Questions for African American Literature
Professor Stewart / Spring 2014
Week 1 / Introduction; Glory (film)
Week 2 / PP Presentation: Slavery in America; Beloved (film)
Week 3 / A Groups: Glory and Frederick Douglass
1. What purpose does Douglass have in writing his autobiography? How does he
approach his task rhetorically—for example, why does he choose an autobiography to
accomplish this purpose? How could we say that his approach is meant to persuade a
specifically American audience?
2. How is Douglass’ approach influenced by his gender? How does gender pose
problems in making his point? For example, if he is a victim of slavery, why as a man
does he have to be careful in representing himself as a victim?
3. How is this problem of victimization treated in Glory? Why is it appropriate that
Frederick Douglass appears in the film given the film’s claims about race, gender, and
citizenship? Hint; what are these claims and how are they made—after all, it’s a
movie, not an essay or treatise?
4. Glory is made by a white filmmaker and features several important white characters.
What is the relationship between blacks and whites in the film? What do you think
Frederick Douglass would have thought about the role given to whites? What does it
suggest that Trip finally picks up the flag—and winds up buried with Colonel Shaw?
5. How does our reading “How Slavery Really Ended in America” help us understand
the difference between what occurs in the past and the history of what occurs, whether
that history comes from a movie, a description by someone who was there, a popular
memory, or a textbook? Why is this difference important in reading literature by and
about African Americans?
Week 4 / B Groups: Beloved and Harriet Jacobs
1. What purpose does Harriet Jacobs have in writing her autobiography? How does he
approach his task rhetorically—for example, why does he choose autobiography to
accomplish this and why tell the miserable story she does?
2. How does Jacobs’ approach stem from her gender given what Mary Ryan tells us
about the social expectation regarding women in the 19th century? How does gender
pose special problems for her in persuading her audience? For example, if she is a
victim, what kind of victim is she and why does he have to be careful in representing
herself as this kind of victim? How does Jacobs resolve this problem? Hint: Who is
her audience and why might they find her story both repulsive, but also appealing?
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3. How is gender also a problem in Beloved—especially for Sethe, but also men (Paul D
and her husband back in Sweethome)? How are these gender problems resolved in
Beloved—and also in Glory? Hint: what role does community play in the two films?
4. Beloved and Glory are both about memory: Beloved haunts Sethe in the way we say
someone is ‘haunted by a memory’; and Glory is about a forgotten piece of Civil War
history, which is that blacks fought beside whites for their freedom. Why is memory
important for African Americans and how is this represented in the two films?
5. Beloved is also made by a white filmmaker—although it follows the plot of the novel
written by black author, Toni Morrison. Here too we find whites playing important
roles. How do we explain these roles? Consider especially the final scene when
Sethe confuses the white philanthropist who aids them with Schoolteacher. How does
this scene compare with the final scenes of Trip and Colonel Shaw from Glory?
Week 5 / A Groups: Charles Chesnutt
1. Who are the Blue Veins and what do they want? Would you call them racist?
Explain.
2. How does Chesnutt characterize Mr. Ryder? Pay special attention to his race, his
view of culture (literature especially), his status before Civil War, and how he finally
deals with Liza Jane. What does it suggest about Chesnutt and his career as a writer
that he too was he too was a successful business man who was born free and half
white—so white that he could easily pass as a white man?
3. Who is Liza Jane? Does she have anything in common with another character we
have seen? Why is everyone crying at the end, not just Mr. Ryder?
4. What if we called the story “The Narrative of the Life of Mr. Ryder”? In other words,
how is Mr. Rider fighting a different, but in many ways similar battle for his freedom
as Frederick Douglass? Why?
5. Mr. Ryder seems to be a perfect illustration of the kind of respectable working Negro
that Washington wishes to produce through his system of vocational education. How
does Ryder illustrate the limitations of Washington’s approach?
Week 6 / B Groups: Du Bois, Harper, and Dunbar
1. What would W.E.B. Dubois say about Booker’s project in “Industrial Education for
the Negro”? How would “The Wife of His Youth” help him make his point?
2. Dubois is famous because he provides a theory of black identity in America, one that
still carries great weight today. What is his theory?
3. While Paul Lawrence Dunbar died before Frances Harper, he was born nearly 50
years after her. Compare the two as poets and suggest how their different ages might
account for their differences—and similarities—as poets.
4. How would W.E.B. Dubois read Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy”?
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5. While Dunbar died young, he was very popular as a poet and as a writer generally.
He was especially famous for his dialect poems, such as “When de Co'n Pone's Hot”
and “A Negro Love Song.” But as popular as these poems were, he was very
ambivalent about the form. Why? You might base your answer on a comparison of
his “A Negro Love Song” with “Dearest May,” a blackface minstrel song from around
1850.
Week 7 / A Groups: “The Monster”
PP Presentation: Freedom in Black and White
1. How are Blacks described in the story? (Are all blacks the same? Explain.) How do
they act and how are they treated by Whites? How does this compare with the
treatment and behavior of Blacks in our other readings?
2. How are Whites described in the story? (Are all whites the same? Explain.) How do
they act and how are they treated by Blacks? How does this compare with the
treatment and behavior of Whites in our other readings?
