LITR 4332 American Minority Literature: Lecture Notes

Review and prepare for midterm & research proposal; introduce American Indian literature (post-midterm)

Tuesday, 7 October: Complete African American, assign American Indian literature; midterm prep

Poetry presentation: Albert Gazeley, "The Cry of the Native American"

Reader: LeChelle Walker

Poetry presentation: Langston Hughes, "Harlem" & "Dream Variations"; Countee Cullen, "From the Dark Tower"

Reader: instructor

Tuesday, 14 October: midterm exam (in-class or email)

Tuesday, 21 October: begin American Indian literature

Reading assignments:

• Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories: "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" (7-45); "The School Days of an Indian Girl" (47-80); "Dream of her Grandfather" (155-58)

Minority Culture Reader: Telishia "Tee" Mickens

Literary Style Reader: Veronica Valdez

Poetry presentation: Linda Hogan, "November"

Reader: Kirsten Massey

For presentation assignments, go to syllabus

Course objectives relating esp. to American Indians--

"Historical Foundation"

Objective 5b: Loss and Survival              (compare "The Dream" of African America)

Objective 5: Minority Narratives

• “Narratives” are stories or plots, a sequence of events in which people act and speak in time.

• Narratives concern not only how a writer tells a story, but also how an audience receives, processes, and makes meaning of it.

• A cultural narrative is a collective story that unifies or directs a community--for example, The American Dream for the USA, or particular minority narratives that reflect an ethnic group's experience or range of expression.

• Following Minority-Culture Objective 1, Minority Narratives differ from the dominant “American Dream” narrative—which involves voluntary participation, forgetting the past, and individuals or nuclear families.

• Instead, minority narratives generally involve involuntary participation, reconnecting to a broken past, and traditional, extended, or alternative families.

Tabular summary of Objective 5:
contrasts between the dominant culture's "American Dream" narrative and minority narratives

5a. African American alternative narrative: “The Dream”

• "The Dream" resembles but is not identical to "The American Dream."

• Whereas the American Dream emphasizes immediate individual success, "the Dream" factors in setbacks, the need to rise again, and group dignity.

5b. Native American Indian alternative narrative: "Loss and Survival"

• Dominant / immigrant culture leaves its past behind to gain rights and opportunities--the American Dream.

•  For Indians, the American Dream of immigration is the American Nightmare, creating an undeniable narrative of loss: the native people were once “the Americans” but lost most of their people, land, rights, and opportunities.

• Despite these terrible losses, Native Americans defy the myth of "the vanishing Indian," choosing to "survive," sometimes in faith that the dominant culture will eventually destroy itself, and the forests and buffalo will return.

• The American dominant culture usually writes only half of the Indians' story, romanticizing their loss (e. g., The Last of the Mohicans) and ignoring the Indians who adapt and survive.

review midterm

review format, timing

content:

biggest change is #3

last week: only about "The Dream" etc.--what I planned, but not reality of our course

we had discussed the color code at least as much

this week: revised #3 to offer choices, options

If I see glitches in the latest version of the midterm, I may correct them, but I won't make any important changes without alerting.

"The Dream" in The Bluest Eye

Historical foundation:

• The dominant culture of the USA is formed by immigrants and their descendents
  who live or imagine the American Dream.
   
• Minorities are ethnic groups that do not fit the immigrant narrative or profile,
  for whom  the American Dream has typically been an American Nightmare.
   

The Immigrant Story and the American Dream are almost identical

If you're not an immigrant, can you have the American Dream?

African Americans aren't immigrants > "The Dream"

Objective 5: Minority Narratives . . .

• A cultural narrative is a collective story that unifies or directs a community--for example, The American Dream for the USA, or particular minority narratives that reflect an ethnic group's experience or range of expression.

• Following Minority-Culture Objective 1, Minority Narratives differ from the dominant “American Dream” narrative—which involves voluntary participation, forgetting the past, and individuals or nuclear families.

5a. African American alternative narrative: “The Dream”

• "The Dream" resembles but is not identical to "The American Dream."

• Whereas the American Dream emphasizes immediate individual success, "the Dream" factors in setbacks, the need to rise again, and group dignity.

3rd class meeting, Slave Narratives

poetry presentation: Angelou's "Still I Rise"

References to "The Dream" in The Bluest Eye

39 dreams of affluence and vengeance into the anonymous misery of their storefront

62 a high-yellow dream child

69 Dreamland Theater

103 big white house with wheelbarrow full of flowers

105 Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams . . . white house

107 white, white, polished + 127 porcelain tub, silvery taps

113 dreams disintegrated (Polly's dreams of romance, love)

129 old dreaminess

142 house belongs to some white folks

149 dreams, figures, premonitions

165 Interpreter of Dreams

172 dreamless sleeps, what this dream means

Color Code & Black Aesthetic in The Bluest Eye

1d. “The Color Code”

• Literature represents the extremely sensitive subject of skin color infrequently or indirectly.
   

• Western civilization transfers values associated with “light and dark”—e. g., good & evil, rational / irrational—to people of light or dark complexions, with huge implications for power, validity, sexuality, etc.
   

• This course mostly treats minorities as a historical phenomenon, but the biological or visual aspect of human identity may be more immediate and direct than history. People most comfortably interact with others who look like themselves or their family.
   

• Skin color matters, but how much varies by circumstances.
   

• See also Objective 3 on racial hybridity.
   

This objective is still fairly new and "under development"

Next time, revise to include Black Aesthetic, reversal

Black Aesthetic crystallized in 60s-70s with Black Arts Movement

"Black is Beautiful"

see also earlier international movements of Negritude

Anticipation of Black Aesthetic in Narrative of Life of Frederick Douglass

The Bluest Eye

Color code:

134 God was a nice old white man > the devil?

124 black ball of hair

126 ugly

Black Aesthetic:

113 dark sweetness

133 soft black Georgia sky [God's mercy is dark]

138 African violets

141 black thread

145 dark juice

157 elderberry

174 a little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes

190 baby in a dark wet place

Morrison persistently represents a hidden or unrecognized beauty in darkness

contrast "The Bluest Eye" as a crossed-up value for a black girl, Pecola

If God, truth, or beauty is limited to light and white, a dimension of human and natural reality is denied.

Darkness as fertility, not life eternal but life anew