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What Makes Libretto Difficult? Reading Past the Text: an analysis on the societal and academic pressures Tolson faced

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  (Melvin B. Tolson and Tate Allen, the latter of whom wrote the controversial preface for Tolson's Libretto ).  What made Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia such a difficult read? While on the surface level, its demanding nature could be explained by the thick layering of allusions, foreign languages, and the many complex literary devices carefully placed throughout the epic, the true effects of Tolson’s writing, combined with the literary movements at the time, was the true creator of its poetic effects.  As a class, we grappled with some of those themes: the archival nature of the work (to preserve the African history without harmful bias), the literary assimilation as a modernist (whether Libretto was distinctly read as a “poem” or a “Black poem”), and the cultural transcendence (where the use of various cultural texts and examples creates a unified perspective on the world). However, to better understand the peculiarity and complexity of Tolson’s Libre...
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Does Hurston’s Buckets of “Characteristics of Negro Expression” Accurately Catch All African American Sentiments?

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While Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) wrote during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, her research provided commentary on the movement itself.           In her analysis of African American cultural art forms, Zora Neale Hurston uses the terms “drama” and “will to adorn” distinctly as an all-encompassing attribute of African American expression. These founding principles of expression find themselves deeply immersed in Harlem Renaissance poetry, and are characteristically used to differentiate the works as uniquely African American at this time. However, much of the internal conflict that afflicted Harlem Renaissance artists is confused within these foundation principles. The merging of Eurocentric ideas, such as within Countee Cullen’s “Colored Blues Singer”, was a pivotal conflict point to African Americans’ situation within the world’s art, questioning whether blending within European tradition can be achieved without losing African American identity. Cul...
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All Aboard Dunbar’s Train

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A Pennsylvanian train station during the Reconstruction period, which is likely a similar setting evoked by Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Goin' Back" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_railroads_in_North_America)   Paul Laurence Dunbar was a storyteller. Throughout his writings, Dunbar projects a deeply intricate perspective, with readers rarely able to connect with Dunbar as the speaker in his works. By forming these stories, Dunbar, although born in 1872 and publishing the majority of his popular works after the 1890s, goes back to the Reconstruction period frequently in his works. Narrative poetry forms the vessel Dunbar uses to transport readers into vivid perspectives, leaving the reader to analyze the environments that forged the speaker’s lifetime and confront the emotions, troubles, and life paths of newly freed African Americans. However, Dunbar used his storytelling not just to document the past, but as an opportunity to stretch his audience further in proces...
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