Assignment Question
Using 3 course texts that represent historical moments that are each at least 20 years apart (i.e. you should cover at least a 60-yr spread with your three course texts), write a 4-5 page essay in which you discuss how representation has helped to reflect, shape, challenge, and/or transform dominant understandings of blackness in the United States at different historical moments.
The 3 course text should be 1. Ethnic Notions film by Marlon Riggs 2. Television, Black Americans and the American Dream By Herman Gray 3. Hip-Hop Beyond beats and rhymes By Byron Hurt
In developing your response to the prompt, you might choose to organize your thoughts around one of the core analytics we used: The politics of representation: what is the key difference in how your chosen objects attempt to use representation as a political tool? Are they trying to reach different audiences? Are they using different representational forms that seem differently useful to whatever cause they are addressing? Do they have different messages about the power of representation to influence black social and political life?
The burden of representation: How do your chosen cultural objects carry their burdens of representation? What do they seem burdened with explaining/representing? Why are they burdened with representing “blackness” in some way? Who or what stands to benefit from this burden being placed on the objects? Who or what might be harmed by these objects “speaking for” black people as a group? (Remember that an author/maker can intentionally take up the burden of representation part of the creation of a cultural object, and/or this burden can be imposed on the representation by its audience, whether the subject wants to be seen as representative of their group or not)
The politics of respectability: What’s different about how your chosen works offer strategically “respectable” representations of Blackness? Does what is considered respectable change according to context? What’s different about how people try to represent blackness in each context? Your analysis should: Have a thesis that clearly articulates the throughline of your analysis—are you talking about persistence over time or change over time? What is that thing that persists or changes? Be evidence-based: don’t speak in generalizations, point to evidence from within your chosen texts and then explain how this evidences supports your claim of persistence or change over time. Don’t write “around” your cultural objects, reactivate your close reading muscles and make sure that analyzing the objects themselves is the bulk of your paper. Account for the different socio-political contexts within which your chosen cultural objects would be circulating at the time of their creation (or within which the subjects of your texts would be circulating, if you’re writing about an analysis of something, rather than a primary cultural object)
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