Literature Core (1080-01 S2022)
Identify: In her short story Shift, Nalo Hopkinson combines detailed visual imagery and second-person narration. With this combination, she describes Caliban’s actions like the stage directions of a play. One example of the combination is when the golden girl transforms Caliban into different things: “She takes your face in her hands, turns your eyes away…
In her short story White Rat, Gayl Jones “curses” White Rat with a black club-footed baby after he decides to leave his black family and visit the white bar. By cursing him after he visits the white bar, Jones portrays how Rat essentially goes back on his ‘vow’ of being black and examines the idea…
In a scene from Thomas Glave’s And Love Them, the narrator grows fearful of a black man walking down the same street as her at night, assuming that he will attack her. When she sees him hail a cab, her fears are briefly relieved but replaced with anger when he does not reciprocate her smile.…
Brownies, by ZZ Packer, follows the story of a girl scout troop of African American girls plotting revenge against Troop 909, a troop of white girls, because of the misconception created and spread by Arnetta that a girl from Troop 909 called Daphne a racial slur. Deeper than a narrative solely about race and racism,…
Nalo Hopkinson uses the characters of Caliban, Ariel, and Sycorax from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to portray the central themes of heritage and cultural identity in her short story, Shift. However, while in the original play Caliban is enslaved by Prospero, a man who was exiled to Caliban’s island and forced him into servitude, Hopkinson chooses…
“Heads of Colored People”, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, features use of imagery to further the central theme. This is specifically used on page 13 in describing the image the Associated Press used for Riley after his death. Riley had been wearing “an oversize blue shirt and a bedazzled bandana over cornrows” in a social media post,…
In Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, the formal textual element visible that is the most impactful is the use of references. At the very beginning of the story, the author mentions Drake and Fetty Wap as a way to show that the main character, Riley, was not “self-hating” or against black people…
Backwacking, a Plea to the Senator is a fictional text published in 1977 by Ralph Ellison. Ellison’s text is formatted as a letter from Norm A. Mauler, a white Alabama citizen, to Senator Sunraider. In his letter, Mauler calls for action against “Backwacking” – a physical, seemingly sexual action performed by black males. Mauler condemns…
And Love Them? is a short story written by Thomas Glave, a black author from the Bronx, and is told from the perspective of a presumably white woman working in New York City. Throughout her narrative, the unnamed narrator details her personal experiences with black people and airs her frustration with their seemingly angry disposition,…
Backwacking, a Plea to the Senator was published in 1977 by Ralph Ellison but takes place in 1953 in Alabama. This piece is formatted as a letter to Senator Sunraider from a white resident of Alabama concerned about a new activity in the black community taking place called backwacking. Although somewhat unclear in the description,…