African American Literature Essay Example for Free (#2)

African American Literature Essay African American (597) , African (466) , Short story (403) , American literature (133) , African american literature (7) company About StudyMoose Contact Careers Help Center Donate a Paper Legal Terms & Conditions Privacy Policy Complaints ? African American literature has a strong deeply rooted background in the history of America, thus giving the writers categorized in this genre a strong message to convey in any story they chose to tell. From tragic life moments to happy life moments, the writers have the ability to tell their story in a variety of methods. This canon of literature serves as a diary for the African American community. All of the literary works that compile this genre reflect the many twists and turns a collective group of persons must endure while struggling to achieve a place in history. The following discussion of three historically significant African American stories reflects the struggles one race of persons had to endure on their journey throughout various time periods in America. The Short Stories In the short story, My White Folks Treated us Good by Mariah Hines the author describes in first person account of a situation when African American slaves were treated well in comparison to the stories of abuse, rape, and neglect most persons are accustom to reading from this era. The slaves never went hungry, always had clothes to wear, were able to work under their own accord, always treated with respect, and were told to take Sundays off while also being encouraged to attend church on Sundays. The slaves were in fact treated so well that when they were free to leave, they choose to remain at their former master’s farm and continued working for him. Hines concluded the Master continued to support his former slaves. Hines stated â€Å"Master helped us much as he could. Some of us he gave a cow or mule or anything he could spare to help us (p. 34). † Moving forward in time, the short story Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston describes a situation of domestic abuse in a long term relationship between a wife, Delia Jones, and her husband, Sykes Jones. Sykes enjoyed torturing Delia, he would find ways to make her job as a washwoman more difficult by kicking the clothes across the room or by scaring her with ways related to her fear of snakes. Sykes enjoyed fighting; he in fact enjoyed it so much so that he intentionally picked fights with Delia. This type of torture strained their marriage to the point of near silence on a daily basis. Sykes thought it to be a good idea to bring a rattlesnake into their home. The rattlesnake got lose in the home, Delia was able to get outside the home but Sykes remained in the home and was attacked in their bedroom. Sykes yelled to Delia for help and comfort, but she was unable to come to him related to fear. Delia finally walked to the door, but due to the nature of his injuries and the distance to the doctor she understood he would not make it through this attack, therefore she allowed him to pass in their backyard. â€Å"She could scarcely reach the chinaberry tree, where she waited in the growing heat while inside she knew the cold river was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which much known by now that she knew (p. 108). † This story shows how those who choose to abuse others always pay for those actions in the end. Alice Walker wrote the story Nineteen Fifty-Five, about a young white singer, Traynor, who purchased a song from a young African American woman, Gracie Mae, and went on to become famous after recording and releasing his own version. His version of Gracie Mae’s song continued to eat away at Gracie Mae for the rest of her life. It did not have the same meaning, nor was it loved by his fans for the same reasons she hoped it would be. The fans loved Traynor, not the song. Traynor continued to keep in contact with Gracie Mae throughout his time in the army, touring, marriages, and divorces. Then towards after many years, contact stopped and Traynor was found dead after 15 wives and a troubled road in the end. Gracie Mae lived vicariously through Traynor and his portrayal of her song. Gracie Mae herself lived quite happily through the birth of many children, the divorce and/or death of three husbands, the showering of gifts from Traynor, and his ultimate death. Gracie Mae did have a connection to Traynor that flowed deeper than her song. â€Å"One night I dreamed Traynor has split up with his fifteenth wife p. 297). † Due to the stereotypes and prejudices of this time period Gracie Mae and Traynor were never able to express the emotional connection they felt between each other. Common Literary Conventions Literary conventions and themes were similar in the stories; connotations, culture, undertones, and main characters were alike. The three stories were written in first person and portrayed a personal struggle endured by each main character. The main character was always female, strong, and independent in different way. The stories span three different periods of time, yet still reflecting similar struggles in very different settings. These conventions are important when connecting the messages of these stories. Each has a story of struggle, some are internal while others are outward, and each woman must find inner strength to change or cope with their situations. Beginning with My White Folks Treated us Good, this story was historically important in relation to conveying the happiness that could be found in such a dire situation as slavery. Hines showed not all slavery conditions were adverse or abusive; there was still the possibility of enjoying life, and gaining independence by getting the break needed, such as the freeing of all slaves, to make one’s own life better. In Sweat, Hurstson was able write a story about a woman able to persevere in a dreadful situation of both mental and physical abuse. During this time in history, women were not able to be independent and outspoken due to a fear of judgment or increased abuse. Delia was given the chance to be free from the abuses of Sykes and took that chance by allowing him to die from his injuries, thus resulting in her freedom. Following in the same suit, Nineteen Fifty-Five expressed the internal struggle of a woman’s desire to be understood and independent. Gracie Mae wanted to sing her own song and live her own life, without connection to a version of her song that did not represent the original intent. Gracie Mae was happy with her life, but was never free from what the release of her song brought to her life. Conclusion Culturally, these stories are important to all American’s. The historical significance of these stories and the emphasis on equality places a connotation of acceptance and availability of equal opportunity to all persons regardless of color, social class, age, race, gender, or personal situation. African Americans are able to tell their personal stories of struggles and triumphs through literature. This literature is a valuable tool for all persons wanting to educate themselves about significant times in American history. References Young, A. (1996). African American Literature: A brief Introduction and Anthology. New York, New York: HarperCollins College Publishers. African American Literature. (2016, Dec 18).

