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Jazz Across Movements

  While both the jazz poetry from the Harlem Renaissance and the jazz poetry from the Black Arts Movement have some similarities in form and style, they have many major differences in tone and meaning. The style of the Harlem Renaissance embraces the roaring twenties and self pride in their black identity. The tone of reading jazz poetry from this time seems more upbeat, like the poets are attempting to channel jazz and dance into their art. In contrast, the Black Arts Movement provided a new restructuring of jazz poetry as a way to let out frustration from the slow progress of getting equal rights. Forming at the end of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement emphasized putting feelings into poetry and furthering their fight for equality in the art that poets make.  Both styles of jazz poetry contain a collage of music, sounds and voices that the poet wanted to include, and occasionally arrange the words on the page in a non-standard manner in order to have a deepe...
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Down By The Riverside: Nature vs Jim Crow

 We can see examples of how the Jim Crow south intensifies the experience of the Mississippi flooding for black people throughout “Down By The Riverside,” and speaks to how the deep racism in the south exacerbated the tragedy experienced. In “Down By The Riverside” there are two forces outside of the narrator's control: the force of nature and the force of racism. Throughout the story, the two powers heavily affect Mann, with the force of racism eventually overpowering him at the end of the story. As a black naturalist story, the power of nature features prominently in the plot of “Down By The Riverside,” and is the driving factor for most of the story. I think the most prominent scene we see this in is the scene where Mann goes to work on shoring up the levee. It’s right after an emotionally complicated scene for Mann, with his wife and unborn child dying in the hospital directly before. However, when a white man sees Mann, he demands that he go to work on shoring up the levee wit...
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Washington vs Jacobs: Censorship and Differing Narratives

  While Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are both autobiographies that talk about their experiences with slavery and the impact that slavery left behind on them, they differ in meaningful ways. Both Washington and Jacobs diminish their experiences with being a slave, but they also had very different experiences. Washington was not in slavery for much of his life, as the civil war freed him early on, while Jacobs was a slave in the south for many years, and when her book was published, slavery had yet to be abolished. Aside from the timeline differing, Harriet Jacobs experienced a much different treatment from her master on the account of her being a girl in slavery. Washington’s accounts do not discuss any sort of sexual interest or advances made by any of the white people on his plantation, while in Jacobs’ story, this plays a major role. Since the attention from her master led to her kids and eventual escape from s...
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