Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Spring 2020 | Paper 7

Due: Saturday, April 26 at 5:00 p.m., in your conference leader’s Eliot Hall mailbox

Target length: 1,800–2,000 words

  1. What does Du Bois mean by the word "soul" in The Souls of Black Folk?

  2. In Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, many shapes and figures are repeated in multiple panels, e.g., triangles, two lines receding, the woman in the red dress, the migrants in train stations. Analyze the role of one recurring motif, discussing, for example, how it embeds a smaller story within a larger story or how the repeated figures contribute to the visual rhythms of the series as a whole.

  3. Choose a creative work (other than a piece of music) that focuses on music (for example, Johnson’s “O Black and Unknown Bards”; the short film Black and Tan; Toomer’s Cane, or Hughes’ “The Weary Blues”). Why is music an important topic for this text? You may want to consider whether on a formal level the work itself is “musical” or aims to become so.

  4. Identify and critically examine some of the main claims about the role(s) that music plays in the formation of African American identity, community, and/or culture in any two of the following works: Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk (especially “The Sorrow Songs”), Hurston’s “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” and Locke’s “The Negro Spirituals.” Do the claims conflict or do they complement one another?

  5. Compare how Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Subcomandante Marcos (the latter in either the 4th or the 6th Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle) describe the value of manual labor. You may want to consider how their historical, cultural, or geographic contexts, as well as their divergent political philosophies, shape their views.

  6. Compare the way in which the rural South and the urban, modernized North are characterized in two of the following texts: Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Toomer’s Cane, or Lawrence’s Migration Series. Focus on one chapter or two panels, grounding your argument in the details of the text or painting.

  7. In her essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argues that cinema often forces the audience to view through a male gaze in which female characters are “isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised.” This gaze reflects and creates “a world ordered by sexual imbalance, [in which] pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form, which is styled accordingly” (Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009], 19). Do the narrators in Cane consistently present women through a male gaze or do other relationships emerge? To support your argument, discuss 1–2 passages that were not analyzed in lecture.

  8. In length and genre, “Kabnis” seems distinct from the chapters in the first two sections of Cane. How does it either build upon or deviate from formal characteristics or thematic elements of the other sections? How does this final section shape our understanding of the work as a whole? You might want to pay special attention to the final scene of “Kabnis.”

  9. Compare the representations of New York City in two of the following: Claude McKay's "When Dawn Comes To The City,” Black and Tan, James Weldon Johnson’s “The Making of Harlem,” Saidiya Hartman’s “Mistah Beauty” or “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” or Alain Locke’s essays in Survey Graphic.

  10. In consultation with your conference leader, develop your own topic.