ENGL382: African American Lit - Black Card Revoked Flashcards

Flashcards covering key vocabulary, literary excerpts, and historical figures from the ENGL382: African American Literature course.

Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing"

Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America. They entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people. For the most part these artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks.

Choreopoem

A type of dramatic expression that mixes poetry, movement, music, and song.

Spike Lee, "Do the Right Thing" (Radio Raheem)

"Let me tell you the story of Right Hand, Left Hand. It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love: these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: static. One hand is always fighting the other hand, and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished. But hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes, now, that's right. Ooh, it's a devastating right and Hate is hurt, he's down. Left-Hand Hate KO'd by Love."

Identify at least ONE figure who produced writing from a space of incarceration (Jail).

Martin Luther King Jr. or Bob Kaufman

James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

Intersectionality

Refers to the interconnectedness of social categories—such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability—that shape an individual's experiences and opportunities.

Elizabeth Alexander, "The Trayvon Generation"

A lot of kind statements about black people are coming from the pens and minds of white people now. That's a good thing. But sometimes, it is frankly hard to tell the difference between expressions of solidarity and gestures of absolution (See, I’m not a racist, I said you matter!) Among the most difficult to swallow are social-media posts and notes that I and others have received expressing sorrow and implying that blackness is the most terrible of fates. Their worrisome chorus: “I cannot imagine … How do you … My heart breaks for you … I know you are hurting … You may not think you matter but you matter to me.

Black Arts Movement

Larry Neal famously described this as the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power."

Ntozake Shange, "for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf"

Somebody almost walked off with all of my stuff and didn't care enough to send a note home saying "I was late for my solo conversation" or "two sizes too small for my own tacky skirts". What can anybody do with something of no value on an open market? Did you get a dime for my things? Hey, man! Where are you going with all of my stuff?

Julie Dash: Daughters of the Dust

I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the barren one and many are my daughters. I am the silence that you cannot understand. I am the utterance of my name.

Fill in the blank In “Everybody's Protest Novel,” James Baldwin scathingly compares Richard Wright's novel ___________________ to Harriet Beecher Stowe's sentimental novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Native Son

Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Microaggressions

Everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults (intentional or unintentional) that communicate hostile or negative messages based on race, gender, or sexual identity.

Fill in the Blank Public Enemy’s song ____________________ is a soundtrack for Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing.

Public Enemy, "Fight the Power”

Margaret Walker, "For My People"

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

rise and take control.

Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet"

We have injected ourselves into the civil rights struggle. And we intend to expand it from the level of civil rights to the level of human rights. As long as you fight it on the level of civil rights, you're under Uncle Sam's jurisdiction...So our next move is to take the entire civil rights struggle—problem—into the United Nations and let the world see that Uncle Sam is guilty of violating the human rights of 22 million Afro-Americans right down to the year of 1964 and still has the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world?

Audre Lorde, "Poetry is Not a Luxury"

It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Black Aesthetic

A system of isolating and evaluating the artistic works of Black people based on the imperatives of Black experience while rejecting White standards of art.

Brent Staples, "Black Men and Public Space"

And on late-evening constitutional I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn't be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.

Amiri Baraka

This figure experienced a radical transformation of racial consciousness and even changed his name after the assassination of Malcolm X.

Lorraine Hansberry, "A Raisin in the Sun"

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so! When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is."

Langston Hughes, "Harlem"

The poem that inspired Lorraine Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun."

August Wilson’s Joe Turner Come and Gone

“I been wading in the water. I been walking all over the River Jordan. But what it get me, huh? I done been baptized with blood of the lamb and the fire of the Holy Ghost. But what I got, huh? My enemies all around me picking the flesh from my bones. I’m choking on my own blood and all you got to give me is salvation?”

James Baldwin

Fill in the Blank Born in 1924 in Harlem, ______ early life was marked by poverty and a complex relationship with his religious upbringing.

He moved to Paris in 1948, where he found a sense of freedom and a platform to express his views on race and society, distancing himself from the racial tensions in America.

Toni Morrison, "Sula"

“Lonely, ain't it?Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”

Nikki Giovanni, "For Saundra"

I wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-bopping

then my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked - do you ever write
tree poems - i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed that the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green - no trees grow
in manhattan

Realism

… a literary movement in the mid-19th century, largely in response to the emotional excesses of Romanticism and the sweeping generalizations of earlier idealistic literature. It sought to depict life as it truly was—without embellishment, exaggeration, or idealization. Rooted in the societal transformations brought about by the Industrial Revolution, it focused on the everyday experiences of ordinary people, emphasizing character, setting, and social context over plot and fantastical elements.

Richard Wright, "Ethics of living Jim Crow"

I was outraged, and bawled. Between sobs I told her that I didn't have any trees or hedges to hide behind. There wasn't a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn't throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again. And they were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle. Didn't I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn't be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn't kill me.

Essex Hemphill

This figure was prominently featured in Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied (1989), a ground breaking documentary that “gives voice to what it means to live as an outsider in both a Black community rife with homophobia and a largely white gay subculture poisoned by racism.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Between the World and Me"

But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

The Combahee River Collective

If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression

The Great Migration

One of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s. The driving force behind the mass movement was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow.

Jericho Brown, "Foreday in the Morning"

My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway toward her porch
Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it color.
She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was an American.
But she’d say it was because she believed
In God. I am ashamed of America
And confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship in spite
Of the timer set on my life to write
These words: I love my mother. I love black women
Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blooms
Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them
Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we are lazy,
But I’d love to wake that bastard up
At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under God
Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk
Waiting to go work for whatever they want. A house? A boy
To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave things green.

Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"

You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials, because …

Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"

I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible---except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.