Blackness, Performance, Freedom
Drawing inspiration from all of the visual media we’ve been viewing over the past two weeks of classes, this prompt asks you to write a 1-2 minute dramatic monologue (about 1-2 pages of double spaced lines) where you detail a moment in your life where you felt successful. It could be like when Toni finally…
Beyonce’s “Diva” music video opens with a black screen and simple typewriter-style text providing the viewer with a definition of the word diva: “A successful and glamorous female personality; especially: a female singer who has achieved popularity”. This definition immediately brought me back to the opening scene of Atlanta’s sixth episode, “Value”, which presents with…
Focusing on the final scene of “Harriet Jacobs” by Lydia R. Diamond, how would you stage Harriet’s final monologue and the stage directions that come after that describe a “rousing, hopeful spiritual” as the play ends. Be very specific about lighting, set, and stage directions. Why have you staged the scene in this way? What…
Personally, whenever I’ve heard the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death”, my automatic assumption is that the person saying it would much rather receive liberty than die. However, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this idea of preference is largely eliminated by the absolutely brutal nature of slavery. Harriet Jacobs,…
In “Which Way is Down? Improvisations on Black Mobility” by Jason King, many claims are made about the relationships between falling and ascension, verticality and the horizontal, and the intersections of masculinity, activism, queerness, and shame. King uses the extended metaphor of a ladder to convey his ideas about shame and social mobility, elaborating on…
here is the test post!
I picked this prompt for us to think through because the use of imagination and magic in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo are some of the most fascinating aspects of the text. Throughout the novel, the recurring motifs of magic and child-like discovery of the world serve as points of access into the minds and lived…