Pont du Gard

Sing it, Dance it, Write it, Paint it Just like many of the great visionaries of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, one of the leading visual artists of the era, was not born and raised in Harlem. This artistic genius came out of Topeka, Kansas, where he developed an artistic sense of community and isolation. Before Douglas became a “pioneering Africanist” of the Harlem Renaissance, he received his bachelors degree of fine arts at the University of Nebraska, and taught in Missouri…

Everyone loves to hear a great story every once in a while. Sometimes when telling one story people tend to tell others stories to help aid the first one. This technique is called a frame story. Charles Chesnutt uses this technique in “The Goophered Grapevine” published in August 1887. Mr. Chesnutt was a black writer who wrote stories in which he would reverse traditional roles, using black characters where prominent white characters would normally be present. Chesnutt “had great hopes for the…

he Harlem renaissance was a conglomeration of the best and brightest, poets, singers, artist, philosophers and all around thinkers of the African American community. They were escaping the oppression of the American South for a place where they could gather and let their creativity free. Some of the major names that were a part of the Renaissance included Langston Hughes (poet), Claude McKay (writer/poet), Zora Neale Hurston (novelist) and many more. The Harlem Renaissance wasn't just a…

Social activist, Marcus Garvey in his essay, “The Future as I See It,” explains how it is essential for the African American race to overcome their struggles to advance in society. He develop his claim by encouraging the African American race. Garvey states, “We are organized for the absolute purpose of bettering our condition, industrially, commercially, socially, religiously, and politically. We are not organized to hate other men, but to lift ourselves, and to demand respect to all…

Langston Hughes endured many hardships, even during infancy. His parents divorced and his dad moved all the way to Mexico. When he was thirteen years old, he went to go live with his grandmother in Lincoln, Illinois. It was then he decided to put the rest of his love and passion into his poetry and became one of the most famous and well-known poets of all time. Hughes was born on the first of February in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. [Although] he was born in Joplin, he mostly grew up in Lawrence…

During the time period that Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright were writing, there was a conflict between African American writers. The conflict was that some of those writers were focused more on creating a “useable past” that disregarded the topic of slavery by using Africa to reclaim the positive image of Africa. As to where the other writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, was focused on using the past that she was a part of and actually experienced. She was not concerned about creating a…

William Cross is one of the most influential black psychologists in the field of development. This psychologist is a leading theorist and researcher who deals with ethnic identity development; he focuses his research specifically on the development of African Americans. “In 1971, the original model of the Nigrescence theory addressed whether racial preference was believed to do two things: 1) to be a part of a Black person’s personal identity and 2) to affect the person’s mental health…

In chapter ten Jones discusses the two secularities ways that blues began to separate into throughout these next few years. People who moved forward to citizenship moved away from older blues. When the city blues began to be powerful, the larger negro dance bands hired some of the emigrants as soloists and the blues began to be heard everywhere. However, the materials of blues were unavailable to the middle class and the white man. The movement far from mainstream developed what was known as…

In the wake of the Black Power Movement a group of politically motivated artists, poets, and musicians emerged to ignite what was known as the Black Arts Movement in the mid 1960s. One of the artists who emerged from this era was Ernest Barnes. Known as the “Picasso of the black world,” Barnes was born in Durham, North Carolina, and was known for his artistic expression of the African American lifestyle. “The Sugar Shack” was one of his most widely renowned paintings, since it fully captured the…

Reflecting on all of our work so far with rise and history of African American Theatre, its social, cultural and political issues that the genre wrestles with then and today, and the discoveries you have made over the last three weeks, how has your historical understanding, attitude, view, or feeling toward this kind of Theatre, T.V. and film changed or altered? Has it changed or altered? Why or why not? My views on African American theatre has changed, since before, I thought African American…