In the essay “The White Album,” Joan Didion recalls her most memorable experiences of the late nineteen sixties, ponders which one captures the essence of the era, and asks herself what these experiences meant in her life. The essay begins with Didion’s life before her 5 years of exploration. She felt that she was a responsible woman with a reputation. Cut to 1966, she appears to have lost her sense of narrative. Every major event that took place was happening without a grand picture in consideration. In this time of confusion, Didion reveals that she lived in a formerly luxurious Los Angeles home that then was on the brink of destruction. Didion begins to expand on all of the events that happened in the years she lived in the decaying house.
Louise Erdrich has a certain tone in the novel The Painted Drum, Jean Wyatt argued that the transformation of the protagonists’ process central to this novel is not described at all (Wyatt par. 1). Rather, the narrative
One of the most strived for things in life is academic excellence however the path to it is never easy. Author Thompson Ford’s article “How To Understand Acting White” outlines Stuart Bucks arguments about the irony of desegregation in education. A separate essay written by, Alfred Lubrano, “The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts” has similar ironies about the average college student. If Ford was to read Lubrano’s essay, Ford would come to a more complex conclusion by incorporating arguments and concepts from Lubrano’s essay. Ford may utilize Lubrano’s essay to expand on certain concepts such as the proximity effect, socioeconomics, and the level of education in top tier schools to further explain the “acting white” phenomenon from his own article.
Review on Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem In her memoir titled, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion includes a collection of essays that focus on her experiences in California during the 1960’s. By combining true historical facts, with a keen eye for gothic imagery, Didion narrates a felt experience from the perspective of a participant and an observer— calling into question the values of her own generation, while simultaneously embracing them in order to create a palpable narrative. Part One, Life Styles in the Golden Land provides a both a nostalgic and geographic origin story for the following chapters. The collection opens with the essay, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, which tells the tale of Lucille Miller and her
The colored museum is a play written my George C. Wolfe, first premiered 1986. The play includes eleven performances. Starting with Git on board, followed by The Photo Session, Cooking’ with Aunt Ethel, Soldier with a Secret, The Gospel According to Miss Roj, The Hairpiece, The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play, Symbiosis, Lala’s Opening, Permutations, and lastly, The Party. The play shows African, African-American, and white supremacy culture through the stage design, music, and overall story-line. The John Hopkins University Press Theatre Journal wrote, according to Wolfe, “ The legacy of the past must be both embraced and overcome.”
Early American social hierarchies differed markedly for women of color—whether free or enslaved—whose relationships to the white regimes of early America were manifold and complex. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women in the colonies of the English West Indies and Carolinas, particularly women of color, were seen as subordinate by white male slave owners because of race and shared oppression of the female gender. However, these women were a means of economic gain for white slave owners. Taken from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, white slave owners valued these women for their ability in domestic work and fieldwork where they performed primarily unskilled agricultural tasks, as well as their potential to bear children. White slave owners of the Early Americas, driven by greed and opportunism, used political laws, physical characteristics of women, and social constructs of gender roles to appropriate
Zora Hurston uses vivid imagery, natural diction, and several literary tools in her essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”. Hurston’s use of imagery, diction, and literary tools in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” contributes to, and also compliments, the essay’s theme which is her view on life as a “colored” person. Throughout “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” Hurston carefully incorporates aspects of her African American culture in an effort to recapture her ancestral past. Hurston’s use of imagery, diction, and use of literary tools shape her essay into a piece of Harlem Renaissance work. Imagery in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is quite abundant.
George Alazar Mr. Peets AP US History 3/20/22 Duke Ellington Duke Ellington was the most well-known musician composer and bandleader during the Harlem Renaissance. Born on April 29, 1899, in Washington D.C, Edward Kennedy Ellington group up in a stable middle-class family. His parents, Daisy and James Ellington, both were talented musicians, playing piano. They strongly encouraged him to play piano, and he began piano lessons at the age of seven. Throughout his young life, Ellington began interested in the arts and wrote his first piece, “Soda Fountain Rag.”
