The Black Arts Era: Suggested Paper Topics
Paper Topics on the The Black Arts Era
Questions that can serve as the starting point for an essay.
- Compare and contrast the structure, themes, and characters of Ed Bullins’s Goin’a Buffalo, Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, and Baraka’s Dutchman.
- Examine Mari Evans’s incorporation of references to African American history in her poetry. What is gained by the use of these allusions?
- Discuss King’s attitude toward the imprisonment of political protestors in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” How does the attitude of his speaker toward prison compare to Malcolm X’s? To the speaker in Knight’s “The Idea of Ancestry”?
- How does Malcolm X represent the “education” he gained in prison? What does his autobiography reveal about his attitudes toward race, masculinity, and the institution of prison?
- What aspects of Hurston does Alice Walker inscribe in the essay “Looking for Zora”? What elements of intertextuality can we read in the later author and the earlier novelist who inspired her?
- To distinguish between literary theories espoused by Ellison and his literary descendants of the Black Arts era, read Ellison’s literary theories as set forth in his letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman, “The World and the Jug,” and “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” and compare them to “For Saundra,” by Nikki Giovanni, and “Introduction” to Think Black, by Haki R. Madhubuti.
- Compare and contrast poems by Mari Evans, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and Lucille Clifton. To what extent can Evans be argued to occupy a “middle space” among these other poets?
- According to Larry Neal, what is the role of black women in the Black Arts movement? In what ways do the writings by Jayne Cortez, Sanchez, Clifton, and others in this era uphold Neal’s view? In what ways do their writings challenge Neal’s prescription for black women’s performances and acts?
- Analyze the function of the music of John Coltrane in poems by A. B. Spellman. How does the poet use allusions to the music? Is there any correlation between Spellman’s use of Coltrane’s music as a trope and Cortez’s in her poems?
- Discuss the representation of Richard Wright and James Baldwin in John Alfred Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am. What role do the two authors play in Williams’s fiction?
- Listen to the selections by Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker on the Audio Companion CD to the anthology, and explain their influence on Baraka’s Dutchman.
- What is the role of the black body in the formation of Black Art, according to Madhubuti? How does he use the figure of the black body in his poetry to advance his theory of Black Art?
- In what ways can Madhubuti’s poetry be argued as a precursor to hip hop?
- How do the unconventional capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and other rhetorical features in Carolyn M. Rodger’s poetry compare with those in Clifton’s? Can the two poets be said to disregard standard literary conventions in the same ways? For the same reasons? Why or why not?
- Examine the function of music as a trope in Sanchez’s poetry.
- Compare and contrast the use of black vernacular music traditions and other black vernacular traditions in poems by Hughes and Brown.
- Some critics have argued that June Jordan uses black vernacular English to advocate for resistance to racialized dominance. Support this contention with specific passages from the selections of her works in the anthology.
- In what ways does Jordan use black vernacular English specifically to advocate for women’s resistance to patriarchal oppressive conditions?
- What is the function of the figure of the black female body in Clifton’s poems? Does the figure shift over a series of poems? Does the function of the figure shift?
- Consider the depiction of black women in Ishmael Reed’s fiction. Use selected passages to support or refute the recurrent claim that he crafts a misogynistic narrator for virtually all of his texts.
- How do Reed’s texts define “American”? What for him seems to constitute an “African American” identity? How does this conceptualization of national and racial identity differ from his compeers in the Black Arts movement?
- Examine Giovanni’s description of African American males. To what extent does her representation of black manhood form a counterpart to Reed’s representation of black womanhood?
- Examine the function of memory and history in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. How does the novelist’s use of historical allusions differ from Evans’s? from Malcolm X’s?
Research Paper Topics on the The Black Arts Era
Paper topics that require research.
- List rhetorical and stylistic differences between drama and other prose genres of the Black Arts movement, particularly the novel and short story. Discuss the difficulties involved in studying each.
- Research some of the causes of homophobia among African Americans across U.S. history. How is homophobia manifested in groundbreaking texts of the Black Arts era? What literary works of earlier eras can be said to anticipate the homophobia of the Black Arts era?
- Discuss Maulana Karenga's assessment of the methodologies used by white institutions to study ethnic minority cultures. Based on your research, observations, and experiences, to what extent is his assessment accurate or realistic?