Category: McCoy 337 Spring 2019

“The songs are a way to get to singing” –Bernice Johnson Reagon

On Monday, Paul Laurence Dunbar allowed us to engage with an homage to his poem, “We Wear the Mask:” the Fugees song, “The Mask.” This interpretive possibility was particularly exciting to my hip-hop loving self. It affirmed my admiration for the unique way hip-hop remixes and revitalizes culture by weaving intertexts and sampling sonic artifacts all while being really enjoyable to listen to. Now, while I love the Fugees’s sound, it is really Lauryn Hill that made the group so dynamic for me. Needless to say, the symposium hosted by the Black Student Union on Tuesday night regarding Lauryn Hill and Joan Morgan’s “hip-hop feminism” was an event I couldn’t miss. Continue reading ““Now hear this mixture, where hip-hop meets scripture” Bringing Lauryn Hill to Dunbar, Douglass, and Jacobs”

“In Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation, it is the police who initiate the call or address by which a subject becomes socially constituted.  There is a policeman, the one not only who represents the law but whose address “Hey you!” has the effect of binding the law to the one who is hailed… The call is formative… precisely because it initiates the individual into the subjected status of the subject.” (Judith Butler, “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion, 381, emphasis added)

Judith Butler is making the argument that the police, and potentially other empowered groups, have the power to place or put the law on those whom they choose to address.  The police are inherently empowered by the virtue of their position and by the law itself. The person whom they have made a “subject” however is at the disposal of the power of the law and thus at the disposal of the power of the policeman.   Continue reading “The Omnipresence of the “Unasked Question””

The past few classes we have talked a lot about how we are all vulnerable to the language of the day. This has made me start thinking about how everyone is growing and learning through the changes that the world is going through. Have you ever made a statement, or wrote a paper, or a tweet, or anything public and now you look back at it years later and you don’t completely agree with what you wrote? I know that I have. This is due to the fact that the world is always changing and through these changes we adapt to them and learn from them.
Continue reading “Adapting to the Ever-Changing World”

Consent is a word often used in today’s society but do people actually know what it means? It is a word that cannot be defined in one sentence and has multiple parts to it. After our discussion about consent in class, I was inspired to check out how SUNY Geneseo defines consent in the student handbook. I believe that Geneseo does a good job in defining consent, however, I do not think they advertise the Affirmative Consent Policy enough. The worksheet we were given in class is a good start to advertising the definition of consent and its importance and should be displayed on bulletin boards throughout campus. Continue reading “Where do we draw the line with consent?”

This summer I was lucky enough to attend a creative writing conference where I participated in a class on writing dialogue. The instructor, a well-established author, outlined a couple of major “no-no’s” in writing dialogue: most prominently, in all-caps, DO NOT WRITE IN VERNACULAR. He described vernacular as a lazy tool for writers, a quick and sloppy way to characterize through insulting caricature. He encouraged us to consider modern-day texts which used vernacular or phonetic spelling to illustrate an accent, and I ended up thinking about the Harry Potter series. Continue reading “DO NOT WRITE IN VERNACULAR?”

I’ve had the pleasure of reading selections of W.E.B Du Bois’ work The Souls of Black Folk three times, including as an assignment for this class. The most consistent element of my praise is how singular Du Bois’ voice is: it seems to reverberate in the historical context, in the philosophical context, in the literary context, and in the present day. I know of very few works, literary or otherwise, that have that wide of a reach.

Continue reading “The Rewards of Re-Reading”

In my last post, I discussed the ways that repetition with a difference results in progress. I find this idea interesting, especially when applied to the reading and writing processes. Due to new experiences and knowledge acquired during the time between a first and second reading, new meaning can be drawn from a text. Additionally, while writing, an author repeats their argument, story, or history until it is representative of the most recent iteration of their thoughts and ideas. Using my newly acquired knowledge, I reread Possession by Suzan-Lori Parks through the lens of repetition and noticed how she describes the writing process as repetitive.

Continue reading “Possession Through Repetition”

After discussing Bernice Johnson Reagon’s article “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” originality’s importance to African American song actually made me think of art history. Specifically, I started thinking about two artworks: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) and Archibald Motley’s Nightlife (1943). Continue reading “Something New Under the Artificial Light”