Slef Determination and struggle for Justice in Afrcan American Literature

Slef Determination and struggle for Justice in Afrcan American Literature

entails tracing a literary genealogy of Between the World and Me?i.e., writing an essay that argues for a particular set of formal and thematic influences on Ta-Nehisi Coates. To write your paper, you will draw on our shared reading, and you will be in conversation with others who have written about Between the World and Me.
Audience and Rhetorical Situation: The actual, real audience for this essay is me, Kathryn Warren, your professional ssor. I am grading your work on this assignment and will take into account how well you execute the requirements listed below.
The impliedlimagined audience for your paper is general readers of a mainstream but semi-scholarly publication such as The New York Review of Books. Your readers will likely be familiar with Coates and may be conversant in the language of critical race theory.
What Should You Write?: They Say, I Say
Your task is to join a conversation about Between the World and Me, adding something new to what others have said. Below are three unique takes on the book. Read them all. You must engage with at least one of them in your paper.
? Brit Bennett, “Ta-Nehisi Coates and a Generation Waking Up,” The New Yorker, 15 July 2015 ? David Brooks, “Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White,” The New York Times, 17 July 2015 ? Darryl Pinckney, “The Anger of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” The New York Review of Books, 11 Feb. 2016.
What do you have to contribute? You are a literary scholar; you have your knowledge of African-American literature. The major premise of this assignment is that no work of literature, no matter how contemporary, is purely presentist. Every feat of writing arises from what came before. Coates’s memoir is made possible, you could say, by a host of predecessors, and his memoir picks up threads?both thematic and formal?that one can trace all the way back to the beginning of African-American literature. (He isn’t influenced by African-American writers alone, I should say. But that’s what our focus is in this course.)
So, in this essay, you will be tracing the book’s literary genealogy in order to engage with a question, a criticism, or a response that another thinker has had when reading Between the World and Me. A few options for threads you could trace include: ? Religionlidealism v. materialism ? Autonomy, both bodily and spiritual ? Passive resistance v. violent or active uprising ? Prioritizing among economic, social, and political rights ? Feminism and gender roles ? Role of white allies in the struggle for African-American civil rights ? Essentialism v. constructionism with respect to race ? “Good intentions” ? Individual v. systemic racism ? Justice: what it means, how to get it ? Role of education
You must make an argument. Part of it will be arguing for a particular set of formal and thematic influences on Coates, but don’t stop there: your paper should also have a clear position on the importance of the thread you’re tracing to Coates’s book, a position that engages with one of the people who’s written about Between the World and Me.
Minimum Requirements
? The essay must be between 5 and 10 complete pages in length, double spaced (-10 Minimum Requirements
? The essay must be between 5 and 10 complete pages in length, double spaced points if this condition is not met). ? The essay must include quotations from ? Between the World and Me o your main interlocutor o at least three texts from our shared reading ? You must analyze the quotations you include. ? You must make an argument. ? The essay must engage with what someone else has said when writing about Between the World and Me. ? Your tone, diction, and style should be appropriate to the audience and genre. T isn’t stuffy academic writing you’re doing, but it isn’t Facebook-level informality, either. Take your cue from the three sources above. ? No Works Cited page is necessary, but please include page numbers for your in-text citations, like this (2).