EPAP PAPER JESSICA – BLACK ODYSSEY

I visited the Cambridge area on the evening of the 26th April to watch Black Odyssey in the Central Square Theatre. Directed by Benny Sato Ambush and written by Marcus Gardley, Black Odyssey repurposes Homer’s epic poem within the black expressive tradition, tracing the black experience within America from the  Middle Passage all the way...

Project Chick In 2 Jess

Letters from Negro Leaders to Gerrit Smith Henry Box Brown places to annotate but though my body has escaped the lash of the whip, my mind has groaned under tortures which I believe will never be related, because, language is inadequate to express them, but those know them who have them to endure, The whip,...

Project Check In 1- Jessica

Which text have you found most compelling and/or would like to examine further? I found the narrative of Henry Box Brown the most compelling text so far, particularly the debate surrounding its authorship. Such debates make me question the ways in which white authors were, to some extent, in control of black artifice and performance,...

The Unshakable Descendants

The characterization of the black child, is something which particularly struck me in my reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Jayna Brown’s piece. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin the drama between Ophelia and Topsy, is whether she can enact an education for her, this is reminiscent of Brown’s argument that Topsy is “drawn in Stowe’s novel...

The Liminal Panorama

In our previous seminar, the concept of performance and liminality really stuck with me and it was something I could see cropping up in Daphne Brooks The Escape Artist. The box itself in Henry Brown’s narrative denotes a place of liminality. It is literally liminal, as Henry Brown is both free through his escape, but...

Alien Sounds

The sounds heard in This is America were something that particularly struck me. I noticed in the Huffington post article a link to a twitter post by @_mikepearson where he notes the different ad-libs heard in the song. These sounds were something I took for granted upon listening to the song initially. However, there are...