This Blog is meant as a an academic support as well as a space of interaction for students of American literature (M1. English Department. University 8 mai 1945 - Guelma).
In this respect, students are invited to refer to this electronic resource as a pedagogical complement for the courses provided in the classroom.
Western/Colonial Representations of the Native American:
The western definition of the native American: The term "Indian" as a western mistake and a western definition… a western misconception.
The stereotypical image of Native American:
The Ecological Native American: In this 1971 commercial, the image of the "indian" is exploited for entertainment. It is a studied and an artificial image. A fake indian with a fake tear and a fake costume. this image is manipulating and misleading the minds as far as Indian identity is concerned. By that, it is exterminating the real Indian in the public imagination since in reality there are no such Indians as the one in this commercial. By creating such an imaginative and non-existent image about the Indians, they provide the evidence of their non-existence and by that negating the existence of real Native Americans and stripping them of their identity.
For more analysis of this commercial read the following article: The Crying Indian
The Indian Princess: It is an oxymoron. The word princess suggests aristocracy. However, Native American Culture is based on egalitarianism. It is another studied and artificial image also used for a purpose: aristocracy is something America lacks. The indian princess gives them more sense of belonging (they descend from an Indian princess grandmother and not an Indian warrior grandfather). Walt Disney's Pocahontas is a recycling of Naomi Campbell. The song shows how Pocahontas teaches captain John Smith to see "spirit" where he sees "profit". It is a sort of "an adoption ritual". Westerners need this kind of adoption to be legitimate in the land.
The Indian Warrior (the bad Indian): mainly as depicted in western movies.
The Wise Indian / the brave Indian (the good Indian): As a matter of instance, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. A novel romanticizing America and romanticizing the West (place of fulfillment of the American Dream)
Avatar (the movie) as a colonial narrative:
Consider the elements of othering and stereotyping in Avatar.
Deconstructing and Revising western images of the native American:
What is a Native American?
Healing Processes / Reconstructing Identity:
"The seeds remembered the land they came from."
Corn is more than food. It is history. It is spirit.
Barbara Smith, a pioneer in Black Feminist Criticism, explains the historical, social and political conditions leading to the emergence of Black Women's Literature.
Watch the eighteen short videos for a better understanding of the mechanisms behind black women's literature. Barbara Smith describes the context from which black women writers created their voices.
Take notes for discussions.
• Harlem in the1920's became the meeting point and the cultural centre for black writers and intellectuals coming from all over the USA.
• This has led to what was coined as the New Negro Movement which became later influential for other black movements outside the USA, like the Negritude Movement.
• The Harlem Renaissance as a movement is a cultural movement.
• Though primarily literary, this movement is tightly related to developments in African American musical, theatrical, artistic and political expressions.
• There is no common style or political ideology defined by the movement. However one could detect the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance:
- It is an optimistic movement
- It meant to give expression to the African-American experience in USA.
- Blacks used their own voices to express their experience. They rejected white's descriptions of black people because according to them they were racist and biased. However they did not separate themselves from the body of American Literature.
- There is diversity as far as their expression is concerned.
- A manifestation of Black Pride or Racial Pride.
- A celebration of black heritage and roots (romanticizing Africa and the American South)
Study Cases:
If We Must Die
BY CLAUDE MCKAY
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry
dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though
dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us
brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one
death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly
pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting
back!
We Wear the Mask
BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We
wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We
wear the mask!
The Weary Blues
BY LANGSTON HUGHES
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard
a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did
a lazy sway. . . .
He did
a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O
Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a
musical fool.
Sweet
Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O
Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano
moan—
“Ain’t
got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t
got nobody but ma self.
I’s
gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put
ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the
floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some
more—
“I got
the Weary Blues
And I
can’t be satisfied.
Got the
Weary Blues
And
can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t
happy no mo’
And I
wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that
tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his
head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
How It
Feels to Be Colored Me
by Zora Neale
Hurston (1891 -
1960)
1 I am colored but I offer
nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the
only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side
was not an Indian chief.
2 I remember the very day that
I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of
Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I
knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites
rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in
automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when
they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at
cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come
out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the
tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
3 The front porch might seem a
daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My
favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter.
Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I
liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they
returned my salute, I would say something like this:
"Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin'?" Usually automobile or
the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would
probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest
Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me,
of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that
I was the first "welcome-to-our-state" Floridian, and I hope the
Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.
4 During this period, white
people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and
never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and
wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small
silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do
them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn't know it. The colored
people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was
their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the
county--everybody's Zora.
5 But changes came in the
family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left
Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the
river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a
sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored
girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I
became a fast brown--warranted not to rub nor run.
6 But I am not tragically
colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my
eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood
who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose
feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my
life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little
pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy
sharpening my oyster knife.
7 Someone is always at my
elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register
depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was
successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that
made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The
Reconstruction said "Get set!" and the generation before said
"Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch
to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the
choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid
through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for
glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think--to
know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as
much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with
the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.
8 The position of my white
neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me
when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The
game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
9 I do not always feel
colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the
Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
10 For instance at Barnard.
"Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand
white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all,
I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me
again.
11 Sometimes it is the other
way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just
as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The
New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about
any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters.
In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It
loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts
the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This
orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil
with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the
jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly
inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl
it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way.
My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is
throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death
to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their
lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call
civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in
his seat, smoking calmly.
12 "Good music they have
here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
13 Music. The great blobs of
purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He
is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that
have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so
colored.
14 At certain times I have no
race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh
Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the
Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned,
Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately
carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on
me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal
feminine with its string of beads.
15 I have no separate feeling about
being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul
that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
16 Sometimes, I feel
discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me.
How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.
17 But in the main, I feel
like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in
company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and
there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A
first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a
key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved
for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of
things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant.
In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it
held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all
might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the
content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter.
Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first
place--who knows?
