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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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September 1, 2006

The Harlem Renaissance

September 01st 2006 Posted to English 104A, African American

blues_motley.jpgThe Harlem Renaisssance occurred during the 1920s, a result of the confluence of black American writers and artists in a district which was already fashionable among the white smart set as the music-and-entertainment capital of New York. The early years of the century had seen the publication of works such as W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, indicating the future role of black people in America. In 1925, Alain Locke, a professor at Howard University, brought together a collection of short stories, poems, and prose by divers hands, under the title The New Negro. As the abstraction was held to characterize the ‘spiritual Coming of Age’ of the black race, so the volume itself could be seen as a mark of its cultural maturity. (Read the article)

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

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

“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)

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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)

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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)

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Maria Full of Grace (Maria llena eres de gracia) (2004)

August 28th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, Lesson Plans, English 104A, Latino / Latina American, Film

maria-full-of-grace.jpgWinner of the Dramatic Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Maria Full of Grace is one young woman’s journey from a small Colombian town to the streets of New York. A bright, spirited 17-year old, Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) lives with three generations of her family in a cramped house in rural Colombia and works stripping thorns from flowers in a rose plantation. The offer of a lucrative job involving travel—in fact, becoming a drug “mule”—changes the course of her life. Far from the uneventful trip she is promised, Maria is transported into the risky and ruthless world of international drug trafficking. Her mission becomes one of determination and survival and she finally emerges with the grace that will carry her forward into a new life. Directed by Joshua Marston. In Spanish, with English sub-titles. An HBO films / Fine Line Features release.

From: “Synopsis,” HBO Films / Fine Line Features. http://www.mariafullofgrace.com/index.html (Read the article)

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104A Course Syllabus

August 28th 2006 Posted to Syllabi, English 104A 176e

This is a link to a course syllabus for English 104A, American Literature from 1900 to present. Designed by Professor Yunte Huang, this course is a survey of twentieth-century American literature with emphases on pluralism, bilingualism, migration, translation, media, and avant-gardism. It presents a picture of American literature rooted in the translocal and translingual, a literature that is not confined to national, cultural, or linguistic boundaries.

Yunte Huang’s 104A Syllabus

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