Humanities 110

Paper Topics | Spring 2024 | Paper 7

Due Saturday, April 13, 5:00 p.m., to your conference leader

Target length: to be determined by conference leader

Choose one of the following topics:

1. Compare what Booker T. Washington (“Industrial Education for the Negro”) and W. E. B. Du Bois (“The Talented Tenth” and/or “Of the Coming of John”) see as the purpose of education. Where do they differ in terms of what they regard as the ultimate aims of education, both in general terms and in terms of the particular concerns of Black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century? Despite their philosophical and political differences, in what ways do Washington and Du Bois share common ideas about education and its significance?

2. The concepts of the “veil” (as white blindness and Black invisibility), “second sight” (prophetic vision), and “double consciousness” are integral to Du Bois’s account of the construction of race in The Souls of Black Folk. After discussing how Du Bois defines the key terms, analyze how one of the following texts illustrates, redefines, and/or challenges one of Du Bois’s concepts: a poem from The Harlem Renaissance Reader, Du Bois’s “Of the Coming of John,” Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.”  

3. Explain Du Bois’s conception of propaganda in “Criteria of Negro Art.” Why does he think  that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be”? Based on Langston Hughes’s definition of art in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” would he agree with Du Bois? Why or why not?   

4. Analyze the depiction of intergenerational tension or misunderstanding in one or two of the following works: Du Bois’s “Of the Coming of John;” Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade;” and/or Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. How do these works depict the transition between generations? What changes (for example, values, expectations, experiences)? What remains the same?

5. Analyze and compare how two of the following texts imagine racial or cross-racial alliance involving the African diaspora: Garvey’s “Africa for Africans,” UNIA’s “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,” Du Bois’s Dark Princess, McKay’s Banjo, and Hughes’s “Letter from Spain.” What are the barriers that stand in the way of forming such solidarity? Pay attention to their understanding of race, class, nation, and imperialism.

6. In her “Note on Method” that opens Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman argues that “every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor” (xiii). Based on his arguments in “Propaganda of History,” would W.E.B. Du Bois agree with this claim? How do his concerns about the danger of propaganda and the need for a “science” of history compare to Hartman’s concerns about “power and authority of the archive”? To what extent do Hartman and Du Bois argue for similar or different methods as they seek to convey stories that are not fully acknowledged in the dominant historical narratives of their respective moments?

7. Analyze the role of pleasure and the imagination in Richard Bruce Nugent's short story "Smoke, Lilies and Jade.” How does the story construct relationships that are outside of normative boundaries? And in what ways does the text stake a claim for queer identities?

8. In “Sweat,” how does Hurston represent the relation between labor and gender in the power struggle between the main characters, Delia and Sykes? How are symbols and imagery (such as the snake, the washpot, and sweat) used to convey this in the story?

9. Compare and contrast the theorization of spirituals in Du Bois’s “The Sorrow Songs,” Hurston’s “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” and Locke’s “The Negro Spirituals” (assigned for March 22). You can analyze, for instance, how they discuss the historical specificity of spirituals, the way spirituals are or should be performed, and/or the role spirituals have had in Black culture.

10. In consultation with your conference leader, write on a topic of your own devising.

In addition to consulting with your conference leader, you can get help with all stages of the writing process from peer tutors at the Writing Center. You can find links to the Writing Center hours on the Drop-in Tutoring Schedule website. Extra tutoring help will be available in the week leading up to paper due dates.