AADS/ENGL 3328.01
For my creative post I decided to make a painting inspired from an MFA art exhibit featured earlier this year by Basquiat, a black street artist, combined with my interpretation of Indigo’s character in Cypress, Sassafrass, and Indigo. Basquiat was a part of the “neo-expressionism movement” and created art in the 80s in Manhattan. His…
In her novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs reflects on her relationship with her master, using touch to highlight slave women’s experience with sexual abuse. Jacobs’ manipulation of touch both exposes the sexual vulnerability of black women and highlights her cunning defensiveness to the violence of imposed white male dominance. …
Throughout the autobiography Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs describes her experiences with the “poisonous fangs” of slavery from her conscious awaral of enslavement at age six, stripping her from the comforts of childhood, to the sexual abuses she was a continuous victim of, all…
In her novel Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, Shange employs lyricism as a persuasive mechanism for showcasing black female artistry. She does so by juxtaposing lyrical descriptions of Indigo’s creative outlets (as well as those of the women around her) with the prosaic consciousness brought on by gender-charged violence. The scene in which Indigo gets her…
Black joy is a form of resistance that gives agency to Black people in times where oppression and racism have tried to take away everything else. Stowe portrays an instance of black joy when she describes Uncle Tom’s cottage at the beginning of chapter 4. The cottage is first described as a “small log building”…
In the novel Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, Ntazake Shange uses magic as a means of empowerment that in turn challenges societal expectations in the youngest character, Indigo’s, coming of age. Throughout the course of the book whenever Indigo displays an action or trait that would typically be considered “crazy” or “unusual,” the phrase “the south…