Since 1975: Suggested Paper Topics
Paper Topics on the Since 1975
Questions that can serve as the starting point for an essay.
- Select a few authors in this section who use their literary texts to explore issues of slavery, civil rights, Jim Crow, and post civil rights. What generalizations can we safely make about their engagement with these themes? In what significant ways do their attitudes towards these topics differ?
- How do writers like Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, Samuel R. Delany, and Alice Walker, among others, demonstrate an awareness of a large white readership of their novels? Are there other authors that betray such awareness? Are there writers in this period that seem explicitly to disregard white readers and/or to write exclusively for other black people? On what do you base your answer?
- Women writers after 1970, led perhaps by Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, and Jamaica Kincaid, represent a new woman’s voice after the gains of the 1950s–1970s Civil Rights movement. Compare and contrast a few works by women writers in this era for divergent expressions of the freedom to write about African American history, family, and social issues.
- African American literature since 1975 offers a unique and unprecedented range of literary subjects. To appreciate the range of styles, topics, tropes, and so on among these post-1975 writers, study Sam Delany and Colson Whitehead together for science fiction, or study August Wilson and Adrienne Kennedy together for a better understanding of playwrights at this time.
- What do Octavia Butler’s and Sam Delany’s fantastic science fictions argue as to the difficulty of finding a personal, and communal, identity in contemporary African America? What do the authors gain by situating the struggle to cultivate a black identity within utopic or dystopic alternate universes?
- Black identity emerges as one of the most predominant themes of this literary period, especially black identity that also asserts gay/ lesbian/ transgendered identity. How do such writers as Michelle Cliff, Sam Delany, Essex Hemphill, and Gloria Naylor depict queer black characters? What struggles with being black and queer emerge in these characters? What do the characters proclaim as the advantages to this multifaceted black identity?
- To analyze ways that black male playwrights have shifted focus, style, theme, and so on over a relatively short period of time, compare Baraka’s Dutchman with Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
- This literary era has been heralded as significant for its inclusion of voices from other parts of the African diaspora. What common concerns do you find at the center of works of Cliff, Kincaid, and Paule Marshall?
- How do memory and sensation function in Kincaid’s Annie John?What elements of postcoloniality contribute to her poignant portrayal of estrangement, alienation, and homelessness?
- How are imagined communities depicted by Afro-Caribbean authors different from those portrayed by U.S.-born black authors? Start your analysis with the family situations portrayed respectively by Walker and Cliff.
- Contrast Phillips’s tone and style with those of Wright, another male author who lived primarily outside of the U.S. What attitudes toward the notion of a black homeland does each man assert?
- Contrast Gaines’s use of regional tropes and settings to selected authors of the Harlem Renaissance.
- Trace some scenes in which Cliff’s characters portray a plethora of emotions as they develop their individual identities. Identify the specific rhetorical devices that give these emotional scenes their power.
- What apparent influence do works of the black vernacular traditions have on authors of the current historical period of literary development? Start formulating your answer by studying the use of black vernacular musical influence on the works of Albert Murray, Angelou, and Williams.
- Review the blues selections on the Audio Companion CD to the anthology. Which blues records seem to have directly influenced Gayl Jones in writing Corregidora?
- Review “Mary Don’t You Weep” in the Vernacular Tradition section of the anthology. Trace elements of this song and other gospel songs of your choice as they appear in Williams’s “Tell Martha Not to Moan.”
- Trace the effect of the blues on black writers over time by comparing “Po’ Boy Blues” or “The Weary Blues,” by Hughes, to the anthology selections by Murray.
- Compare Hemphill’s poetry with that of Hughes or McKay of the Harlem Renaissance. What similarities do you find in these men’s writing, in spite of their different historical eras?
- The use of the slash in “Nappy Edges” arguably creates a broken, “slashed” syntax that forces readers to pause over the words and phrases of the poem. What other stylistic features does Ntozake Shange deploy to ensure readers pay close attention to her words?
- What do detective fictions in this section reveal about the authors’ respective deployment of Du Boisian double consciousness to illustrate masking and camouflage as ongoing aspects of the black experience?
- In what ways does Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It” illustrate most contemporary black writers’ suggestion that they are haunted by national history and historical events?
- Define postmodernism. Then study selections by Nathaniel Mackey and Leon Forrest to support or refute the contention that both authors are postmodernist writers.
- What stereotypes of black men does challenge in Charles Johnson’s “The Education of Mingo”? What stereotypes does Johnson ironically uphold?
- How does Jones’s use of a storytelling motif in Corregidora correspond to antebellum narratives that you have read? To what extent do the antebellum slave narratives and Jones’s neoslave narrative prove that stories are told more for the sake of the storyteller than the person receiving the story?
- Jones is also a successful contemporary playwright. What elements of dramatic performativity does she deploy in Corregidora? What passages would you describe as more poetry than fiction or drama? On what do you base your response?
- Compare Naylor’s portrayal of women characters The Women of Brewster Place with narratives by other women writers who depict domestic abuse and patriarchal subjugation as an issue central to women’s experience. Include Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl among the texts you choose to analyze sources of dominance and oppression.
Research Paper Topics on the Reconstruction to the Since 1975
Paper topics that require research.
- Analyze the power and impact of technology on selected authors in this section. What cultural media are most significant in your selected works? Now consider the effect of Hollywood movies and the entertainment industry on the popular reception of these works.
- One key to understanding literature since 1975 is to recognize that it is the only section that is still growing. Besides the anthology sections on the Vernacular Tradition, only this one has writers still producing within its fold, which perhaps accounts for its focus on the future. Look at ways that this group of writers has changed over any period of thirty years. For example, how are works produced most recently by Walker, Morrison, and Williams different from texts they produced in the 1980s? Make similar temporal contrasts with the playwrights of this era. Then make similar contrasts with the poets.
- How do you characterize the unique language that Mackey develops in his fiction? What are the implications of developing a new language for African Americans in the twentieth century? Does this new language make any comment on such linguistic controversies as Ebonics and other forms of Black Vernacular English?
- Examine the character of Milkman in the excerpt from the second part of Morrison's novel Song of Solomon. What elements does he seem to share with such Greek classic heroes as Odysseus, the quintessential quester? How do the excerpt and the protagonist illustrate key characteristics of heroes of the black vernacular traditions available in the anthology?
- Research the relationship of blacks in the United Kingdom to persons of African descent in other parts of the African diaspora. What instances of imperialism and Eurocentrism, if any, can you locate in works in the anthology by writers from the UK? What attributes of their work suggest that they grew up in the UK? To what extent does their work collectively suggest that a British and/ or Caribbean black identity yields a literature and ideology of a different sensibility from black authors who grew up within the United States?
- Examine the works of Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid to compare the diaspora within literature from the Caribbean. Look for elements of strong women and the creation of communities.
- Research uses of the terms feminist, womanist, and artist as they have been deployed in U.S. literary history. Which term most accurately describes the representation of African American women in black literary works since 1975? Which writers express an ideology more feminist than womanist? Which writers do you find to reject both feminist and womanist in favor of artist? How effectively can one generalize about black women writers' uses of these terms?
- How does the character Socrates in Walter Mosley's "Equal Opportunity" compare with the famed philosopher of the same name? Is Mosley's depiction meant to highlight ironies in the United States today or to arouse nostalgia for a distant past? Research Socrates' ancient setting as well as the contemporary setting of Mosley's short story to prepare your argument.