Jewish diaspora

No-No Boy by John Okada is a story about a twenty-five-year-old, second generation Japanese-American named Ichiro Yamada. The year is 1946 and Ichiro, a former undergraduate student at the University of Washington, returns home to Seattle after spending two years at an internment camp and federal prison. He was punished for refusing to serve in the Armed Forces and to swear allegiance to the United States. At that time, he became a “no-no boy.” The reason behind his resentment was because was…

Racism is the belief that one race is fundamentally superior to another, leaving the other race potentially more dangerous, violent, and more likely to be the cause of problems. Despite any real evidence, many believe this is true. Brent Staples, author of “Black Men and Public Spaces” shares some of his own experiences, as being an African American man himself and many of his troubles caused by his race. Staples, being African American, has been mistaken for a criminal countless times. Many…

In applying for the Sylvia Wynter Graduate Fellowship, my area of interest is film theory, especially as it is challenged by the work of Sylvia Wynter. Wynter’s work challenges us, as diasporic people of African descent, to create unique stories, and to approach them as “new ceremonies.” In cinema, Wynter’s challenge is primed to authorize the film scholar to approach other ways of performing humanness as a verb, and to find inventive ways of implementing humanness as a creative and biographic…

Set in the 1940’s, Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye” is a tale of Pecola, a young Negro girl shunned by society for being ugly due to her skin colour and appearance. Morrison explores life in America during the late 60s and early 70s in which American culture was influenced predominantly by the white race. Using a creative approach, Toni Morrison explores the white ideal that the Negro population strives to attain to shed light on an arguably different kind of racism. Through the use of…

lklore In The Play A Raisin The Sun Folklore is the use of traditions in story telling that are inclusive of the beliefs, the customs and the culture of a people that are passed from one generation to the other. Folklores forms an integral part of the culture that assist transmit information through the word of mouth. There is the use of the folklore in the black vernacular used in the throughout the play to broach important issues and also conflicts such as the poverty, discrimination and also…

In “Be Like Mike? Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire,” Michael Eric Dyson explores Michael Jordan’s impact on African American culture and society. He discusses Michael Jordan’s success as an athlete calling him, “perhaps the best, and best known, athlete in the world today” (1). He also points out his role as a positive influence, and a success in both marketing and business, specifically referring to his impact in the “sneaker” world. The audience for this article is specifically…

The autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings works by singer, poet, writer, and actress Maya Angelou, it is one of the most widely read and taught book by an African American woman. The title of the book comes from Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, "Sympathy." The connection of the poem with the novel is where a little persistence bird (Marguerite) struggles against the bars of the cage life barriers , but she gets up, she rises and pushes forward. Although I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings covers…

Symbolism in the works of literature refers to the use of objects, people, animals, and situations that have other meaning than the literal one used in the story. It creates a certain emotion or mood in the story making the reader understand it better. Symbolism is widely applied in the story Everyday Use by Alice Walker. This paper will explore symbolism in the story Everyday Use which includes the house, quilt, yard and characteristics of some characters. One of the prominent symbols in the…

2. In the play “Fences” there are many components that contribute to the play being about African Americans. One contribution to this is the improper grammatical terms used in the play. Like the use of the word “nigger” “You was in the neighborhood alright, nigger.” Another example is the use of the word “cause”.” Yes, ma'am, I got plums, you ask me how I sell them, Oh ten cents apiece, Three for a quarter, come and buy now ’cause I’m here today and tomorrow I'll be gone. ”Also the use of the…

Toni Morrison is a black African-American novelist of 20th C whose novels show and record a brief history of African-Americans of the early times of the 19thC. She became the first African-American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Toni Morrison shows us the troublesome circumstances within which the slaves were forced to live, the dark aspects of humanity, and the destructions that are delivered to their lives through her novels. She has attempted to show the past of slavery,…