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Manchild In The Promised Land Analysis

974 Words4 Pages

Claude Brown begins Manchild in the Promised Land with himself (Sonny) at the age of thirteen, shot on the streets of Harlem for stealing sheets from a clothesline. The autobiography then retraces Brown’s life from the age of eight up to the shooting and goes on to chronicle his stays in the Warwick Reform School and his eventual escape from the street life of Harlem. A gang member at the age of nine, Brown was sent at eleven to the Wiltwyck School for Boys, returned to the streets, was shot, was sent to the reformatory and then gradually moved from Harlem as he earned his high-school diploma, became a jazz pianist in Greenwich Village and ultimately began college. Manchild, which was written while Brown was still in his twenties, was for …show more content…

Ernest Papanek, a psychologist and the director of the Wiltwyck School for deprived and emotionally disturbed boys, as the author playfully expresses “probably the smartest and the deepest cat I had ever met” (Brown 1965). A child that has seen the struggles of his parents and grandparents, having traveled from the newly freed south to this so called promised land of New Your City. Was this bad kid just trying to reinvigorate the masculinity stolen from the ancestors on the journey here. A subject not ignored by the modern day African American entertainment community. In a dissertation aimed to highlight how rappers or entertainers posture themselves to project a strong, assertive, masculine image. The author of the dissertation notes” how hip hop performers such as Ice Cube, Nas, 50-Cent, amongst others, are recovering and recuperating the figure of the black hustler… it assists in developing an understanding of how young black men learn to perform masculinity “(Garnes 2015). This basic need to feel like a man and not conform to the limitation that unbalanced socio-economic inequality forces migrants to deal with. Is exactly what Brown is portraying in this book. Is the protagonist a bad person or a person taking the cue of those not wanting to settle for what has been left and take what is

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