296a Race and Pedagogy Project - Teaching Resources » Biography

Biography

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)

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)

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 24e3

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 22, 2006

Leslie Marmon Silko

August 22nd 2006 Posted to English 104A, Native American, Biography

“It’ssilkolesliemarmon.jpg stories that make this a community,” Leslie Marmon Silko has remarked about the Native American world of the Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, in which she grew up, and in five books—Laguna Women (1974), Ceremony (1977), Storyteller (1981), Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Yellow Woman (1993)—she has told and retold the tales that, she believes, make her people who they are. Of mixed Native American, Mexican, and Caucasian descent, Leslie Marmon attended Bureau of Indian Affairs schools at Laguna until entering high school, then studied at the University of New Mexico and later matriculated in law school before deciding to do graduate work in English and devote herself to a literary career. Divorced from John Silko, she has taught at Navajo Community College in Arizona and at the University of New Mexico, is the mother of two sons, and has been the recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Her ceremonial impulse to tell stories that are both self-defining and celebratory of her community has issued in an art that employs many forms: poetry, short stories, legendary tales, a novel, and most recently, film scripts.

From: The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. 2nd Ed. New York: Norton & Co., 1985. 2327-8 (Read the article)

Comments(0)

August 21, 2006

Langston Hughes

August 21st 2006 Posted to English 104A, African American, Biography

A prohughes3.jpglific poet, novelist, essayist and playwright, James Langston Hughes was a seminal figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a period during the 1920s of unprecedented artistic and intellectual achievement among black Americans. Hughes integrated the rhythm and mood of jazz and blues music into his work and used colloquial language to reflect working-class African American culture. His often-bestowed title of the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” reflects the extent to which Hughes’ career both shaped and was shaped by the music, art and lifestyle of black Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s. Unlike many of his fellow Harlem Renaissance writers, Hughes continued to write into the 1950’s. He died in New York City May 22, 1967. (Read the article)

* Comments(2)

August 18, 2006

Gertrude Stein

August 18th 2006 Posted to English 104A, Biography 3009

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an avant-garde German-American poet, playwrstein-1935.jpgight, feminist and avid art collector. In the 1920’s her salon at 24 Rue de Fleurus in Paris became a meeting place for artists and expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and Guillaume Apollinaire. She wrote her self-proclaimed masterpiece, the 1000-page The Making of Americans, from 1906 to 1911, but it wasn’t published until 1925. This novel loosely follows the history of an immigrant family over several generations. Raised in German-American family herself, Stein offers a unique perspective on what it means to be an American while simultaneously pushing the rules of English grammar and the form of the novel to their limits. (Read the article)

Comments(0)

August 28, 2005

Defining Race and Pedagogy

August 28th 2005 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, UCSB Courses, Lesson Plans, Syllabi, English 104A, Writing 2, English 197, English 10AC, English 165HR, English 50, English 103A, External Resources for Teachers, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American, Asian American, Latino / Latina American, Native American, Type of Resource, Literature, Film, Photographs, Visual Art / Posters, Music Recordings, Maps, Recordings of Speeches, Legal Documents, Panels and Lectures, Biography, Other

Although these terms are often used as though they signified clear and well-bounded meanings, both words have complex histories and implications that are frequently only discernable once one considers the contexts in which they are used. For the purposes of this site, we offer the following definitions: (Read the article)

* Comments(2)

0