Final project topics
Up to and into early 20th Century
* discuss African rententions/survivals in African American folk culture:
religion, music, dance, literature, etc.
* discuss slave narratives, perhaps comparing those of men and women
* consider the way the spiritual, secular and sexual combine in the slave
narratives and early American autobiographies
* consider slave folktales as metaphors or transcendence. What, for example is
significant about the animal trickster figure in the African America, rather
than African, context?
* discuss the ways the poetry of Phillis Wheatley explores notions of race in
American culture
* discuss the rise of Black feminism in late 19th C. (Ida Wells Barnett, Anna
Julia Cooper, Francis Watkins Harper, see p. 553)
* explore spirituals and gospel music in relation to themes of African
American literature
* discuss the role of the Black church and the Black Preacher in AF-Am
life/liberation struggles
* study the Black Heroic Tradition: workers (Casey Jones/John Henry) Badman
(Bras Coupe, Stagolee, Jody and in contemporary film and rap)
* study Booker T. Washington and WEB DuBois' debate over black social and
political progress
* discuss the Blues (rural/urban), their origins, form and significance in
Black literature and life
* explore the literature, music and prose of lynching (Ida Wells Barnett 724-32,
Charles Chesnutt" The Marrow of Tradition, Walter white, lynching investigator
of the newly formed NAACP, rise of the KKK, "Strange Fruit" and Billie Holiday
20th Century and Beyond
* explore the Harlem Renaissance: art, drama, literature, music (Blues/jazz/Big
Bands), dance
* study Langston Hughes: art, life, legacy
* study Zora Neale Hurston: art, life, legacy
* Ralph Ellison: read "Battle Royal" from Invisible Man; study the blues
and jazz aesthetics that inform his novel (borrow Contexts of Invisible Man
from me)
* study A Raisin in the Sun: its themes, its various productions, its
author
* Consider how writers of the 1960s focused on both protest and gender. Looking
at poets who published in that decade, select 5 male and 5 female poets.
Determine what themes encapsulate African American gendered experience.
* Explore the idea of jazz/verbal improvisation and resilience in African
American life/literature.
* What factors explain the movement from blues to jazz? Examine not only the
relationship between the individual and community but also the movements from
the rural to the urban environments as key factors in this progression.
* Discus the toasts as critiques of social and poetical reality. In what ways
are the toasts precursors to rap?
* Discuss the "Signifying Monkey" as both an African and African American
symbol.
* Explore the "Badman" in African American folk culture and literature/film.
* How does James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" reflect he emphasis on improvisation
as a means of self-definition?
* What factors contribute to the militancy in the voice of R & B in the 1960s
and 70s? Consider this voice across musical genres: compare for instance, "I'm
Black and I'm Proud" with "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round."
* Discuss the evolution of rap lyrics from those of Gil Scott-Heron to Public
Enemy in terms of language, as well as political and social message.
* Compare and contrast the representation of black women in rap and in the
blues.
* Discuss rap as a preserver of culture. In what ways does rap reflect the
"blackness of blackness" (authentic, Black experience)?
* Discuss the ways in which Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks transform the
commonplace into material for sociopolitical protest.
* Discuss the tension between depicting blackness as art and Ellison's
"blackness of blackness" in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use."
* Discuss the conception of revolution in the works and lives of Larry Neal,
Amiri Baraka, and Sonia Sanchez.
* Ralph Ellison described the blues as "an impulse to keep the painful details
and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to
finger its jagged grain and to transcend it, not by the consolation of
philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." Select
several blues and prose works and discuss the way in which this definition
resonates in the works. In your discussion identify the "near-comic lyricism"
and the "finger[ing] of its jagged grain.
* Using song lyrics and musical genre definitions from our text/site, discuss
the evolution of the African American struggle for liberation.