247a Race and Pedagogy Project - Teaching Resources » Type of Resource

Type of Resource

October 27, 2006

Class and Race In America: The Legacy of Hurricane Katrina

October 27th 2006 Posted to Announcements, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American, Visual Art / Posters

boy-and-flag.jpgThe picture to the left of a father using the American flag as a blanket to shield his son points to the contradictions and complexity of the United States when it comes to dealing with race and class together. Images such as this broadcast across the nation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina illustrate the economic stratification and racial inequality that still exists in a country that refuses to come to terms with its history of slavery and economic disparity between the rich and the poor. Spike Lee’s four hour documentary about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, serves to highlight this disparity, as well as the system wide failure of the government on all levels, and gives a voice to the survivors and victims of the storm. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

Corregidora: The Blues as Narrative

October 27th 2006 Posted to Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American, Literature

Billie HolidayThe blues and music play an integral part in Gayl Jones’ novel Corregiadora. Ursa as a blues singer uses music as a narrative to map the historical trajecotories of slavery onto the present. Because she cannot bear the children that her grandmother deems as necessary in preserving the hertiage of slavery and the seuxal exploitation her family endured the narrative becomes Ursa’s to bear alone. The blues in Corregidora serve as an outlet with which to negotaite this history of violence and degradation and ultimately Ursa’s performace of the blues transforms into an act of resistance. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

Beloved: The Story of Margaret Garner

October 27th 2006 Posted to Announcements, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American, Literature 268e

Margaret Garner Painting Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a fugtive slave who in her recaputre committed the act of infanticide rather than see her child grow up in slavery. Morrison’s rearticulation of Garner’s story through the character of Sethe is as much about telling and speaking as it is about silence; about the “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” (Beloved 199). Morrison’s writing of a story “not to pass on” points to what is said in the silences, as that which is not said is often revealed through its very refusal of disclosure.Newspaper Clipping

(Read the article)

Comments(0)

September 8, 2006

Lesson Plan: Laviera’s Bilingual “AmeRíca”

September 08th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, Lesson Plans, English 104A, Latino / Latina American, Literature, Film, Music Recordings

Assigned Reading:
“AmerRícan” by Tato Laviera

american.jpgDiscussion Questions:
1.La Bomba and La Plena: The influence of music on Laviera’s poetry.
In “AmeRícan” Laviera makes several references to traditional Puerto Rican music. He mentions the composer Pedro Flores (13), “sweet soft spanish danzas gypsies” (15), “beating jíbaro” (18) and “walking plena-rhythms in new york” (32).

Watch the film clip of Los Pleneros de los 21 playing “Testigo” at the Smithsband_photo_2005.jpgonian Folk Folklife Festival, 2005. Also watch Los Pleneros’ demonstration of how the drums are played in Plena music. Los Pleneros de los 21 are a New York-based music group that plays Bomba and Plena, two African-based music styles that have flourished among the black communities of Puerto Rico proper and American Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Bomba and Plena are the result of the blending of various influences, including West African music, European music and Native Taino music. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

September 7, 2006

Tato Laviera

September 07th 2006 Posted to English 104A, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, Latino / Latina American, Type of Resource, Photographs, Biography

tato-laviera.jpgTato Laviera was born in Puerto Rico and has lived in New York City since 1960. A second-generation Puerto Rican writer, a poet and playwright, he is deeply committed to the social and cultural development of Puerto Ricans in New York. In addition, he has taught creative writing at Rutgers and other universities on the East Coast.

His poetry and plays are linguistic and artistic celebrations of Puerto Rican culture, African Caribbean traditions, the fast rhythms of life in New York City, and of life in general. Laviera writes in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, a mixture of the two. His superior command of both languages and the playful yet serious value he imparts to Spanglish, distinguishes his writing from others of his generation. For example, the titles of his two books, Enclave and AmerRícan, suggest double readings in Spanish and English. Laviera’s poetry is highly relevant to the study of bilingual and bicultural issues, for in it he documents, examines, and questions what it means to be Puerto Rican in the United States. His texts have reflected the changes and transitions that his community has undergone since the major migrations of the 1940s and, moreover, offer a paradigm of what pluralistic America should really be all about. (Read the article)

20b8 Comments(0)

