This week, you have read three different sets of proclamations, manifestos, or other historical documents that help to contextualize the fights for Civil Rights during the 1950s-1970s in the United States among African American, American Indian, and Chicano/Mexican-American activists. You have also read three works of literature that speak back to their respective activist contexts, sometimes to trouble the cultural nationalist movements and sometimes to defend them.
For this online discussion, you will analyze both the literary and the historical writings through the lens of the other. For instance, how might you read Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" through the lens of MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"? What about the other way around? How does "Everyday Use" change the meaning of MLK's famous letter? Similarly, do you hear echoes or resonances of the proclamation from Alcatraz in Leslie Marmon Silko's "Lullaby"? Where, exactly? Can you reverse that reading to hear how "Lullaby" offers a different understanding of the proclamation? Similarly, for the "Plan Espiritual de Aztlan" and "I am Joaquin," how do these works, emerging from the same period, speak to, through, or against each other?
The purpose of this final discussion is to illustrate how literature functions to create alternative understandings of history as well as how historical documents might have an impact on our understanding of and relationship to literature. Your post should be a minimum of 500 words and a maximum of 700 words, it should be thoughtful, and it should use a coherent paragraph organization. After you post your discussion, read and reply to two other classmates' posts.
Directions:
Select one of the cultural contexts represented by the historical document and literature pair. Explain why you selected the pair/cultural context that you did.
Next, perform a close analysis of the literary piece, emphasizing the language and formal elements of the piece in order to explain how those elements relate to the broader significance of the work, its meaning, and/or significant themes.
Then, perform a close analysis of the non-fiction, historical piece, emphasizing what the main idea is, how the argument is structured, and what specific claims are made. Incorporate quotations from the text to support your interpretation.
Then, read the one of the texts through the lens of the other, indicating how understanding one alters your understanding of the other.
Finally, reverse that reading. So, if you previously explained how, for instance, "El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan" alters your understanding of "I Am Joaquin," then for this portion you will explain how the poem impacts or changes your understanding of the manifesto.