HW for Apr 2: Documentary "My Brooklyn" (2012)

To assess the documentary, choose one or two of these questions that should be posed in relation to "texts" in cultural geography, according to Marcus Doel in his 2010 article, "Analysing Cultural Texts" (now on moodle, in the section for your final paper).

• How, why and for whom has it been constructed?

 • What are the materials, practices and power relationships that are assumed by it and sustained through it? 

• What codes, values, dispositions, habits, stereotypes and associations does it draw upon? 

• What kind of personal and group identities does it promote? And how do they relate to other identities? What does it mean? 

• What are its main structuring devices: oppositions, divisions, metaphors, illustrations, exemplars etc? 

• What kind of cultural/political/territorial/social/economic work does it do, and who benefits? What has been included, excluded, empowered and repressed? How might it be modified, transformed or deconstructed? How could this social space be inhabited differently? 

• What wider assemblages does it fit into and resonate with? Are these assemblages synergistic or contradictory?

HW for March 26: Migrating from South to North

 

 1. Langston Hughes's poem (anthology, p. 125) talks to the mobility heritage of the Africans and African-Americans. Studying a little about Hughes's biography, why does he refer the specific rivers in the poem? To what moment does the recollection of the Mississippi belong to in History and how does the poet's description of this moment impact on you?

2. Born in Missouri, Hughes is himself a product of the migration North, or internal disapora, referred to by bell hooks in the excerpt of pp. 125-127. According to hooks, how did the "great migration" impact the psyche of black people who moved from the rural South to the industrial North at the turn of the 20th century?

HW for March 24: From the "Tidewater" to the South

 1. "The individual of African descent is not seen. The Black Race is seen in the individual. All Black women are seen in the woman. All Black men are seen in the man.

    Racist powers constructed the Black race - and all the Black groups. Them. Racist power kept constructing Black America over four hundred years". - How do the words of Ibram X. Kendi (anthology, p. 118) resonate with Faulkner's understanding of how "the Negro" might or not rise to equality in the South of 1958 (anthology pp. 120-124), and what do we understand about the concept of "race" from both texts? [This reasoning on the keyword "race" might help]

2. What cultural differences does Faulkner establish between Virginia (he is giving his speech at the University of Virginia) and the rest of the South (for instance, Mississippi, where he is from), and why do you think he foregrounds such contrasts?

HW for March 19: comparing / contrasting texts (anthology, p. 109-113 and 116-119)

 Compare any two of these statements in relation to relevant concepts discussed so far in this class, namely "intersectionality", "cultural landscape" and "American values".

1. Captain John Smith. Poor Powhatan
had to make peace, embittered man.

Then teaching - insidious recourse -
enhanced Pocahontas and flowered of course

in marriage. John Rolfe fell in love
with her and she - in rank above

what she became - renounced her name
yet found her status not too tame.

The crested moss-rose casts a spell,
its bud of solid green, as well,

and the Old Pink Moss..."   (M. Moore., "Enough", anthology, pp. 109-110)

2. "In Europe the lands are either cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be resorted to of necessity not of choice, to supportthe surplus of their people. But we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is itbest then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that onehalf should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft artsfor the other? Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people".  (T. Jefferson, 1787, anthology p. 111) 

3. "Virginia's Recorder General, John Rolfe, known as Pocahontas's husband, produced Black America's birth certificate in 1619. (...) 

Only slavery, only racism, only the mighty Atlantc blocing the way back home seemes to be promisde. But the community started to sing long before anyone heard that old spiritual:  "We chall overcome, / we chall overcome someday."

There is no better word than we. When when it is involuntary - meaning to be Black in America is to almost neverbe treated like an individual. (Ibram X. Kendi, "A Community of Souls", anthology p. 118)

HW for March 17: Henry David Thoreau, "Walking" (excerpts, anthology, pp. 100-108)

  Answer one or more of the following:

- What different or complementary image of New England (from Hawthorne's in "Young Goodman Brown") is projected in this essay?

- Is there a thought on race and ethnicity embedded in Thoreau's essay? How might one interpret it?

- Choose a striking passage that you might relate with concepts of cultural geography or of Nature writing discussed in class, and comment on it.

HW for March 12: Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown" (anthology, pp. 87-99)

Answer to one or either (or both):

1. Although Nathaniel Hawthorne published Young Goodman Brown" in 1835, his story is sent in 17th C Puritan New England, a region where his ancestors held religious and ruling power. Comment on characteristics of the Puritan mind that might extend to New Englanders' outlook on the world, as expressed in the tale.

2. Comment on how Nature participates in the plot of the story (its descriptions, symbols, omens).