September 5, 2006

Lesson Plan: Using/Misusing the Black Vernacular: Hurston, Hughes and Toomer

September 05th 2006 Posted to Lesson Plans, English 104A, African American, Literature

untitled-harvest-jules-smith.jpeg“But now, the sun and the bossmen were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”
–Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Assigned Readings:
(From The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Ed. Paul Lauter, 5th Ed., 2005):
“Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston
“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes
“Blood Burning Moon” from Cane by Jean Toomer

Background:
One of the most striking qualities of Hurston’s prose is her use of the black vernacular. In Hurston’s novels and short stories it is often the dialogue and not the narration that drives the story forward. Consider the following passage from “Sweat”: (Read the article)

Comments(0)

September 4, 2006

Zora Neale Hurston

September 04th 2006 Posted to English 104A, African American, Biography

hurston_vetchen.jpgZora Neale Hurston was born in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida. She attended Howard University and then later Barnard College where she studied with the anthropologists Franz Boas and Gladys Reichard. While living in New York in the 1920’s she became an active participant in the literary and cultural innovations of The Harlem Renaissance. During this period she grew fascinated in the scholarly study of her hometown and, in 1927, revisited Eatonville to collect folktales, spirituals, sermons, work songs, blues, and children’s games. Hurston spent six years documenting the art of “the Negro farthest down,” who, she contended, had made the greatest contribution to American culture. The product of her “literary anthropology” was Mules and Men, a novel which she published in 1935. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

September 1, 2006

Lesson Plan: “The Weary Blues”: Langston Hughes and Bessie Smith

September 01st 2006 Posted to Lesson Plans, English 104A, African American, Literature, Music Recordings 24a3

“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes
weary-blues.jpgLangston Hughes was one of the first of the Harlem Renaissance poets to incorporate jazz, spirituals and the blues into his writing. In the 1920’s Hughes steeped himself in the jazz culture of Harlem and began to weave the rhythm and feeling of Harlem jazz into his poetry. Perhaps the most obvious example of Hughes’ experimentation with new musical forms appears Hughes’ poem “The Weary Blues,” published first in 1923 in New York’s Amsterdam News and two years later in Hughes’ first collection The Weary Blues. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

August 30, 2006

Lesson Plan:Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

August 30th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, UCSB Courses, Lesson Plans, English 104A, Latino / Latina American, Literature, Biography

borderlands-book.jpgAnzaldúa’s book is theoretical, political, poetical, and personal. Writing about external, communal, and individual borderlands from a position on, around, and between those borders, Anzaldúa subversively advocates a political mobilization around the “mestiza consciousness,” for only multiplicity—internal as well as external—can break down the “subject-object duality that keeps her [one] a prisoner” (80). Anzaldúa identifies herself as a Chicana lesbian feminist from the tejas-Mexican border, and she writes of the contradictions and coalitions she must negotiate between these multiple identities. Her gender and sexuality, for example, are at odds with patriarchal culture, but she inhabits these contradictory positions tactically. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

August 28, 2006

The Stories of Maxine Hong Kingston Interview

August 28th 2006 Posted to English 104A, Asian American, Film

The Stories of Maxine Hong Kingston - imageThis new PBS Video offering is appealing on a variety of levels. It offers a portrait of Maxine Hong Kingston, author of the two nonfictional works, The Woman Warrior and China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey (her first novel). The first half-hour of the tape focuses on the autobiographical influences in Hong Kingston’s writing, such as her poet-father, her early feminist anger, and so on. Bill Moyers introduces the author, stating that her books are currently “the most widely taught on any American campus, more than any other American author.” It is on this note that Hong Kingston begins to elaborate upon one of the main themes in her writing, the portrayal of the Chinese-American experience as a facet of the total American experience. She finds that the tendency to view Chinese culture as “exotic” denies “mystery” to others, and that the issues raised in her writings transcend the specifics of her heritage and apply to many ethnic groups. Thus, the program also speaks to the richness that the many groups in the American “melting pot” have brought to this country’s culture as each has found what Hong Kingston calls their “voice” - the music of African Americans, for example - or the playful, fun-loving “monkey spirit” that the Chinese have introduced to balance Puritan seriousness. (Read the article)

17e5 Comments(0)

— Next Page »

0