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Dualities in Phillis Wheatley's writings and poems
Phillis wheatley poems only
Features of Phillis wheatley poetry
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Phillis Wheatley and Robert Smalls may not be a notable name in today’s history, but their stories are remarkable none the less. While Robert Smalls became famous for his bravery and actions, Phillis Wheatley became famous through her written words. Against all odds, these two African-American’s went and did what was called the impossible for people of their race in their times of history. Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston, Massachusetts on the ship, The Phillis, in 1761 when she was just seven or eight years old. Phillis was small, frail, nearly naked, and could not speak a word of English when she arrived in America.
Over the course of the time period 1492 to 1750, Europeans exerted increasing economic dominance over the Americas and Africa which caused and even led to many social changes within the Atlantic world. It opened up new and old worlds to a world of growing interdependence as well as connectivity. There were certain patterns of interaction around this time period. The America’s were therefore isolated from the rest of the world as well as all the Afro-Eurasian advances. European interest in spice trades led to many new overseas exploration.
The burden of the black man is the time in the lives of the Africans where they have to defend themselves from the colonizers, or to them, the white westerners. In the poem The Black Man’s Burden, by H.T. Johnson in 1899 as a reply to The White Man’s Burden, Johnson says “Pile on the Black Man’s Burden/ His wail with laughter drown/You’ve sealed the Red Man’s problem/And will take up the Brown.” (Johnson 9-12) This excerpt shows readers exactly what the Africans were forced to go through.
In Chapter 1 and 2 of “Creating Black Americans,” author Nell Irvin Painter addresses an imperative issue in which African history and the lives of Africans are often dismissed (2) and continue to be perceived in a negative light (1). This book gives the author the chance to revive the history of Africa, being this a sacred place to provide readers with a “history of their own.” (Painter 4) The issue that Africans were depicted in a negative light impacted various artworks and educational settings in the 19th and early 20th century. For instance, in educational settings, many students were exposed to the Eurocentric Western learning which its depiction of Africa were not only biased, but racist as well.
In the poem, "If We Must Die," McKay uses figurative language to convey the message of racial equality to his audience. Using figurative language, the readers are able to have a deeper understanding of what the African Americans are going through. For instance, in the poem it states, “If we must die, let it not be like hogs.” (1). In this sentence, the author compares the way hogs die to the African Americans dying.
6 million African Americans moved from the rural South to the cities of the North during The Great Migration. The blacks wanted to escape the oppressive economic conditions in the south and the promise of greater fortune in the north. Some blacks was being paid to migrated from the south to the north for work and their expenses was being paid. The Pennsylvania Railroad paid the travel expenses of 12,000 blacks.
Within Ellis Island by Joseph Bruchac, On Being Brought from Africa to America by Phillis Wheatley, and Europe and America by David Ignatow there are different views of what the American Dream is and what it means to immigrants. Each author writes about their own experience of immigration and life in America, which shapes their view of the American dream. The common theme between the three poems is the variable nature of the American dream and how it has different meanings for each person coinciding with contradictions between leisure and suffering.
Every human being is born into this world with one guaranteed fact: that the life they were just given will one day end. Another guaranteed fact is that it will not be easy, and we will face struggles every day. Claude Mckay’s poem, “If We Must Die,” expresses the idea that since we are all going to die one day, we should go down fighting for what we believe is right. Mckay uses figurative language and literary devices to convey the oppression African American’s faced in the early 20th century.
The husband of the couple--Tea Cake-- is tasked by a white man to bury the dead bodies from the hurricane along with the other black men. Initially, the men dump all the bodies into the same graves, regardless of race. One of the white men eventually stops this and argues that the government is “makin’ coffins [for] all [of] the White folks”(Hurston 171). When asked if the African Americans got coffins he negates it. Tea Cake challenges this and asks “[what] difference [does] it make [about] the color?
The Columbian Exchange refers to the monumental transfer of goods such as: ideas, foods, animals, religions, cultures, and even diseases between Afroeurasia and the Americas after Christopher Columbus’ voyage in 1492. The significance of the Columbian Exchange is that it created a lasting tie between the Old and New Worlds that established globalization and reshaped history itself (Garcia, Columbian Exchange). Worlds that had been separated by vast oceans for years began to merge and transform the life on both sides of the Atlantic (The Effects of the Columbian Exchange). This massive exchange of goods gave rise to social, political, and economic developments that dramatically impacted the world (Garcia, Columbian Exchange). During this time,
In this speech, Pontiac uses his anecdote to explain how he feels against the English who are destroying their people and way of life; however, it can also explain his sadness for his own culture because the English changed his people so easily. In his narrative, the Delaware Indian comes upon many obstacles on his journey in search of The Great Spirit. Two obstacles in particular are a “mountain of dazzling whiteness” (223 ¶ 1 line 23) and a woman in white. The color white in these two occasions is used with different meanings.
As a result, his statement acts as a predetermination put into motion by, of course, the color of his skin: “No black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village.” Under these circumstances, one can notice the hint towards a premise all too mundane for Black Americans— a loathsome self-awareness. To clarify; from the moment of birth, a Negro citizen is made absurdly alert of the fact that, they are indeed, black. The pigment of their skin is to the world this oddity, carrying on a speculation that will seemingly never cease. It is so constant, that the mere idea of the absence of blackness prompts a state of awe: “It did not occur to me— possibly because I’m American— that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.”
Over twelve million Africans were captured and taken against their will by Europeans in the Atlantic slave trade from about 1525-1866. The experience that the slaves endured was horrendous, unsanitary and overall the worst time of their lives. The middle passage was where the slaves were taken from Africa to the Americas via ships. After they arrived in the Americas, they were sold and forced to work for their new owners. Due to strong European force, slaves experienced dehumanization through being captured from their villages and tortured, living with awful conditions on ships, and being sold against their will to Americans.
A person’s identity is what defines them, it is their history and personality, it is what makes them the person they are, and yet sometimes it is sacrificed in order to attain something more. The giving up of a person’s race, when it is possible, is one of the clearest examples of this idea. When a certain race is oppressed, many would be willing to sacrifice their identity with the hopes of living free of oppression. The idea of sacrificing race and identity for a benefit is demonstrated in Charles Johnson’s novel Oxherding Tale and Nella Larsen’s novel Passing. In Oxherding Tale, the protagonist, Andrew, is born a black slave, but is half white and has a light skin tone.
The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).
