Psychological Torture in Contemporary Slave System: Connections with “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” By Harriet Jacobs

CONTEMPORARY CONNECTIONS ESSAY 5-7 pp./1250-1750 words double spaced, stapled AND uploaded to File Exchange   Write an essay connecting one of the works we’ve studied in the course to a contemporary issue. Your paper should incorporate discussion of 3-5 sources and include a “Works Cited.”  Choose one of the texts we’ve studied and put it in conversation with 2-3 other works, one of which must be contemporary. The idea is to take a theme or question that appears in one of the core readings of the course and connect it to something that is happening today.   In addition to your core text you may use other texts or artworks we’ve studied in the class, but at least one of your sources should be come from outside the assigned reading. I encourage you to think about visual texts, including film as well. This is not intended to be an extensive research paper: it is more like a meditation on one aspect of the relationship between past and present, art and life.   Below are some examples of possible topics. Note that each example lists multiple possibilities, but in your actual paper you will need to narrow it down much further.    If you take Kindred as your core text, you might connect it to issues of race, power, history, and/or memory. You might think of it as an allegory about the legacy of slavery in America, and consider how it can help us understand the issues surrounding Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, mass incarceration, reparations, or the debate about historical monuments currently taking place in America. That would involve looking at sources like current news stories, articles, and/or films (documentary or fiction) and connecting them to close reading of specific passages from Kindred. It could also involve looking at recent psychological studies of how memory works or articles from museum studies or historiography (theories about the study of history).   If you take Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as your core text, you could use it to think about slavery and other forms of forced or disenfranchised labor today, such as happens in traditional Philippine culture (“My Family’s Slave” and the controversy around it), sweatshops, or undocumented labor around the world. You would need to use Incidents to help you think about what constitutes enslavement and how disempowerment intersects with race, nationality, class, and/or gender.   If you choose Heart of Darkness, you could use it to think about the influence of European colonial history on certain international conflicts and economic problems today (much of the conflict and instability in modern Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East is at least partly a legacy of European and American colonialism), or you could think about how certain types of international relations in the contemporary world have similar features to colonialism. In this context you could also analyze Season of Migration to the North as a postcolonial (and perhaps post-structuralist) rejoinder to Heart of Darkness. You could also examine artworks like Frida Kahlo's The Two Fridas as a way of thinking about hybrid or mestizo identities.  These are only a few suggestions! If you have something else in mind just run it by me first