Kaleb Diers Duke Ellington's Musical Mark Duke Ellington was a popular pianist in the 1920’s whose ambition led him throughout his career. It is important to learn about musicians like Duke, because the music world will never leave a person's daily life. It’s also important to compare and contrast techniques from the 1920’s to that of the present day. Duke Ellington was one of the greatest musicians to remember, because of his childhood, actual career, and his legacy.
2) This extract is found in “The White Album” written by Joan Didion, who is the creator of many significant different literature pieces, both novels and essays. “The White Album” was published in 1979, and is the first and longest essay in the book. In this essay Joan Didion essentially uses a women as a connecting thread to describe what was happening in America at that time. I believe that the woman may even be herself to a certain extent, trying to externalize all her thoughts. What is perceived from the essay is that Didion was submerged into the focus of some big events that were happening in that year, not only as a journalist but also as a bystander and a normal Californian.
The hippie movement is arguably one of the most famous culture movements from the twentieth century, made widely famous in pop-culture involving romanticized images of overly friendly people clothed in bell-bottom pants and flower-print button down shirts. The romanticization of this movement allowed for a widely accepted and skewed view of the true events that happened during this time. The reality is much darker than publicized to the ignorant generations that followed. It can be maintained by many that personal experience and firsthand knowledge provides the most accurate depiction of the true happenings of the time period. Through vivid imagery and impersonal diction, Joan Didion offers a critical unveiling the mayhem that she witnessed during her various firsthand immersions in the developing culture of the 1960s.
She hoped that writing as well would help her to see what the experiences’ meant but discovers it doesn’t because there was no meaning. In summary Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” shows a very different perspective of the late nineteen sixties. History sells the illuision of war, love, and drugs. Didion’s flashes expose the human side of history. Didion wrote the essay to find lessons in the madness.
Women’s Blues music in the 1920s and early 1930s served as liberation for the sexual and cultural politics of female sexuality in black women’s dissertation. Hazel V. Carby explores the ideology of the white feminist theory in her deposition, "It Jus Be 's Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women 's Blues", and critiques its views by focusing on the representation of feminism, sexuality, and power in black women’s blues music. She analyzes the sexual and cultural politics of black women who constructed themselves as sexual subjects through songs in blues music and explains how the representation of black female sexuality in black women’s fiction and in women’s blues differ from one another. Carby claims that these black women
The genre of blues exploded into the blues craze during the 1920’s. During this time, white record producers saw the untapped goldmine that was blues music performed by people of color. Ma Rainey was one of them, and to some, one of the first, giving her the title, ‘The Mother of Blues’. The 1920’s was not only an era of continuing homophobia from the past (although that would change, briefly, into a mild form of acceptance until the more conservative 1930’s), but also of harsh racism. And yet, one singer, Ma Rainey’s, broke these restrictions.
The Fight Against Colorism in African American Communities Colorism is defined as a practice of discrimination among African Americans against other African Americans because of their skin complexion, for instance being too light or too dark. Colorism plays a large role in the low self-esteem in the African American community, from individuals, relationships, and employment. Colorism can cause psychological effects. Children are more affected because skin biased develops at a younger age.
With drugs, sex, and typewriters at the tips of their fingers, the Beat Generation held the 1950s and many future generations in their palms with their rapid, spontaneous lifestyles and reputations of adventures so… beat. One of the most well-known novels from their literary movement and a prime example of their ways of life was On the Road, written by Jack Kerouac, noted as ‘The King of the Beats’ by many (Morgan xx). And while many critics believe the novel to be a piece of writing that “[leaves] a smirch on the configuration of classic American literature” with its scandalous topics and appraising following, the message of Kerouac’s most famous book may not only reflect on the fast-paced lives of the Beat Generation during that time period but also on the state of America and the toll that their lives have taken on the American Dream (Vopat 1). On the Road, as a story of Kerouac’s personal tales, serves to reiterate a familiar story of a pair of boys going against the current and striking it out on their own with the Beatific message that the American Dream, that had once been “innocent, young, [and] full of promise”, has been destroyed, crippled by its intense quest for a freedom that has long been deemed unrealistic (Vopat 7).