Contemporry artist Fatimah Tuggar Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Contemporry artist Fatimah Tuggar - Essay Example These images happened to be digitally made and reveal their constructed nature to question today's commercial system of representation and how cultural image is formed. [Fortin, 2001] Tuggar's sculptures include real images, primarily domestic ones, which include a leather cushion setting arrangement, a make-up holder, a Calabash bowl, a ceiling fan, an old-fashioned radio, writing tables and dowery plates. Thus, they are pulled into three dimensions. Fatimah manipulates these objects which continue to function but in a re-informed social content and personal history. Fatimah Tuggar digitally combines photographs of her native Nigeria with images of the West (taken from fashion magazines, mail-order catalogues), thus, creating artworks which raise questions of self-identity and cultural differences. Her works reflect her place in both American and African society. Instead of creating simple binary oppositions, she looks closely at cultural nuances; she looks between the cultural products and structures to better understand how media technology influences and affects the daily lives of people. She says, that she focuses 'on the internal relationships of the individuals within the image, tempered by the surrounding power structures'. [Kino, 2001] Sylvie Fortin, the investigator of Fatimah's creations, stays that her digital montages combine sections of images that are garnered from two distinct sources. A first one is considered to be shot in the artist's travels in Northern Nigeria and elsewhere - they betray varying degrees of intimacy and immediacy. The second, boundless virtual bank of found images includes the vast script of Western print and electronic mass media of the last 70 years. That is cinema, travel and fashion and lifestyle magazines, television, advertising and the web. In most cases, the work's conceptualization is launched by the artist's photographs, where the retrieval of a public image follows, thus, creating the intersection of two image systems on its surface. [Fortin, 2001] Fatimah Tuggar's work, or her digital imaging, is a tool, a method, and a metaphor for genetic manipulation; it's also a site for the nuanced public negotiation of performances of African contemporaneity. Her 'Money and Matter' is made up of series of nine images that examine the relationship of human beings to capital, both on a personal level and from a social perspective. She uses entertainment technologies as a vehicle for commentary on various and conflicting histories, journeys and materials of her experience. Money as a symbol, is both a subject and object of what people desire and fear. The main theme is the tension between the money's power gaming and elements of distraction and the substance of what matters in people's lives. Here she presents the dynamics of money and matter. In 'Lady and the Maid' the background

The Success of State Reconstruction Varies according to the Scale of S Literature review

The Success of State Reconstruction Varies according to the Scale of State Collapse - Literature review Example Reconstruction of States following conflicts is usually conducted with the help of various countries and organizations in the spirit of peace, development, and brotherhood of nations, infusing financial and human resources into a target State. In most cases, donor countries provide assistance in the forms of technical expertise and establish cooperative development programmes for locales where the State has no capacity to provide for the needs and protect the right of its populace. Many developed countries like the United States of America, Japan, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have their own foreign aid agencies and programmes providing technical and financial assistance to other countries rising from collapse, poverty or underdevelopment affecting its populace. Â  Most foreign development interventions normally follow the necessity for consent and cooperation of a recipient country. International development projects and programmes normally involve the infusion of technical advice and assistance from foreign international experts, and in some cases, these experts are tasked to manage key functions of governance within target countries. International development programmes and projects may range from the delivery of basic human services like healthcare services, agricultural and food development, to the restructuring and strengthening of judicial and legal systems of target/host countries. The first organizations to establish development assistance packages, through the study, expansion, and institutionalization of good governance as an accepted policy for development, are the World Bank (WB) and the United Nations (UN) through its various agencies and international programmes. The World Bank is best known for its implementation of economic governance programmes in the form of technical assistance and loan packages. The United Nations, on the other hand, focused on the delivery of basic human services and assistance as well as resolving conflict and legal issues within target or recipient countries. Food and agriculture improvement programs of the UN are the World Food Program (WFP) and programs by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), with healthcare development, like provision of water, sanitation, and general health, implemented by the World Health Organization and the UN International Children’s Educational Fund (UNICEF).

