context

african american/black experience

  • the autobiography of an ex coloured man (1890s-early 1900s)

    • experience of a mixed race man - skin tone is important

      • big focus in lit at the time

    • realisation, awakening of his race

      • didnt realise he was black until he was in school but learns from teacher

      • kids are colour blind but adults impose that on them

      • mother tells him not to use n word, not to refer to himself that way

    • identified three characteristics - subservient to white man, independent

    • experiences both sides of america - rich white living, but also experience of black people

    • narrator has black, gentile mother (who is pale skinned), white father

    • shiny - not embarrassed by race, becomes academic

    • form of the novel - episodic

      • picaresque

      • wants to capture as many experiences of black people as possible

      • giving people a picture of what its like

        • most shocking moment - lynching, reported in media, sensationalised, shocking because it was almost like a dirty secret, frames it as a horrible and inhuman occurrence

        • conversation with white man on the train

        • friend on ship doesn’t realise he was black

        • plays ragtime (1910s, precursor to jazz, scott joplin, syncopation becomes popular), playing piano, working in club, gets ahead through music

        • passing as white is significant

        • paid to travel with millionaire - queer coding (??), similar to gatsby/dan cody

      • people during this time often go to france

        • europhilia

        • harlem renaissance - small community

  • native son (1940s)

    • bigger thomas

      • lives w family in a small flat in chicago - cities, poverty, south and west side becomes stereotyped to be ghetto areas where black people lived, doesnt have cultural vibrancy of NY

      • kills massive rat in their flat - symbolises, microcosm of what life is like

      • employed by daltons who own the flat, employed as a chauffeur

        • mother is blind, father is a property magnate (exploits black people, pretends to be philanthropic towards black people)

        • mary is daughter, hanging out with socialists, communist bf, takes them to black cafe, she fetishises black culture, champagne socialist

      • bigger takes her home, takes her upstairs, mother walks in, he smothers her with pillow, he dismembers her body and throws her into furnace

      • pretends that she was kidnapped, communist bf was being investigated

      • found bones in furnace, implicates him

      • rapes and bludgeons his gf

      • he is caught and then beaten up

      • gets lawyer and defends him, voice of communism that blames systemic racism, he is a product of his circumstances

      • dies anyways

    • controversy

      • hes a rapist, murderer but still gets some sort of defence

      • richard wright himself was communist

      • when all the cards have been stacked against you for generations, this is what happens

      • attacks capitalism too

      • disparity between wealthy and poverty

      • equivalent to jungle - portrays every evil of capitalism

      • blames, attributes everything to race

    • free, indirect discourse, saying what hes thinking

  • their eyes were watching god (retrospective)

    • janie

      • black woman with three different relationships

      • mother was raped by father, on drugs

      • grandmother takes care of her, marries her off to older farmer

      • she is portrayed as very attractive

    • janie talking to phoebe (check spelling)

      • older farmer - strict, unromantic, she runs off and elopes

      • jody - moves to etonville, set up for black people, he becomes mayor, he dies and she still holds him accountable for the abuse, she owns the business by this point

      • tea cake - thinks hes a criminal, he runs off w her money at first but brings it all back, great love of her life, rake-ish, hes a younger man, massive hurricane when they go to work on plantation, fight to survive the flood waters, rabies dog bites tea cake, he starts going mad and waves gun around, she defends herself with gun, goes on trial, white jury saves her and says shes innocent

        • even though they are liberated, they didnt have any land, living on land owned by someone else, worked for owner, lack of mobility, normally people would migrate to NY or chicago, deeply exploitative - worse than Joads

    • focuses less on white repression, there are hardly any white people

    • focuses on black people, community

      • crime, gambling

      • marriage

      • being a woman

      • oppressive granny

      • poverty

    • author is part of harlem renaissance, she is an anthropologist

    • written heavily in dialect so surely written for black audience

  • pullman cars

    • people working on it were almost exclusively black

    • exploits them, pays them very little, forces them to rely on tips (origins of tipping cultures)