Richard Wright – Native Son

Discussion Question 1:

Why does Bigger feel like “something awful's going to happen to” him? (23)

Discussion Question 2:

Who are the “Reds” Peggy Dalton spends some of her free time with? (58)

Fact:

Richard Wright was a committed communist, even though he had had some bad experiences connected to different members of the communist party in the United States.

(http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/r_wright/wright_life.htm). 

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/CPUSA_logo.svg

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States, and was established in 1919. Until the 1950s, the CPUSA was the largest and most influential communist party in the United States. It played a prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. But the CPUSA's early successes did not last. The second Red Scare, which denotes the promotion of fear of national and foreign communists influencing society and infiltrating the federal government used by anti-leftist proponents (this is depicted by Wright, when he describes how the police and the newspapers react to the involevement of members of the communist party in the case) , and the adversities of the continued Cold War mentality, steadily weakened the Communist Party's internal structure and confidence. CPUSA's close adherence to the political positions of the Soviet Union enabled anti-communist critics to constantly present the party as not only a threatening, subversive domestic entity, but also as a "foreign" agent fundamentally alien to the "American way of life". Internal and external crises swirled together, to the point where members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions at odds with the CPUSA's party line. 

Nella Larsen – Quicksand

Discussion Question 1:

Why is Helga Crane so dissatisfied with the teaching atmosphere at Naxos? Would you consider this atmosphere or surroundings as not advancing the studying among the students? (Chapters 1 + 2).

Discussion Question 2:

Why does Helga Crane consider Anne Grey as inconsistent in her attitudes towards race and lifestyle? (Chapter 9).

Fact:

The novel Quicksand is loosely based on experiences Larsen made in her earlier life, as she was the daughter of a Danish mother and a colored father, studied and worked in a Southern university and later went to New York to find work there. She also lived with her Danish relatives for a period of time, and later married a physicist, finding it difficult to find her place in society throughout all her life.

(http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Larsen_Nella.html). 

Nella Larsen, who worked as a nurse, and only published two novels and one short story, was considered part of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", and although it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson, who was also and important writer during that period, preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression), eventhough many of its ideas lived on much longer.

 

James Weldon Johnson – The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

In his book Johnson talks about a distinct difference in social perception of the individual between white and colored people, and often highlights the struggle that results from it, especially for the colored individuals. Even though many of the black people might not perceive it as such in their everyday life, they nevertheless fight for something. This fight has changed dramatically over time, however, as it has gone from the fight for a mere recognition as a human being towards a fight for social acceptance. He says, he is able to see this struggle through his observations of black people in the South, because he did not see himself as a member of the black race until he was introduced to it in his days in Jacksonville. As he describes it, his stay in the city “was really my entrance into the race. It was my initiation into what I have termed the freemasonry of the race” (22). By stating this, Johnson wants to tell the reader that he is a kind of participant observer rather than a “regular” black man, thus giving his book the credits it would need throughout the readers of this book. Later on Johnson also mentions the way white people devote many of their resources towards this fight, as they want to upkeep the old status of the superiority of their race. He describes this struggle as the main reason for socioeconomic problems throughout the South that were existent at those times. Johnson also states that this fight between the races determines much of the social behavior of individuals of either race, since they view themselves as “white” or “black” and feel a strong need to act accordingly. However, he never explicitly includes himself in these descriptions, as if he wanted to remind the reader of his more or less neutral status as an observer, who is both by appearance and education what would be considered “white”, but nevertheless by his heritage able to attend to social events of black that no person of the other race would be allowed to. All in all Johnson describes the struggle that goes on between blacks and whites as an exhausting one, the end of which would serve members of both races well. 

James Weldon Johnson describes the influence music has on the main character and his life as very big. Apart from several classical compositions he emphasizes the playing of ragtime music as at first a fascination, and then more and more a means of income for the main character. Ragtime is a type of music that developed in St. Louis and New Orleans from the late 1800s on and was most popular between 1897 and 1918, when jazz music became more popular. A very famous composer of that times was Scott Joplin, who wrote many ragtime hits. His first hit, "Maple Leaf Rag" can be heard in the video posted below. SInce those times, there had been many revivals of the music, why many of the themes and melodies are still known to many people even today. Ragtime as a style of music also influenced many classical composers like Stravinsky or Satie.

