http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom University of California, Santa Barbara Sun, 10 Dec 2006 22:42:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The 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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/announcements/class-and-race-in-america-the-legacy-of-hurricane-katrina The 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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/race/corregidora-the-blues-as-narrative  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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/announcements/beloved-the-story-of-margaret-garner Assigned Reading: “AmerRícan” by Tato Laviera Discussion 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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/teaching-immigration-issues/lesson-plan-lavieras-bilingual-america Tato 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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/ucsb-courses/english-104a/tato-laviera "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. ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/genre/lesson-plans/lesson-plan-black-vernacular-hurston-hughes-and-toomer Zora 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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/ucsb-courses/english-104a/zora-neale-hurston The 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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/ucsb-courses/english-104a/the-harlem-renaissance “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes Langston 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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/genre/lesson-plans/lesson-plan-the-weary-blues-langston-hughes-and-bessie-smith Anzaldúa’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 ... http://rpp.english.ucsb.edu/classroom/teaching-immigration-issues/anzaldua-gloria-borderlandsla-frontera-the-new-mestiza-san-francisco-aunt-lute-1987