bringing together key themes

Taleisha's drawing on identity

Still from "Claudine"

still from "Django Unchained"

Yesterday, the students in this class were pushed to think about four key themes addressed so far in this course in preparation for next week's mid-term: identity, resistance, labor and housing. The idea is to get them to think about how these concepts relate to African American life across time.

Inspired by Lynda Barry's work, I began by asking them to write or draw images related to the idea of "identity." Taleisha's drawing, which takes into account how you see yourself and how others see you, is posted above. 

The 1974 movie "Claudine," which presents the story of a mother on welfare, further pushed our thinking. I love that  movie and enjoyed hearing the students laugh. Diahann Carroll should have won an Oscar for it. We also discussed the readings including Barry's picture book on a friendship between a white girl and black girl in the United States some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Their experiences in a segregated city were juxtaposed against that of blacks and Germans in antebellum Buffalo as presented by historians James Horton and Hartmut Keil. I told them that although Quentin Tarantino's 2012 "Django Unchained" is not without problems, Tarantino nailed it when he allowed us to see an enslaved black woman speaking German before the  Civil War. As Horton and Keil reveal, blacks and Germans often lived beside each other peacefully during the antebellum period. There are reasons why their interactions were quite different from those African Americans had with other Europeans, namely the Irish. Among the reasons is how Irish immigrants often arrived in the States poor unlike the Germans who were fleeing a failed revolution.

I look forward to seeing how the students find meaning in all of these ideas when they take the midterm next week. Stay tuned for more of their initial thoughts on identity.