Final Project: “Individual Identity in a Cultural Context”
I am obsessed with context. When watching television or consuming Beyonce in her various forms, my questions send me beyond the work to patterns of thought, influences, and deeper meaning. I want to know the personnel and how those persons’ experiences also contributed to the work. I think my interest in context has something to do with the years I’ve spent in the recording studio, watching my father put an album together. The depth work and collaboration involved in music making is one of the things that interest me most in it. I am fascinated by the way that songwriting, music videos, and live performance converge to write the meaning of a song. Rap is particularly topical and highly referential. It requires that we have access to much of the prior knowledge of its creator.
In thinking about The Color Purple, I could not help but be consumed by ruminations on how music deals with some of the themes that are also in Walker’s seminal work. I thought of the way that men call Celie ugly and how Jay-Z raps about his appearance—coded in self-loathing in his early years. HoweverIn 2017 he raps “ain’t no such thing as an ugly billionaire, I’m cute” and in 2019, “I’m a miracle, born with empirical features.” I considered similarities in Jay and Celie’s representations of themselves, however, no concrete similarities were present. While Celie is told she’s ugly and referred to as such, she neither verbalizes an agreement nor a denial. I then thought to Jay’s video for “Smile” which is about his mother’s sexuality and covert relationship with a woman. The perspective is of a child witnessing the sweet gentleness of his mother’s relationship and comforting his mother when her partner, who seems to be pushed out of the neighborhood, leaves. I found that Walker recently wrote a letter about The Color Purple in response to some controversy about a woman who was cast as Celie, but harbors anti-gay sentiments. Walker says she based the character on her Grandmother who was raped by her grandfather, bore children who were taken from her, was subsequently barren, and was restored by a loving relationship with a woman.
It would have been interesting to examine the way that a fictionalized Jay imagines himself as his mother’s restoration at the loss of her same-sex partner, while Walker writes of the restorative nature of Celie’s same sex relationship. But my mind didn’t land there. In “The Story of OJ,” Jay presents a music video rich with visual references that are contemporary to the setting of The Color Purple. The video alludes to Dumbo (1941) and Jim Crow era animation.
I created a unit called Individual Identity in a Cultural Context for a 12th grade class. I chose lesson planning, because for me, it is an exciting form of creativity and because I hope to use it in a future classroom. In thinking about teaching The Color Purple, I considered the way that adolescent identity is forged by culture and experiences. The unit begins with a pre-reading exercise and introduction to African American Vernacular English. I write phrases written in AAVE on the board. I will ask students to interpret these sentences. Students will either be using prior (and perhaps inherited) knowledge and will thus have that knowledge validated in an academic setting, or students will be learning to understand a language that they encounter daily in pop-culture and viral videos. The purpose of this activity is to contextualize the language of The Color Purple. We conduct close readings of the text—passages I’ve yet selected. We will also read an excerpt of Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folks, and become familiar with Double Consciousness. Students will be asked to grapple with the mind state of double consciousness and consider whether or not we see it in the text. This question, I hope, will generate a debate. I am not certain that Walker represents double consciousness in any character. We will then review “The Story of OJ” music video. Jay visually overwhelms us with visual references to chattel slavery, the Harlem Renaissance and the jazz era, minstrelsy, the Great Migration, among other things. The character, Jaybo, is overwhelmed with a responsibility to correct the impact of systemic racism and enslavement. We ask the question, what does Jay mean by the repeated phrase “still nigga”? Here is where I will need more research. There is a lot of information in that video that I need to be able to explain to students in one or two documents.
We return to The Color Purple and examine how both the novel and the book depict the experience of Black men of means. We then move to a reading of the Doris Baines character? Who is she, why is she here and what does her character say about how gender is experienced for women of different races?
We close the unit with an assignment of two bodies of work: an analytical essay, with a prompt I’m still mulling over, and a creative project in which students represent their identity. They are to examine personal identity and group identity and represent that in a medium of their choosing—short film, original song and music video, art work, short story, etc. The purpose of this final work is to compliment the idea that no work or person exists in a vacuum.
6 Key Steps: Find a primary source, choose 3 passages for close reading, create an analytical essay assignment, include key vocabulary, clarify/include specifics of the activities
3 major production dates: I hope to be done by TG
Two questions I need to answer: How is identity formed in the narrative? Is the video I chose truly related?
Questions for you: Is this a satisfactory project? Have I chosen to do too much? Is this enough?
The link to my draft is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nsPhmsnXlVIC9efoBbBgbc9L3mYHt2fdtjja-kCG5iw/edit?usp=sharing