Johnson often describes, how his main character variates the classical music he knows from his formal musical education in his younger years, and plays a ragtime version of those compositions. The video below shows, what such a conversion would sound like, taking Beethoven's  "Für Elise" as a base theme.  

 

Frances E.W. Harper – Iola Leroy or shadows uplifted

Frances E.W. Harper; source: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Py8ZMkFSL._SL500_SS500_.jpg.

Discussion Question 1:

What is Iola's position on slavery before she knows anything of her heritage and the hardships she will have to face? (Chapter XII.)

Discussion Question 2:

How does this position change in the course of the book? How does Iola Leroy express Harper's own views on the world?

Fact:

For some time, Iola Leroy was viewed as the first novel published by an African American woman. However, two other female authors of the time may have published their books one year prior to Harper, but this is a topic still under discussion among literary critics. (http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/iolaleroy/context.html)

Frances E.W. Harper helped escaped slaves along the “Underground Railroad”, which was a network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists, both black and white, free and enslaved, who aided the fugitives. Various other routes led to Mexico or overseas. It reached its height between 1850 and 1860, and one estimate suggests that by 1850, 100,000 slaves had escaped via the "Railroad". This system gets mentioned in many works covered in this blog, starting with Frederick Douglass' Narrative, and ending with Toni Morrison's Beloved, as it was very important for many African-Americans of that time to secure their freedom.

Watch Underground Railroad on PBS. See more from History Detectives.

Source: http://churchillhistory.wikispaces.com/file/view/Underground_Railroad_Map/323881468/Underground_Railroad_Map

Harriet Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Discussion Question 1:

How does Jacobs describe the way even the younger members of white slaveholders households were corrupted by the influence of slavery? (Chapter IX.)

Discussion Question 2:

Why did Jacobs percieve the racism in England as weaker or less present than that in the United States? (Chapter XXXVII.) 

Fact:

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (mentioned by Jacobs in Chapter XL) was a law that required runaway slaves to be returned to their masters upon capture in all the northern states. It was part of the Compromise of 1850 passed by the Congress, which led to a four year reduction of the sectional conflict.

This compromise also contained laws abolishing the slave trade in Washington, D.C., as well as granting California admission to the Union as a free state. In Utah and New Mexico, territorial governments were established, and a boundary dispute between the latter and Texas was settled. (http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Compromise1850.html; 05/07/2013.)

American Congress A.D. 1850; source: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/ppmsca/09300/09398v.jpg

Source: http://mississippiconfederates.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/the-compromise-of-1850.gif

Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

Discussion Question 1:

How does Douglass describe the nature of the slaves' songs at the end of Chapter 2, and what does he criticize about their perception by northerers?

Discussion Question 2:

How are "good" overseers described by Douglass? What were the qualifications needed for this job according to hin, and how do they differ from the concept discussed above? (Capters 1 - 8.)

Fact about Frederick Douglass:

After his first wife had died, Douglass remarried again in 1884. His second wife was Helen Pitts, who was a white feminist. This marriage caused great controversy among friends and family of the couple. (http://winningthevote.org/FDouglass.html; 1/21/13.)

Douglass wrote: 

No man, perhaps, had ever more offended popular prejudice than I had then lately done. I had married a wife. People who had remained silent over the unlawful relations of white slave masters with their colored slave women loudly condemned me for marrying a wife a few shades lighter than myself. They would have had no objection to my marrying a person much darker in complexion than myself, but to marry one much lighter, and of the complexion of my father rather than of that of my mother, was, in the popular eye, a shocking offense, and one for which I was to be ostracized by white and black alike. (Douglass, Life and Times... p. 534.)

Frederick Douglass wrote three autobiographies, each of which he used to accomplish different goals. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was intended by him as a means of enhancing his credibility throughout the public of the time, where he was still seen as an uneducated slave. Many also doubted the stories and experiences he depicted in his public speeches, thinking of them as partly made up or exaggerated. After the book was published, however, this perception throughout the public opinion changed greatly, partly because of the credibility statements by white men in the preface, partly because of the use of real names, places and dates, and the overall coherence of the story. This let Douglass have more liberties among the abolitionist movement, which was at that time still mostly run by white people, who initially did not want Douglass to become too influential. Douglass therefore achieved his intended goal, rising to important positions in the abolitionist movement and eventually even meeting President Licncoln is person.

A short biography of this historically very important man can be watched here: