Camelia Elias

American Studies

What are civil rights and what are civil liberties?

Civil Rights = The right of every person to equal protection under the law and equal access to society’s opportunities and public facilities.

Civil Liberties = Individual rights that are protected from infringement by government.

Civil Liberties

The First Amendment Freedom of Religion Freedom of Speech Freedom of the Press

The Struggle for Equality: African Americans

Slavery and the Civil War The 13, 14, and 15th Amendments

13 = Abolished Slavery14 = Guaranteed equal protection and due

process15 = Gave African Americans the right to vote.

Jim Crow Laws (Post 1877)

lost rights

late 1800s segregation enforced blacks lost their voting rights in 1890. In 1883 the court declared the Civil Rights Act of

1875 unconstitutional. whites didn’t want blacks to be admitted to any

public place. the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th

Amendment to the Constitution were ratified in 1868, which forbid blacks to have any equal rights.

still separate but equal

between 1948 and 1951, the US supreme court ruled that separate higher education facilities for blacks must be equal to those for whites

laws permitting racial discrimination in housing and recreation also started to lower

an increasing number of blacks began to move into all-white areas in Northern cities

whites moved from the cities to the suburbs

Landmark Court Cases

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)“Separate but equal”Court endorsed Jim Crow LawThe use of race as a criterion of exclusion in

public matters was not unreasonable

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Homer Adolph Plessy (7/8ths white 1/8th

black) boarded a train in New Orleans and sat in the “whites only” car.

Plessy was arrested when he refused to sit in the “colored car.”

Plessy sued arguing that the 14th Amendment made racial segregation illegal.

The Supreme Court ruled in Plessy that the Louisiana law was constitutional and that separate but equal facilities for blacks did not violate the Equal Protection Clause.

The high court Plessy ruling led to a profusion of Jim Crow laws.

By 1914 every Southern state had passed laws that created two separate societies - one black, the other white.

Separate But Equal Doctrine

1954Oliver Brown v. Board of Education

in the 1950s, school segregation was widely accepted throughout the US.

it was required by law in most southern states. in 1952, the Supreme Court heard a number of

school-segregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. It decided unanimously in 1954 that segregation

was unconstitutional, overthrowing the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had set the separate but equal precedent.

The Civil Rights Movement

1955 – Bus Boycott in Montgomery, AL

1957 – Little Rock, AK Desegregation

Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat

to a white man was arrested the Negro community leaders

incl. Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott (382 days of protest), which would deprive the bus company of 65% of its income

eight months later, the Supreme Court decided, based on the school segregation cases, that bus segregation violated the constitution.

sit-in campaigns, 1960

Negro students demanding to be served lunch in Greensboro, North Carolina

sit-in campaigns become a manifestation of protest against all sorts of other things

1963 Birmingham Alabama

Birmingham, Alabama was one of the most severely segregated cities in the 1960s. Black men and women held sit-ins at lunch counters where they were refused service, and "kneel-ins" on church steps where they were denied entrance.

Hundreds of demonstrators were fined and imprisoned. In 1963, ML King, the Reverend Abernathy and the

Reverend Shuttles lead a protest march in Birmingham. The protestors were met with policemen and dogs. The three ministers were arrested and taken to

Southside Jail.

Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

1963 – March in Birmingham, AL led by MLK, Jr.

1963 – March on Washington, DC.

I have a dream

1963 Marchon Washington

Despite worries that few people would attend and that violence could erupt, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin organized the historic event that would come to symbolize the civil rights movement. A reporter from the Times wrote, "no one could ever remember an invading army quite as gentle as the two hundred thousand civil rights marchers who occupied Washington."

Malcom X (1925-1965)“We declare our right on this earth…to be a

human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

“Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world.”

“An integrated cup of coffee isn’t sufficient pay for four hundred years of slave labor.”

“If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.”

“I am not racist in any form whatsoever. I don’t believe in any form of discrimination or segregation.”

“Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.”

Progressive Narrative Southern Baptist Multiracial and assimilationist Non-violent Media centered Student organized NAACP as legal representative

Redemptive Narrative Northern Separatist Africa as source of inspiration Slavery as ongoing Community based Confrontational

fragmenting the whole

women’s movement the pill Vietnam war’s impact on the counter-culture youth students’ protest of 1964 democratization of

curriculum (multiversity vs. university) presidents and presidential candidates are being shot

(but only the democrats die) sex, drugs, and rock and roll

creating counter-publics from free sex through expanding consciousness through drugs to mass events (Woodstock, 1969)

1968 and all that global revolt and dissent

Raymond Federman (1928) ‘To write, then, is to produce

meaning, and not reproduce a pre-existing meaning….. As such, fiction can no longer be reality, or a representation of reality, or an imitation, or even a recreation of reality; it can only be A REALITY – an autonomous reality whose only relation with the real world is to improve that world. To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality, and especially to abolish the notion that reality is truth.’