3. How are we to understand Dr. Trescott’s behavior? How can we connect his behavior
after the fire to his behavior before? For example, how do you read the opening scene
of the story in a way that explains his behavior throughout? How can we understand
his treatment by others after the fire? What do you think the ending means? How
does it relate to the beginning?
4. How is Henry treated before and after the fire? How does he act? What is the
relation between how he acts and is treated before and after the fire? Can you explain
this by interpreting the scene of the fire that makes him a “monster”? Does the scene
inside the burning house remind you of another scene in the story? What is the
significance of this similarity?
5. “The Monster” is a story more just as much about white racial identity as black in the
US? What do you think Dubois would say about this?
Week 8: MIDTERM EXAM
Week 9 / B Groups: Great Migration; Rose; Hughes; McKay; Birth of a Nation
PP Presentation: The Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance; clips from
The Birth of a Nation
1. Like “The Monster,” The Birth of a Nation is a white man’s account of the relations
between blacks and whites in the United States. How is Griffith’s film different from
the story? Please provide examples.
2. How do our letters of the great migration confirm or challenge Griffith’s portrayal of
blacks in The Birth of a Nation? Provide examples from the film and reading.
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3. How does Ernestine Rose confirm or challenge Griffith’s portrayal of northern whites
in The Birth of a Nation? Provide examples from the film and reading.
4. Langston Hughes says black writers should help facilitate “change in America.” How
does he do this with poems about lynching? How does he do it with “The Negro
Speaks of Rivers”? Provide examples.
5. Claude McKay’s poems are very regular in their rhyme and meter. Several are
English sonnets (also called Shakespearean sonnets), which have three quatrains and a
final couplet, with a rhyme scheme, ababcdcdefefgg. The final couplet is usually
meant to resolve tensions acquired in the preceding quatrains. Focusing on two of
McKay’s most famous poems, “America” and “If We Must Die,” what is the effect of
using a traditional English form for such poems? Provide specific examples.
Week 10 / A Groups: Richard Wright
1. Why does Dave need a gun? Why does his mother give him money to buy one?
2. How is this story about race? Where does race appear and how does it figure in Dave
being “almost a man”? Is Dave like anyone else we have seen?
3. What role does social setting play in the story? How is it different from social setting
in “The Monster”?
4. What does the ending suggest about Dave’s future? Do you think that he should leave
his family in this way?
5. How does Wright treat black identity in the story? Have we seen Dave anywhere else
in our readings or films?
Week 11 / B Groups: Zora Neale Hurston
1. How does Hurston treat black identity in “How It Feels to be Colored Me”? How
does she account for social stereotypes? Please provide examples.
2. How is Hurston’s public performance of her color compare to Henry Johnson’s?
How do Henry and Bella Farragut compare to Joe and Missie May?
3. Compare the relationship of Missie May and Joe with that of Dave’s parents. We
know that something comes between Missie and Joe—what is it? In other words,
what does Slemmons represent?
4. Can we locate a similar division between Dave’s parents? Where? How does this
division affect Dave’s desires and finally his actions?
5. Why did Wright and other black writers dislike Hurston?
Week 12 / A Groups: The Long Walk Home; Martin Luther King; Fanny Christina Hill
PP Presentation: The Civil Rights Movement
Questions for African American Literature / 5
1. When Harriet Jacobs wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she too was a maid to
a white woman. Compare the relationship between Odessa and Miriam to the one
between Harriet and her readers.
2. The Long Walk Home is fictional. No such relationship existed between a white
woman and her maid in Montgomery AL during the bus strike. It is true, however,
that such white women, especially in the North, have long supported rights for blacks,
often openly identifying with slaves before the Civil War, especially slave women.
Based on the film, what was the basis for that identification?
3. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is one of the great documents
in the history of the fight for human rights throughout the world. What are its claims,
and how does it seek rhetorically to persuade us it is right?
4. Fanny Christina Hill provides one more voice from an ordinary African American
who lived through transformative times for her race and her nation. How does she
compare to Whoopi Goldberg’s portrayal of Odessa in The Long Walk Home? What
would Hill have thought of M.L. King and Malcolm X? (Recall the Malcolm X
quotation from the end of Do the Right Thing.)
5. In the struggle for black identity in the U.S., what happened to double consciousness?
Week 13 / B Groups: Ralph Ellison; Do the Right Thing
1. The “man who was almost a man” travels to Harlem and becomes the “invisible
man.” Explain. Again, what happened to double consciousness? Do you see any
problems with this?
2. Do the Right Thing is a film that takes place during a 24 hour period in Brooklyn NY,
across the river from New York City. It is also clearly set in the present (1989), with
music, dress, and social concerns identified throughout that viewers at the time would
have been completely familiar with, black and white. Yet the film also deals with the
history of black struggle in America. How?
3. How does the film deal with race generally? How does it deal with gender?
4. What do Sal and his family business represent? What do Buggin Out, Radio Raheem,
and Smiley represent? Who do we blame for what happens?
5. Who is Mookie? What does he do in the film, especially at the end? Is it “the right
thing”?
Week 14 / ALL Groups: Dove, Brooks, Hayden, Lowell
Groups will prepare readings of poems to be presented in class.