Essay on the Woman Protagonist in The Birthmark -- Birthmark Essays

Woman Protagonist in â€Å"The Birthmark†Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚      In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, â€Å"The Birthmark,† the reader finds an excellent example of a woman who is so superior to her male counterpart that she has to be labeled the protagonist of the tale. This essay will demonstrate why this designation is deserved by the female character, Georgiana.    In the opening paragraph of â€Å"The Birthmark† the narrator introduces Aylmer as a scientist whose love for Georgiana is â€Å"more attractive than any chemical one.† And indeed, he is such a passionate scientist that everything meaningful in his life has to be related to science. He is incapable of developing beyond this stage of personal growth. Georgiana, on the other hand, enters the tale as a rather â€Å"simple† young lady, but soon grows and grows and grows –n that most important spiritual virtue of love. As the woman-protagonist advances in her spirituality, her unfortunate husband, Aylmer, declines in virtue.    Even after Aylmer has â€Å"persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife,† he is not capable of loving her properly, unselfishly, because he â€Å"had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion.† The narrator seeks to justify this error or lack in Aylmer by explaining that â€Å"it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy.† Already at the outset of the tale, the reader perceives that Georgiana is going to be shortchanged in this marriage. She is exposed to the problem initially when her husband asks whether â€Å"it never occurred to you that the mark upon your cheek might be removed?'' Aylmer is in quest of physical perfection in his wife; unfortun... ...memorable: â€Å"The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a mortal frame.† The soul of this angelic, loving woman, â€Å"lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight.† A true angel of womankind is ascending to heaven.    The distinct and obvious spiritual superiority of Georgiana, as compared to the retarded, backward, stunted, minimal growth thereof in Aylmer, is adequate cause for designating the lovely woman of the tale the protagonist. She possesses qualities of heroic dimension; he does not.    WORKS CITED    Hawthorne, Nathaniel . The Birthmark Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=HawBirt.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1

Case Analysis on Hilton

The Hilton family started its first hotel in the year 1919 by the name of Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas under Conrad Hilton. The firm launched its IPO under the name Hilton Hotels Corporation in 1946 to make its presence felt in the hospitality business. With time the firm expanded to compete and serve at the global level. In the highly competitive Global Lodging Business the challenges mainly faced by the firms included difficulty in achieving a standardized service of operation all throughout.With economies of scale and to focus on consistency as well as superior service delivery across the Hilton brand of Hotels, the importance of CRM was realized and the firm came up with the strategy of Customers Really Matter (CRM) in 2002. To build customer equity it is important to embrace technology and Hilton implemented this using its infrastructure called OnQ which acted as an enabling agent helping employees to deliver great customized customer experiences. Hilton introduced the Customers Really Matter with the objective to provide outstanding services to the customer.CRM enabled Hilton Corporation to focus more on building and managing its relationships with its customers. With CRM it was possible to acknowledge customers and provide personalized attention to each of them. It helped to store personal records of a person to access information for knowing the customer better. It helped maintaining people’s preferences, which directly reduced time spent on websites assistance or call center’s phone call costs and it also helped providing offers suited according to an individual and even helped promoting cross-selling and improving conversion rates.With CRM, the hotels front desk could have a comprehensive report each day of the guest list in an easy to scan format. The pre-assigning of rooms, the classification/segmentation of membership and exclusive benefits for privileged customers could all be done using CRM. However, there were few problems involved with pre-assigning of rooms and changing priorities of the customer. By adopting CRM and adapting with the technology it all became easier for Hilton, the guest profile managing, online profile maintenance, building more relationship, andhave more information (emails, phone no. ) of the customers and record complaints and feedbacks. All of these could be integrated by Hilton to bring more consistency as well as standardization to its services across its diversified business. The existence of the SALT (Satisfaction And Loyalty Training) survey, which helped significantly to improve the services by monitoring customer experiences and better measure the important factors that could help the business, added great value to the CRM initiative.On the other hand, OnQ also assisted property level operations and could enable the corporation to open more hotels for the customers and expand the brand image. Although CRM had its own benefits, the success boiled down to execution. OnQ incorporat ed huge costs and maintenance expenses. Apart from them, the CRM technology also required many other organizational factors to be addressed. The focus required on measurement, executive championship, training of the employees to use the technology, the feedback incorporation, etc. all had to be taken in account which couldn’t be overlooked.Taking in consideration the presence across 78 countries, the technology helped maintaining central database accessible from all the service points. Having variety of products across different price points throughout the organization, CRM also assisted segmentation of customers into modules such as Diamond, Gold, 4+ for improving services. A difficult task was to deduce the Return on Investment for the CRM. To conclude, CRM did help Hilton in its goal to enhance its competitive advantage, and to become the one of the premier choices of the world’s traveler in the global hospitality business.

