from those
The novel covered so much that high school history textbooks never went into why America has never fully recovered from slavery and why systems of oppression still exists. After reading this novel, I understand why African Americans are still racially profiled and face prejudice that does not compare to any race living in America. The novel left a mixture of frustration and anger because it is difficult to comprehend how heartless people can be. This book has increased my interests in politics as well and increased my interest to care about what will affect my generation around the world. Even today, inmates in Texas prisons are still forced to work without compensation because peonage is only illegal for convicts. Blackmon successfully emerged the audience in the book by sharing what the book will be like in the introduction. It was a strange method since most would have expected for this novel to be a narrative, but nevertheless, the topic of post Civil War slavery has never been discussed before. The false façade of America being the land of the free and not confronting their errors is what leads to the American people to question their integrity of their own
In “The Allegory of the Cave,” Plato describes the cave as very dark with chained people inside and a wall where they can only see shadow illusions, which they believe is reality. Outside the cave, there is “light” and “truth.” One chained person is released into the “light,” which is uncomfortable at first, because of how bright the “light” or “truth” is however, once he adjusts, he realizes the outer world is the “truth” or reality and the cave is a shadow of reality. He pities the ones in the cave, still lost in the darkness yet, when he tries to make them see reality, their ignorance overpowers them and they kill the enlightened one out of fear and confusion. This is the kind of society, full of puppet-handlers, the narrator Sylvia in “The Lesson” dwells in and the author, Toni Cade Bambara, depicts Sylvia as being freed from the chains of ignorant society. Bambara’s released prisoner, Miss Moore, is the one to free Sylvia and the other chained prisoners and exposes them to the “light,” which is the unequal distribution of wealth and the “truth,” which is educating youth on economic inequality so the freed prisoners can learn to change their society’s shadow of reality.
During the nineteen sixties, African Americans experienced an immense amount of changes such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Prior to these changes, African Americans faced racial segregation. Segregation was prevalent in housing, transportation, education, medical care and even in the United States Armed Forces. In the poem, History Lesson, the speaker recalls a memory on a beach in Mississippi regarding segregation with her grandmother in the 1930’s. A comparison of the speaker and her grandmother shows both the belief in segregation in the 1930’s compared to the desegregation in the 1970’s. By utilizing historical criticism, History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey can be analyzed from a historical point of view.
12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright is a photo and text book which poetically tells the tale of African Americans from the time they were taken from Africa to the time things started to improve for them in a 149 page reflection. Using interchanging series of texts and photographs, Richard Wright encompasses the voices of 12 Million African-Americans, and tells of their sufferings, their fears, the phases through which they have gone and their hopes. In this book, most of the photos used were from the FSA: Farm Security Administration and a few others not from them. They were selected to complement and show the points of the text. The African-Americans in the photos were depicted with dignity. In their eyes, even though clearly victims, exists strengths and hopes for the future. The photos indicated that they could and did create their own culture both in the past and present. From the same photos plus the texts, it could be gathered that they have done things to improve their lives of their own despite the many odds against them. The photographs showed their lives, their suffering, and their journey for better lives, their happy moments, and the places that were of importance to them. Despite the importance of the photographs they were not as effective as the text in showing the African-American lives and how the things happening in them had affected them, more specifically their complex feelings. 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright represents the voice of African-Americans from their point of view of their long journey from Africa to America, and from there through their search for equality, the scars and prints of where they come from, their children born during these struggles, their journeys, their loss, and plight...