«Un Cristo de Color "Recrucificado"»: Countee Cullen y el simbolismo religioso

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) es una de las voces más representativas del Renacimiento de Harlem, movimiento artístico de la segunda década del siglo pasado. Si bien no se tiene certeza sobre el lugar exacto de su nacimiento, las ciudades de Baltimore, Louisville y Nueva York se disputan ese honor. Cullen perdió a sus padres y hermano a temprana edad y su abuela paterna le crio hasta que ésta falleció, siendo todavía adolescente. La vida le concedió otra oportunidad al ser adoptado por el matrimonio formado por el reverendo Frederick Cullen, pastor de la Iglesia Metodista Episcopal del famoso barrio neoyorquino, y su esposa, Carolyn Belle Mitchell. Su posición acomodada facilitó al joven Countee poder asistir al DeWitt Clinton High School—cuyo alumnado era mayoritariamente blanco—y, más tarde, le garantizó una educación selecta en las universidades de Nueva York y Harvard.

The Indictment of God and the American Society in Countee Cullen’s Poetry

The concept that God is as unjust as the society is so eloquently portrayed in Countee Cullen’s poems “Yet Do I Marvel’’ and “Incident”. Cullen accuses God of being unjust by making him a poet. The renowned poet does not exonerate his American society from the indictment based on racial hostilities and insensitivity that seemed to have permeated the milieu. This paper addresses the questions of the indictment, racial intolerance and the significance of Cullen’s poetry to American literature. To achieve the objective of this study, the author adopts interpretive literary study and The Reader-Response approach to analyze the selected poems. The study reveals that Cullen’s poetry like other genres lives in timeless performance, is therapeutic, is a strong vehicle for the mobilization of people, and a tool for protest. The study concludes that Countee Cullen uses his poetry to indict God and American society. From the analysis of the selected poems, it is observed that poetry lives with people, is a weapon for change in any Nation and Cullen’s poetry addresses the contemporary needs of a society. His accusation of God and American society is a concern and seems relevant. What matter most is equality, justice and love for humanity? All these ingredients must emanate from the heart and transcend color for any society to attain oneness.

The Depiction and Ethic of Pride in the Work of Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen’s literary oeuvre emerged in a cultural context wherein Harlemite leaders took pride in an emerging intellectual and literary vanguard. Interestingly, Cullen’s work foregrounds many of the negative aspects of both personal and group pride. Pride for Cullen is typically unnatural, a compensatory excrescence to be shed or managed; this corresponds more closely to a Christian than to a pagan ethos of pride. As regards pride in one’s group identity, although readings of Cullen in terms of gay pride would be anachronistic, he deliberately treats the topic of racial pride—particularly in his novel One Way to Heaven, wherein pride figures a structurally integral leitmotif.

THE ANALYSIS OF THE BULLYING IN THE POEMS “I GOT FLOWERS” BY PAULETTE KELLY AND “INCIDENT” BY COUNTEE CULLEN

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze about the kind of bullying that is reflected in the poems “I Got Flowers” and “Incident” and how the bullying occurs in each poem. The analysis uses qualitative and content analysis method. The data are taken from books. The results of the analysis are (1) There are five types of bullying; physical bullying, verbal bullying, emotional bullying, sexual bullying, cyber bullying which are common happen in society. (2) The speakers of the poems get bullying in the different ways. The speaker of poem “I Got Flowers”, who is a woman, suffers verbal, physical, and emotional bullying from her husband but the speaker of poem “Incident”, who is still a little child suffers verbal bullying due to discrimination of race. (3) The speakers of the poems also feel the effects after suffering the bullying. The speaker of “I Got Flowers” is beat to the death because of get the bullying action repeatedly but the speaker of “Incident” has trauma for eight months in Baltimore

New Negro and Genteel Protest

Scholarly accounts of the Harlem Renaissance often foreground its politically radical and aesthetically innovative aspects. This tends to obscure the continuing strength of genteel ideas in African American writing of the period. This chapter traces the productivity of the sonnet during the Harlem Renaissance to its productive revisions of the genteel tradition. Drawing on a range of previously neglected poems, it situates Claude McKay’s epochal “If We Must Die” against the gradual transformation of the protest sonnet over the 1910s. In a second step it shows how genteel conventions shaped the subversive variety of protest that Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson explored from the mid-twenties. The ambivalent position of the sonnet in between gentility and protest, the chapter argues, is behind the difficulties that scholars like Houston A. Baker have faced in assessing the interplay of formal mastery and deformative self-assertion in the Harlem Renaissance sonnet.