U.S. Minority Literature Week 1c

1. U.S. Minority LiteratureWeek 1c

2. Meter work Darth Vader decided to crush the rebel soldier. Luke Skywalker will rebel against his father’s wishes.

3. What is the difference in sound? • Stress. In English, we stress some syllables and leave other syllables “unstressed.” • DARTH Vader deCIDed to CRUSH the REBelSOLDier. • LUKE SKYWALKer WILL reBELaGAINST his FATHer’sWISHes.

4. Types of Metrical Feed: • Iambic: a lightly stressed syllable followed by a heavily stressed syllable: u / • Anapestic: two light syllables followed by a stressed: u u / • Trochaic: a stressed followed by a light syllable: / u / u / • Dactylic: a stressed syllable followed by two light syllables: / u u

5. What is the pattern of stress in your name?

7. George Washington: Owned slaves: Yes 1786:  ”I can only say that no man living wishes more sincerely than I do to see the abolition of (slavery)…  But when slaves who are happy & content to remain with their present masters, are tampered with & seduced to leave them… it introduces more evils than it can cure."(Hirschfield,p187)

8. Thomas Jefferson

9. Owned slaves: Yes. He was one of the largest slave owners in Virginia. 1776:  (King George III) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he  also obtruded them thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”  -from TJ's draft of the Declaration of Independence. This paragraph was voted down by the Congressional Congress.(Jefferson, 1984. p 22.)

10. James Monroe

11. James Monroe Owned slaves? Yes. 1801:  “We perceive an existing evil which commenced under our Colonial System, with which we are not properly chargeable, or if at all not in the present degree, and we acknowledge the extreme difficulty of remedying it."(Monroe, 1903.v3, p 292-294.)

12. John Adams

13. Owned slaves? No 1841:  "What can I do for the cause of God and man, for the progress of human emancipation, for the suppression of the African slave-trade?  Yet my conscience presses me on; let me but die upon the breach."(Adams, p 519)

14. Resurgence of neo-slave narratives post-1960

15. neo-slave narratives are written by authors whose focus is not the abolition of slavery, but the amelioration of the wounds it has left behind; they seek reconciliation with a past that still haunts the present.

18. Neo-slave narratives explode in the 1970s. Why in the 1970s?

19. Reconstruction: Federal law provides civil rights protection in the U.S. South for freed slaves during the period of 1865-1877 (period after the civil war) • Jim Crow: racial segregation laws between 1876 and 1965. Racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states. • Civil Rights: 1960s fight for integration • 1970sis the period after civil rights. The neo-slave narrative is a reaction to a post-civil rights era that embraces colorblind and post-racial discourse

24. Frederick Douglass’s narrative (pgs. 39-80) • How can we think about slavery intersectionally? • “Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her [Master Hughes’s mistress] of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-lke fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband’s precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself” (39)

25. “The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read” (40).

26. “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! That very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish”

27. Psychological ramifications of slavery • “Mr. Covey’s forte consisted in his power to deceive. His life was devoted to planning and perpetrating the grossest deceptions. Every thing he possessed in the shape of learning or religion, he made conform to his disposition to deceive. He seemed to think himself equal to deceiving the Almighty. He would make a short prayer in the morning, and a long prayer at night; and, strange as it may seem, few men would at times appear more devotional than he” (55-56).

28. “The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave. They do not give the salves this time because they would not like to have their work during its continuance but because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it. […] Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation” (65).

29. “It was for a long time a matter of surprise to me why Mr. Covey did not immediately have me taken by the constable to the whipping-post, and there regularly whipped for the crime of raising my hand against a white man in defence of myself. And the only explanation I can now think of does not entirely satisfy me; but such as it is, I will give it. Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker. It was of considerable importance to him. That reputation was at stake (63)

30. Topic sentences: A claim about how the paragraph develops from the previous paragraph and what the main point of the paragraph is.

31. Frederick Douglass enacts agency within the rigid form of the slave narrative by demonstrating his own limitations in what he could write, and demonstrating his own literary mastery. In doing so, he subversively argues that free African Americans are still not equal as well as argue for the equality of all African Americans—even those enslaved.