Minimum Legal Drinking Age A Discourse Appraisal

Minimum Legal Drinking Age in America: A Discourse Appraisal You know an issue has evoked large levels of community discussion when interest groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and rappers like J-kwon are telling us the same thing: teen drinking is very bad. But discussion on the topic tends to vary far more than that. Congress discussed the issue in 1984, with the National Minimum Drinking Age Act: an act that withheld federal highway funding from states without a minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) of 21. The motives behind the act can’t be summed up in just residual American puritan values; it wasn’t aiming to ruin teenaged fun, but reduce deaths by drunk drivers and cut down on alcohol dependence and abuse. It’s been over 30†¦show more content†¦The United States has the world’s highest MLDA, and many citizens are content to keep it that way. Political interest groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who had a hand in changing the law, insist that a higher drinking age protects com munities. They focus on the decline in drunk driving accidents and deaths— something they attribute to a lack of intoxicated under-21s on the road. Recently, MADD has been criticized for stepping away from it’s original purpose and turning toward a â€Å"neo-prohibitionist† outlook that demonizes alcohol, rather than drunk driving. Still, MADD members and other advocates of a 21 year MLDA often point out that death rates due to car accidents for 18 to 20 year olds have decreased since the MLDA act was passed, but this can be countered with the observation that this loss of lives has just been delayed a few years, now showing up in the 21 to 24 age bracket. It would seem that newly-legal drinkers are the ones causing accidents, no matter the age. Perhaps neurologists make the strongest case for a higher MDLA, with their claims that brain development only concludes in one’s early to mid 20s. Of course, the argument can also be made by opponents that the hu man brain grows and changes throughout life— it doesn’t finish on one’s 21st birthday. Other research in the scientific community shows that alcohol abuse is more prevalent in adults who began to drink before the age of 21. When discussing the MLDA in

The Gospel Of Matthew Is Considered A Gospel - 1705 Words

The Gospel of Matthew is considered a Gospel based on the premise that it describes the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Translated into narrative form means ‘good news’ and the preferred standard to communicate the mystery of Christ. A Gospel is the committing to write of a narrative born of the faith-filled vision, theological perspective and pastoral concerns of the evangelist (Mullins 2007, VI). The famous theologian Rudolf Bultmann saw the gospel as an original Christian creation that centered on faith; cult and pastoral concerns arising from and illustrating the Christian Kerygma (Mullins 2007, IV). Kerygma is a fancy Greek word that is the very heart of the gospel, the core message of the Christian faith that†¦show more content†¦Numerous studies show that the Gospels of Luke and Matthew contain much material from the Q-source and none in Mark’s Gospel. This is significant as the contents of these texts apparently passed do wn verbally from one generation to another. The M-source on the other hand is a hypothetical textual source likely written by Matthew and defined as special material that is neither Q source nor Markan. The M-source distinguishes itself from both Q and Markan influence with inclusions such as Jesus’s Genealogy (Matthew 1:1-17) and the Infant Story (Matthew 1:18-23). The Gospel of Mark or Markan material is plausibly the earliest of the Gospels and an influence to the Lukan and Matthean writings. There are 661 verses in Mark, 606 of those verses appear in Matthew, however Matthew is a simple, easy to read style as compared to that of Mark. Exegesis of Matthew 4:23-25 9:35-38 4:23 Teaching and Preaching: There is a difference in these two acts that Jesus practiced. The teaching term is in reference to all things present, while preaching is things yet to come (Aquinas 1993, 142). By the word of divine power he cured the weaknesses of the body and by the medicine of heavenly teaching, he healed the wounds of the soul (Simonetti 2001, 74). It should be noted that at this stage of Jesus’s ministry, he is directing everything to his own people and only later in his ministry doesShow MoreRelatedThe Gospels Are The Closest Things We Have A Primary Source For The Life Of Jesus1460 Words   |  6 PagesThe four gospels are the closest things we have to a primary source for the life of Jesus. Each one recounts the same story, but with different details and focuses. During my research of the gospels, I noticed that Jesus seemed to be a large advocate of women’s rights for his time period. He changed the laws of divorce to be more equal between the sexes, and treated everyone he met equally, regardless of their gender or ethnic background. 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