African American Voices
If textbooks and curricula about US cultural studies did not explicitly require learners to read texts by and listen to an ethnically diverse cast of voices, it would be likely that learners of English would miss out on important perspectives on cultural studies.
In the industries behind many American films and texts students of English study, Black people are underrepresented. The proportion of Black directors, writers and producers in film and TV in the US falls well below of their representation in the overall US population. Black people are also underrepresented in journalism and in the publishing industry.
To ensure students get a more complete picture of US cultural studies, teachers and textbooks actively encourage students to study narratives written by Black writers and featuring Black protagonists and to learn about inspiring Black people who are have shaped or are shaping American culture. Four examples of African-Americans who have left their mark on American culture are Alice Walker, Toni Morison, Marley Dias, and Spike Lee.
Sources:
https://blog.leeandlow.com/2020/01/28/2019diversitybaselinesurvey/
Spike Lee
Spike Lee (born 1957) is an American filmmaker and actor. His films, both fictional films and documentaries, deal with controversial subject matters.
Spike Lee does not shy away from conversations about race. Many of his films feature race relations as their main topic, for example Do the right thing (1989), Malcom X (1992), BlacKkKlansman (2018). He is also been a champion of diversity in Hollywood. He has been advocating for more representation of people of colour, for example with his satire Bamboozled or by criticising productions for a lack of diversity. Spike Lee has repeatedly faced criticism for bringing those controversial issues to the screen, but it does not seem to discourage him.
Many of Spike Lee’s films are deeply political. Two examples are the documentaries When the leaves broke (2006) about the US government’s failings in the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the documentary NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021 1/2. With the stories his films tell, Spike Lee draws attention to the need for change.
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200515-spike-lees-masterpiece-about-racism-in-the-us
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Spike-Lee
Alice Walker
Alice Walker (born 1944) is a writer, poet and activist. She became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for the novel The Color Purple (1982), which was turned into a movie and a Broadway musical.
Walker was the eigth daughter of sharecroppers, which meant that her parents farmed land which belonged to somebody else in exchange for living there. When she was blinded on one eye in an accident, her mother encouraged her to write instead of doing chores in the house. A scholarship made it possible for her to attend college.
After her graduation in the mid-60s, Walker joined the civil rights movement in Mississippi. During this time, she was at the forefront of social change. For example, she and her then-husband became the only interracial couple in Mississippi. She also taught one of the first women’s study course at a college. And she took part in the March on Washington, during which Martin Luther King Jr. held his famous I Have a Dream speech.
In her profile of Walker, S. Dunning writes: “Walker is such a prolific writer that it would be impossible to discuss all of her work; she has written in almost every form and genre.” Reuccuring themes are African-American experiences, racism and sexism. Walker sees a link between gender oppression and race oppresion and coins the term “womanist” for the politics which unite the ideas of gender and race liberation.
Sources:
https://blog.oup.com/2020/12/women-and-literature-alice-walker/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Walker
https://nmaahc.si.edu/alice-walker
Tony Morrison
Tony Morrison (born 1931, died 2019) was a writer, editor, and teacher, and the first African American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1993.
Growing up, Morrison heard many stories, songs and folktales from her parents who taught her about Black culture. After her master’s degree she taught at Texas Southern University and Howard University, two historically black universities. In 1965, started to work for Random House as a fiction editor. She started writing her own novels when she noticed as a publisher that there were few novels who spoke to readers as herself.
Morrison’s most famous novel is Beloved (1987), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. It is about a runaway slave who kills her daughter when they are caught to spare her a life of slavery. Lyn Innes writes in The Guardian:
The mother and those who live with her are haunted by the memory of the dead child, and the novel is also a more general representation of the terrible history that continues to haunt African Americans, a history that must be confronted in all its anguish before black people can learn to love themselves and one another.
The plot is based on a factual incident which Morrison uncovered. The book was turned into a film, starring Opra Winfrey as the protagonist. Morrison later also wrote the libretto1 for the opera Margret Garner (2005) about the incident that inspired Beloved.
Sources
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Toni-Morrison
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/06/toni-morrison-obituary
Marley Dias
Marley Dias (born 2005) loves reading, but she was disappointed by how many books were about white boys and their dogs. To change that, she founded the #1000BlackGirlBooks challenge on Twitter in 2015, at the young age of 11. Her goal was to collect 1,000 books with a Black female protagonist and sent them to the school in Jamaica her mother had attended. The challenge went viral and numerous organizations and individuals helped her with the project. To-date, Marley has collected over 13,000 books.
In a Guardian interview with Coco Khan, Marley Dias explains that she sees her role in “motivat[ing] young girls, regardless of their race or their experience, to get out there and do the things you love and that will help other people.” She has writen the book Marley Dias gets it done: And so can you! to encourages young girls to read and to become activists for things they are passionate about. She sees activism as a way out of pessimism: “All we ever hear is bad news; we’re put into a fear-mongering world where we’re told that things are bad, that bad things are always happening and the world’s going to end in 2050. And we don’t see [enough of] the good people like Greta, or the [organisers of] March for Our Lives, and we don’t see people like me.” Dias hopes the story of people people fighting for a better world will inspire people to do the same and become more optimistic about the future.
Sources:
https://www.marleydias.com/about/
Exercise
Work with a partner and pick two of the activists presented above. You research one person, your partner the other. Try to find reasons for why students should learn about this person. Present your findings to your partner.
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libretto = text of an opera ↩