Wood for the Fire

I would really like to look at texts that are more related to our contextual world. I would like to read non-fictional prose dealing with the “realness” of American history. I think It would be nice to see the difference between what is engrained in us  as being “real” through school texts and what people who have experienced themselves in terms of slavery and status.

Up From Slavery- Booker T. Washington: Autobiography

Black Boy- Richard Wright: An Autobiography by Richard Wright

Native Son- Richard Wright: Wright gets inside the head of "brute Negro" Bigger, revealing his feelings, thoughts and point of view as he commits crimes and is confronted with racism, violence and debasement.

Why we Can’t Wait- Martin Luther King Jr.: about the civil rights’struggle and racial segregation in the United States.

Out of Africa: the movie

Slavery by Another Name- Douglas A. Blockmon: The book explores the forced labor of imprisoned African American men and women through the convict lease system used by southern states, local governments, European-American farmers, and corporations after the Civil War until World War II in the southern United States. Blackmon presents evidence that slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War, instead persisting well into the 20th century.

Out of Africa-Isak Dinesen : recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen’s life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It is also a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire

Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became and Excuse to Learn Myth- Mary Lefkowitz

Ways of Seeing John Berger: as a way to “see” the readings we would have so far read.