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Once They’ve Seen the Big City How’re You Gonna get ‘em Back on the Farm?

Once They’ve Seen the Big City How’re You Gonna get ‘em Back on the Farm?. Black America’s Urban Renaissance Part One. Why Re -naissance?. First major self-conscious literary movement by African American writers

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Once They’ve Seen the Big City How’re You Gonna get ‘em Back on the Farm?

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  1. Once They’ve Seen the Big City How’re You Gonna get ‘em Back on the Farm? Black America’s Urban Renaissance Part One

  2. Why Re-naissance? • First major self-conscious literary movement by African American writers • Following “the Great War” and black flight to northern cities – cut short in ’30s by Depression • Influence of DuBois? • respect for cultural traditions, but whose? • High or low? Blues, jazz or spirituals? (Or classical music?) • Oral traditions or novels, poetry, drama? • Identify with white culture or “black culture”? • Rise of anthropology, “primitivism” • New educated African American class: “Tenth”?

  3. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) • Majors and Minors (1895) • “major poems” in standard English • Commercial failure, later literary fame • Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896) • “minor poems” in dialect • Instant commercial success, later read as racist

  4. “We Wear the Mask” (1895) We wear the mask that grins and lies,It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes –This debt we pay to human guile;With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,And mouth with myriad subtleties.Why should the world be overwiseIn counting all our tears and sighsNay, let them only see us whileWe wear the mask. . . . (Major Poems)

  5. “The Party” (1896) Dey had a grread big pahty down to Tom’s de othah night,Was I dah? You bet! I nevah in my life seen sich a sight;All de folks f’om fou’ plantations was invited, an’ dey come,Dey come troopin’ thick ez chillun when dey hyeahs a fife an’ drum . . . (Minor Poems)

  6. Zora Neale Hurston (1891? – 1960) • b. Eatonville FL (founded by blacks in 1880s) • 1923: Howard University, Washington DC • 1925: Barnard College NYC • Fellowship w/anthropologist Franz Boas (“Papa Franz”) • Research support from Mrs. R. Osgood Mason (“Godmother”)

  7. A writer, then obscurity & death • Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life • Written w/Langston Hughes c. 1931, never staged • Jonah’s Gourd Vine (novel, 1934) • Mules & Men (folk tales & voodoo, 1935) • Their Eyes Were Watching God • Dust Tracks on a Road (autobiography, 1942) • . . . Plus short stories, essays, some still lost and/or unpublished

  8. “How It Feels to be Colored Me” “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, or lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. . . . I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. . . . Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. . . . I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconcious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. . . . Sometimes it is the other way around . . . When I sit in the New World Cabaret . . . With a white person . . . The jazz orchestra plunges into a number . . . I follow those heathen exultingly. I dance wildly within myself . . . I shake my assegai . . . I hurl it true to the mark . . . I am in the jungle, face painted, body painted . . . The white friend sitting motionless, calmly smoking. Then I am so colored. (1928)

  9. “the “perfect, happy darkie”– fellow writer Langston Hughes on Zora Zora: “Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my own company?”

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