Weighing the pros and cons of titles for my blogs

  While no attempt to define a pattern in nature, human or otherwise, has ever been fully successful at escaping the inherent nuance and exceptions in the natural world (call that the persistence of nature in naturalism), Zora Neale Hurston certainly abides by her list of uniquely Black traits in art, in her essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression”. There are many works written during the Harlem Renaissance that contrast with Hurston’s claims that, for example, that Black literature is always “absent of the concept of privacy”, when we have read several poems describing the pain of hiding one’s suffering due to their Black identity.  However, the entirety of The Gilded Six-Bits and the writing that paints the story are highly decorated in the exact styles that Hurston had highlighted; namely Adornment or “the Will to Adorn”, “Drama”, the “Absence of the Concept of Privacy”; upon further examination, you can find much more hidden throughout. In fact, I was hard pressed to f...

                 In class, we approached two different sets of readings approaching the Reconstruction era. In turn, the settings and attitudes of the characters featured in the readings initially approach the “opportunity” of Reconstruction differently.  In Chestnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth”, we see a very clear pattern in Mr. Ryder’s (and the Blue Veins Society’s) ideology; a sect of racism which modern readers currently name as colorism. This discrimination causes Mr. Ryder and other mixed Black people to internally reject their Black identity and heritage in favor of trying desperately to gain white validation. Of course, in “The Wife of His Youth” these characters are fictional, but the story intends on being a realistic portrayal or parallel to real life circumstances. In this sense, recovery from slavery is no more than a rejection of the past; of the previous collective Black identity as chattel .  The Blue Veins Socie...