English

After our discussion of drama vs. prose today, I thought yall might find this (very short!) piece interesting. It's called "On Reading Plays" and is in the print version of a play called Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar

I very much enjoyed our class today, and took pictures of the "equations" of Baldwin, Parks, and our other texts that each small group drew on the board. I post them here in case you'd like to admire your own work and/or reflect on what your classmates created.

i did my citations in a way that read better as a doc so my paper is attached. hope it's okay! serendippanic as usual.. 

Carol Margaret Davison was rude to Greg Johnson.

When reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, many may express that they might reach a point in which they hit a wall. From the form and style to the actual content of the text, Beloved is not an easy read and requires support when reading it. Morrison is known for writing to unpack truth, and the road to truth is not always easy or comforting. It evolves going into the pain that may be present, and relying on the feeling and story to make better sense of what happened and how that might apply currently.

       Transatlantic enslavement, from the slave ship and beyond, was and are predicated on various practices of spatialized violence that targeted and continue to target black bodies and profited, as well as continue to profit, from erasing a black sense of place. From the plantation to modern prisons, black spaces of racialized violence sanctioned black placelessness and constraint. These were and are spaces where enslaved blacks were kept “in place” as a consequence of their legal and cultural placelessness. Toni Morrison's invocation of the transatlantic slave trade frames the narrative of Beloved within the context of spatialized violence - a complex, industrial and capitalistic project that specifically targeted and continues to target black identity.

Thomas King opens each chapter of his book the same way – with a story about turtles. The whole world, he says, is balanced on the back of a huge turtle, and that turtle on another turtle, and that turtle on another, etc. etc. etc. He changes the question-asker a little, varies the gender of the storyteller, puts in a few extra details. But the story itself is always the same; “it’s turtles all the way down.”

            “‘This ain’t her mouth. I know her mouth and this ain’t it,’” insists Paul D as he looks at the newspaper picture of Sethe, the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Paul D’s friend and lover. A former slave, Paul D cannot read the newspaper clipping that his friend Stamp Paid shows him, but he immediately begins to deny that it can be about Sethe “[because] there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear” (Morrison 183).

Damage, Desire, and the Truth About Stories

Damage narratives are the only stories that get told about me, unless I’m the one that’s telling them.¹

Curing the Sick Ghost:

Beloved, Illness, and Crip Futurity

“It’s clear that we’re inescapably haunted by the disability to come.”

- Robert McRuer