scholarly journals An Actantial and Functional Analysis on Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Heri Dwi Santoso
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
African American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
African American People ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
Structural Research

To a certain extent, a structural study is good enough to comprehend the very substance of a literary work. Given the above thesis, the researcher attempted to conduct a structural research on Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (ROTHMC), an African-American novel, using actantial and functional structure analysis. This study aimed at comprehending the basic framework of the story that leads to the revelation of the plot and relations between characters, which indicated the African-American protagonist’s struggle to challenge white supremacy. Method used in the research was descriptive qualitative. Results found that the protagonist was David Logan, an African-American independent farmer that had an ambition to free African-American community from white people’s repressions. It was also found that the ambition and dream of David Logan about African-American freedom and independence and his awareness on the repression toward African-American people (Sender) has made him struggled to make African-American or African-American become a free race with dignity in the United States, where land and other things at the time was dominated by White people. Meanwhile, the functional analysis showed the plot structure of ROTHMC, which was centered on the struggles of David Logan and the family to challenge white supremacy.

scholarly journals Resistance and Protest in Percival Everett's Erasure

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-157
Author(s):  
Sonia Caputa
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Identification ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Thelonious Monk ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Impact

 As argued by the literary critic Margaret Russett, Percival Everett “unhinges ‘black’ subject matter from a lingering stereotype of ‘black’ style [and] challenges the assumption that a single or consensual African-American experience exists to be represented.” The author presents such a radical individualism in his most admired literary work published in 2001. In Erasure, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, the main character and narrator of the book, pens a stereotypically oriented African American novel that becomes an expression of “him being sick of it;” “an awful little book, demeaning and soul-destroying drivel” that caters for the tastes and expectations of the American readership but, at the same time, oscillates around pre-conceived beliefs, prejudices, and racial clichés supposedly emphasizing the ‘authentic’ black experience in the United States. Not only is Erasure about race, misconceptions of blackness and racial identification but also about academia, external constraints, and one’s fight against them. The present article, therefore, endeavors to analyze different forms of resistance and protest in Percival Everett’s well-acclaimed novel, demonstrating the intricate connections between the publishing industry, the impact of media, the literary canon formation and the treatment of black culture.

Mapping Gender in African-American Political Strategies

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Leith Mullings
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
American People ◽  
African American People ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
The Right

Gender is not just about women; it is about the social relationship between men and women and the dialectical, reciprocal, and cultural construction of femininity and masculinity. Recognition of a unique historical experience concerning gender informs the perspectives of African Americans of various political persuasions. This history incorporates a land of origin with certain common principles about gender and family. It also encompasses the African-American experience in the United States where the denial of many "protections" offered by gender roles and indeed sometimes inversion of such roles was a means of maintaining control. Hence asserting the right to assume gender-based roles of husband, father, wife, and mother paradoxically was an act of resistance. The manner in which African-American people have envisioned relationships of gender in light of that history has expressed itself in markedly different forms.

scholarly journals County Demographics and COVID-19 Death Rates: Comparison of relationship in the first and current stage of the pandemic in the United States of America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Urbine ◽  
Madison T James ◽  
Vishal Shah
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Secondary Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Data ◽  
American People ◽  
Significant Variable ◽  
African American People ◽  
Death Rates ◽  
Control And Prevention

AbstractPrevious studies have discovered disparity in death rates associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in the United States during the initial stages of the pandemic. Specifically, the death rates were higher in the population in poverty and communities of color across the United States. In the current study, we perform the secondary analysis of death rates due to COVID-19 data, obtained from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Results indicate that in the first phase of the pandemic (February 1 to August 1, 2020), counties with higher percentage of White, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders, and two or more races populations were found to have lower per-capita COVID-19 death rate. Whereas counties with population having higher percentage of females, Black or African American people, and persons in poverty had higher death rates. Analysis of the death rates from August 1 to September 10, 2020, indicate that disparity continues with counties having higher population of Black or African American people and female having higher death rates. Poverty is not a significant variable in determining the death rates due to COVID-19. Based on the current data and lack of detailed molecular mechanism of the disease, we suggest that more resources must be diverted to counties with higher percentages of Black or African American and female populations.

scholarly journals Structural Violence of Schooling: A Genealogy of a Critical Family History of Three Generations of African American Women in a Rural Community in Florida

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Evelyn Newman Phillips ◽  
Wangari Gichiru
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Family History ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Structural Barriers ◽  
American Women ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
American Children

Through the lens of structural violence, Black feminism and critical family history, this paper explores how societal structures informed by white supremacy shaped the lives of three generations of rural African American women in a family in Florida during the middle to the late twentieth century. Specifically, this study investigates how disparate funding, segregation, desegregation, poverty and post-desegregation policies shaped and limited the achievement trajectories among these women. Further, an oral historical examination of their lives reveals the strategies they employed despite their under-resourced and sometimes alienating schooling. The paper highlights the experiences of the Newman family, descendants of captive Africans in the United States that produced three college-educated daughters and a granddaughter despite structural barriers that threatened their progress. Using oral history interviews, archival resources and first-person accounts, this family’s story reveals a genealogy of educational achievement, barriers and agency despite racial and gendered limitations in a Southern town. The findings imply that their schooling mirrors many of the barriers that other Blacks face. However, this study shows that community investment in African American children, plus teachers that affirm students, and programs such as Upward Bound, help to advance Black students in marginalized communities. Further, these women’s lives suggest that school curriculums need to be anti-racist and public policies that affirm each person regardless of the color of their skin. A simple solution that requires the structural violence of whiteness be eliminated from the schooling spheres.

Dissimulating Blackness: The Degenerative Satires of Paul Beatty and Percival Everett

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American People ◽  
African American People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paul Beatty

This chapter provides a reading of three novels – Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland and Percival Everett’s A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid – that engage in degenerative satire, which complicates the mimetic representation of satiric texts. This chapter argues that these novels satirize not only clichéd tropes of blackness but also the presumption that blackness can or should be represented. Ultimately, this chapter shows how these novels destabilize the very notion of blackness.

This Is Your Book: Marketing America to Itself

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Ween
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Book World ◽  
Important Shift

In February 2001, Knopf Publishing Company, a division of Random House, reportedly purchased the rights to publish two novels by Stephen L. Carter for $4 million. As the Daily Variety Gotham stated, “Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter emerged from the ivory tower last week and shook the book world from its February doldrums” (Bing 43). And the New York Times wrote, “The advance is among the highest ever paid for a first novel and is all the more unusual because of the author's background. Mr. Carter, 46, is an African-American who has written several works of nonfiction, including ‘Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby’ and ‘The Culture of Disbelief‘” (Kirkpatrick, “Knopf”). Whether this purchase is considered “unusual” because it is a first novel or because the author is African American, it is part of an important shift for American literature: the jacket art, prepublication publicity, and sales materials shape this novel as a mainstream, blockbuster, best-selling legal thriller, not as an African American novel per se. The mainstream feel of Carter's novel brings up pertinent questions about race, literature, and the marketing of ethnic identity in the United States. Looking at the positioning of this novel allows us to understand how the publishers, newspaper reporters, and marketers have planted seeds that will influence the reception of the text by reviewers and readers.

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