Infinite Content, Infinitely Content

Their Eyes Were Watching God certainly showcases Zora Neale Hurston’s training as an anthropologist. She used the idea of cultural relativism, the knowledge that aspects of a culture can only truly be understood relative to that culture itself. The whole idea emerged as a reaction to very Eurocentric anthropological practices. Huston shows us this in the novel by letting the black characters speak from themselves, unlike Bigger in Native Son . She has the readers understand black American culture as it exists without having to constantly describe it in the context of white society, which is different than the social protest novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. In this way, I see cultural relativism seems as a good idea, particularly if the author/anthropologist is to some degree an insider of the community/culture. I think it’s possible to allow cultures to speak for themselves, but this novel can still end up being “minstrel-y”. Not because of the novel, but because of the rea...

I was brainstorming for my essay last week and just sort of poking around in the book to find what I wanted to write about. And so I ended up back in the factory hospital episode and rereading it. And all of a sudden I noticed a whole bunch of things I hadn’t picked up on before. First, I decided to look up who Buckeye the Rabbit and Brer Rabbit were. Their names are mentioned when the doctor is asking the narrator various questions about his identity, and after asking about his name, identity, and mother, he asks about this seemingly random character from the narrator’s childhood. So who are they? Basically, they’re the same character, more commonly known as Brer Rabbit. Buckeye the Rabbit is another name, but it definitely has some significance if you read the narrator’s internal monologue in page 242 (I haven’t really tried to unpack what he means about Buckeye being what you call him when you’re younger, Brer when you’re older - if you have some thoughts/an explanation let me kno...

Reading the dialogue between any of the characters in Invisible Man as they discuss Brotherhood ideology is an adventure into a bizarre rabbit hole. I keep trying to read into it as with any other aspect of the novel, but the words feel empty. It’s difficult to figure out what their ideology is. You can look deeper and deeper and then all you end up finding is rhetoric. Here’s a good line to illustrate this: “The people are fully aroused; if we fail to lead them into action, they will become passive, or they will become cynical. Thus it is necessary that we strike immediately and strike hard!” (pg. 363). Throughout other parts of the novel, you get a slight sense of their views on race perhaps, but other than that we have no idea what the Brotherhood beliefs. What do they mean when they say “action”? What does that look like? What does “striking hard” mean? What are they trying to do at all? This reminds me of the narrator’s speeches, where as readers we question whether he’s sayi...

My dad always said, or perhaps joked - the line with Serbs is thin - that the capital “I” in English is a testament to the vanity of the British. He’s not wrong in that English is probably one of the only languages which capitalizes exclusively this pronoun, although realistically I’d assume that there’s a niche linguistic explanation. Nonetheless, it’d be boring to merely assume this. You have to find some symbolism in everything, or maybe that’s just a side effect of reading Invisible Man. Admittedly, I’ve poked fun at people who try to extrapolate meaning from things like punctuation and capitalization. But the poem that Sarah presented, “I Have a Dream” by Pat Parker, made me remember my father’s remark. I realized that the capitalization was not an accident. While my father always referred to the “vanity of the British”, what was meant under the surface was a history of colonialism and the exploitation of others for the sake of profit; the capitalists of capitalists. For him, and ...

As James Baldwin argued, Native Son is a protest novel. Whether this fact inherently makes the book a failure to convey the complexity of race relations in America, I don’t really know. Richard Wright’s political intentions are obvious though, and in class we sort of fleshed out what he might be protesting. And while we briefly touched on it, I want to explore the idea that Wright is proposing communism as a “solution” to what he’s protesting. And perhaps this would not be surprising, as Wright supported the communist party at the time of the novel’s publication. As a relevant side note, I’ve kind of debated whether it’s fair to talk about “solutions” to large social problems. From a personal standpoint, I’ve generally considered myself to be an analytical person, especially considering how my engineer father looks for a way to make literally anything more efficient. Then when I first attended a social justice meeting, I found the discussion very unusual and kind of unsubstantial. Now ...