Surfiction, 1975

Surfiction postmodernism

Thus the primary purpose of fiction will be to unmask its own fictionality, to expose the metaphor of its own fraudulence, and not pretend any longer to pass for reality, for truth, or for beauty. Consequently, fiction will no longer be regarded as a mirror of life, as a pseudorealistic document that informs us about life, nor will it be judged on the basis of its social, moral, psychological, commercial value….

(Federman, 1975)

Four propositions…

1. the whole traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book must be questioned, challenged, demolished. And it is the writer … who must, through innovations in the writing itself … renew our system of reading

2. linear and orderly narration is no longer possible3. there cannot be any truth nor any reality exterior to fiction.

In other words, if the material of fiction is invention (lies, simulation, distortions, or illusions), then writing fiction will be a process of inventing, on the spot, the material of fiction

4. the most striking aspects of the new fiction will be its semblance of disorder and its deliberate incoherency. …it will be deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non sequitur, and incoherent

The shadow of Brecht

No! to ‘identification’ Down with ‘character’! Foreground the artificiality

of the device ‘representation’ is a

political act, not an aesthetic one

Reader as producer

The writer … will stand on equal footing with the reader in their efforts to make sense out of the language common to both of them, to give sense to the fiction of life.

Authority (like paternity) is a legal fiction

Once upon a time the ‘authority’ of a text depended upon its being anonymous, collective, etc.

Now, the ‘copyright’ of bourgeois property law posits ‘authority’ in a single owner or source of value: the Author

This is a fictive construct like any other

Michel Foucault

Critifiction (1993) Bilingualism

accident of history accident of personal expe-rience: a voice within a voice language in parenthesis left hand/right hand language

--- perverse act of intercourse without gender: androgynous competing contest corrupting emphasizes loss and gain

Translation Double talk/ double vision both/and not subordinated but sub-

suming not a substitute but a

supplement

---- perverse act of intercourse without gender competing contest corrupting emphasizes loss and gain

Frames

Federman to us Federman to Elizabeth Elizabeth to Federman Federman to us through Elizabeth Elizabeth to us through Federman Us, Elizabeth, Federman, or Federman on

Federman?

Autobiography informed by Fiction

Fiction fiction informs life only fiction is real life comes in ‘different’

versions (therefore fictional)

fiction comes in different versions (therefore ‘true’)

memory and images are unreliable

Autobiography autobiography is a distortion of life

(uses language as a medium – unreliable)

includes selection (not the whole sequence of events) and cancellation

an invention after the fact consists of metanarrative frames:

(a writer writing on how to become a writer who is already a writer of writing stories including autobiography)

repetitive, incoherent discontinuous, fraudulent

Positions and Orientations

Autobiography is fiction that looks forward to its own future

MULTITUDES being virtual

Double or Nothing (1998)

Narrative levels Protagonist Narrator Recorder “fourth person” (i.e. the author) fifth person (real author) sixth person (reader)

characters and roles

Protagonistyouthful, acts and suffers, has a limited role

Narratorgambler, tells the protagonist’s story

Recordermiddle-aged, relays the narrative, responsible for the

typographical arrangement of the text on the page Fourth person

the author, regulates the relations among the other three

themes

gambling/writing winning/losing playing/succumbing text/world luck/knowledge “double” assumes pluralistic meanings: it refers

to concepts as well as trivial things: “double statement”, “double problem”, “double purpose”, “double time” vs. “double-ply” toilet paper, “double-breasted suit”, “double bed”, “doubled up portion”

structure

bipartite play between the introduction and the text, (and indirectly the

table of contents, as it doubles the text proper) structure and setting relate to the playing of a game that

cannot be easily broken down into such dualistic categories as text and nontext, serious and frivolous, original and parody, work and play

pattern looping and circular, not linear or binary

reversed order between THIS IS NOT THE BEGINNING and BEGINNING

stylistics

anarchic rhetoric parenthetic comments voice, person, tense position the grammatical

structures of the text and satirize hierarchized possibilities and choices

academic style follows rules of argumentation

metaphors replaced by epigramsex.000 “One must have chaos in one to give birth to a

dancing star”, 00000 “the speed of thought is not superior to that of

speech”

layout

no apparent typesetting no left-to-right, line-by-line page pattern pages lack pagination blank pages words form pictorial patterns, free verse pages crammed with English and French script emblematic

graphics, visual display and paginal space serve iconically to stand for the content

John Barth (1930)

novelist and teacher of writing

interested in narrative techniques

innovator of new forms of ‘realism’ novels about ‘aboutness’ one man’s realism si

another man’s magic (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

interviews with JB

literature of exhaustion

“By 'exhaustion' I don't mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities—by no means necessarily a cause for despair.”

A good writer "confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work."

John Barth in The Atlantic Monthly (1967)