In many cultures, particularly Native American and West African, it is understood that a woman’s cycle is deeply interconnected with the water and the moon. For example, in the West African Yoruba religion, Yemoja is goddess who is associated with the moon, rivers, and motherhood. The goddess, Oshun, patron saint of the Osun river in…
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…
In the Part 2 of “Leaving Atlanta” Jones writes us a second person narrator who is has intimate insight into Rodney’s interior thoughts and feelings. It would seem on face value that this is an omniscient narrator, but the narrator only knows Rodney. The narrator is centered around Rodney and never provides that kind of…
Walker illustrates the experience of Black Americans as a kind of motherless children, to quote the jazz standard, who live as second class citizens in America, but are also rejected by the people of their home continent. In a letter to Celie, Nettie describes in near reverent terms: “try to imagine,” she tells her sister,…
Black artists and intellectuals continue to grapple with Enlightenment style elitism by adopting and inserting themselves within the tropes of the mainstream, thereby subverting and stretching definitions of existence. Glover’s Danny is a quintessential hipster character of this millennial era: a la Hannah in Girls or Vincent Chase in Entourage. Each episode of Atlanta, much…