Elongated Muskrat

In Kindred we see Wylend/Rufus use the threat of selling a slave to get obedience from their slaves a lot. The threat here being that the sold slave would never see their family again and that slavery worse in the deep south rather than the northern part of the south that the story is set in. So just how much worse was slavery in the deep south and how common was it for slaves to be sold south? According to my research, it was very common. Over 100,000 slaves were sold south per decade in in the early 1800s. A child in Virginia had about a 30% chance of being sold south in their lifetime. Slave traders wanted equal proportions of men and women, but they had no interest in keeping families together. Slaves would either be shipped or forced to walk to reach the South. Like the trans Atlantic slave trade, an industry developed around transporting slaves south, with services like holding facilities and food distribution. Once slaves got to the deep south, the conditions were indeed much ...

Slaughterhouse five introduces the Tralfamadorian concept of time. It states that time is a fourth dimension just like the three dimensions that humans can see. Aliens on Tralfamador can see through time just like humans can see through space. Just like our three dimensions, everything has a certain observable position in time that cannot be changed, meaning that humanity's concept of the future is just as fixed as the past. While Billy Pilgrim can't freely see though the fourth dimension like the aliens can, he does time travel randomly. He has seen his future and knows the futures of those around him, including when they die. Billy marks every mention of death with "So it goes", showing how the future is inevitable. The Tralfamadorian view of time is problematic. Is the way we all die inevitable? Can we really not change the future? From a physical standpoint, the Tralfamadorian view makes a lot of sense. If we had a sufficiently detailed model of the universe...

I was interested in the panel presentation on Womanism in Mumbo Jumbo because when I read the book I didn't connect any of the things discussed in the presentation with Womanism at all. I think it is fair to say that Reed did not write Mumbo Jumbo with Womanist ideas in mind. For most of the book, women are side characters at best and not even present in the majority of scenes. That being said, there are some scenes where the theme of Womanism and sexual freedom is adressed specificly, like when Earline is possessed by a Loa. I think that also Reed hides more refrences to Womanism and sexual liberation outside of those scenes. Reed's criticism of Atonism is very clear throught the book. Among the numerous things that the Atonists are against is the new style of dancing that is becoming popular in connection with Jes Grew. The Atonists say that the dances are scandalous. That men and women get too close to each other for their tastes. In Mr. Leffs history class we learned that...

In Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, an epidemic by the name of Jes Grew sweeps across the country causing people to dance to exhaustion. Old people find the dance scandalous. The spread of Jes Grew seems to have a lot of parallels with the development of Jazz in the US during the same time period of the 1920s. Jazz has its roots in West African music. During slavery, African traditions and music were repressed in American, there were gatherings of slaves in Congo Square where they would preform traditional music and dances. Their music incorporated drums, which were not used classical European music. In Haiti an other Caribbean islands, musical traditions lived on and were later reincorporated into American music by musicians who traveled between the US and Cuba. Jazz music grew out of New Orleans. It was played in vaudeville shows, bars, and brothels, spreading it to the rest of the US. The parallels between Jes Grew and Jazz should now be clear. In Mumbo Jumbo , Jes Grew has its or...

There is no doubt that E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime is a post modernist work, and one of the key elements of post modernism is the idea that there are many equally valid ways of viewing reality. Often, when someone settles down in life, they stop seeing alternative viewpoints and settle on their own version of reality. When that person then makes a major life change, they are exposed to other realities and they have to question which one they will accept as true. Doctorow introduces a major life change for father when he returns home from his arctic expedition. By doing this, he challenges many of the assumptions that father had accepted as facts. For example, father had always thought of himself as a strong man, the most important person in the household. When he is wandering through the house, both of these notions are challenged. He finds that mother had taken over business operations, workers had unionized, and that the business had actually grown despite his hiatus. His p...