Everything after this post is for African-American Lit

Janie's Grandmother

Although we don't see much of Nanny throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God , Janie's circumstances are heavily impacted by Nanny's values and subsequent decisions. Janie and her grandmother have strongly contrasting views on Janie's life decisions because of their experiences (or lack thereof) that ultimately put Janie in a situation that she is unsatisfied with. For instance, Nanny's experiences with men are mostly, if not all negative. As the product of two generations of rape, she sees marriage as a practical tool that she can use to protect Janie. To her, life is a game of strategy, and growing up must occur through a specific procedure. On the other hand, Janie hasn't experienced much compared to Nanny and has a less harsh view of her environment, viewing her world through a romanticized lens. N anny's happiness and satisfaction clearly depend on her view of Janie's well-being, and in this regard, her concern in Janie's co...

Rememory

One concept from Beloved that I found particularly intriguing was rememory. Rememory paints the idea of memory as a dynamic, always-changing representation of an event, and in this regard, a central characteristic to an object or memory is the perspective from which you're viewing it. What an object is depends on the person whose perspective you're considering it from, as well as the time—past, present, or future—from which you're considering it. For instance, I initially thought Sweet Home exists in the novel's present just as it's described and remembered by Sethe, but upon further thought, it's probably drastically different from what Sethe remembers now. Yet what matters is how Sethe thinks of and remembers it for what it was in the past, since that's what impacts her present and future most. Paul D remembers Sweet Home in a different way—even though he lived there at the same time as Sethe, he experienced different events and theref...

Bigger as Evidence

As Bigger Thomas's situation intensifies throughout Native Son , he becomes used as evidence for other characters to promote their perspectives. In particular, Bigger is used by both Buckley and Max in strikingly different ways during the trial to advocate for their contrasting racial and economic opinions. The most clear of these situations is Buckley's use of Bigger to further demean the African American race. Buckley argues for Bigger's death sentence and in doing so, he fails to acknowledge the fact that Bigger's situation (and that of many other African Americans in similar positions) wasn't entirely his fault and rather a product of the racial environment. As a result, nothing gets done about trying to uproot the systemic injustices shaping the racial divide and the black population is further subjugated. In contrast, Max uses Bigger to protest the underlying systemic injustices that put Bigger in the sit...

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