Nel and Sula Nel Greene (nee Wright) and Sula Peace seem as if they could not be more different than they are. Nel is cool under pressure, rational, and, like her mother, Helene, retreats into rigid structures of tradition and custom when unsure of what to do. Sula is the direct opposite: she is hot […]
Hi everyone, Since your posts continue to be insightful and provocative, I’d like to try something a bit new tomorrow in class and emphasize your roles as co-teachers. As I said last time, this will be good practice for seminars in other upper-level courses, grad school, court rooms and board rooms. So please come in ready to lead the […]
Though absolutely devastating and often hard to swallow, the position of enslaved African American women described by Brenda E. Stevenson in “Slave Marriage and Family Relations” evoked the kinds of power that we had read about earlier (Nancy Cott). Women had little say in determining the path of romance in their lives and would often […]
Re: Jumping the Broomstick; Brief commentary on Sula Power relations festered inside the slave’s realm of sexual relations. Slave women resisted sexual advances by men of both colors, fostering the idea that “principle” was the only thing they had. They sought to preserve their bodies, usually in forlorn efforts, and, on the contrary, they, many […]
Thoughts on Sula In her essay, Stevenson presents a very clear, though complex, depiction of slave sexual and marital relations; sex was generally encouraged only between married couples and pre-marital pregnancy led to marriage, and, in terms of monogamous relationships, fidelity was highly valued. Most important in her analysis is her assertion that “[Slave kin] […]
Sula’s Sex Powers I thought that the pedagogization of sex that was present throughout the novel was an interesting contrast to the Stevenson essay in which women equated sex with principle. As a previous poster stated, Sula learned her sexual behaviors from her mother, Hannah. Hannah was described as sleeping with men easily and often. […]
Sula (No Other Title Necessary) Last year one of my political science professors was talking about the 2004 presidential election. He mentioned that in a debate between the two VPs (Cheney and Edwards), the two were asked a question about the number of black women in America getting infected with AIDS every year. As my […]
The way Sula’s community reacts to both her life and death is an interesting realization of Foucault’s idea that where there is power there is resistance. Sula lives her life with a sense of power. She sleeps with whomever she wants, refuses to marry, allows her mother to be placed in a home, and lives […]
The opening description of Medallion provides a description of power relations in clear contrast with what we had been discussing during our last class; the physical representation is reversed, since the black residents of Medallion (on a hill) look down on the white residents of the valley below them. When this reverse physical representation is […]
