Brevity, Bravado, and Other Short-Story-Related Things with Shawn

The assimilation of people of color into the White middle class has been an important part of the thought of Black people since the 19th century. An early DuBois spoke of a "talented tenth" that would be allowed by more egalitarian structures to achieve economic success and distribute it to the rest of the community. He would later sour on this view and emphasize how capitalism required the exploitation of Black people to function. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) would pursue a similar line of reasoning in light of affirmative action programs championed by the Johnson administration during the 1960s, claiming that they only allowed some Black people to "make it" in order to buttress systems of racial segregation and domination. "The Body's Defenses Against Itself" makes a similar point, demonstrating how in order to establish themselves in the White middle class, Black people must mold other members of their community into "untamed" others, t...

Recently, I read the work of the Afro-Caribbean anti-colonial philosopher Frantz Fanon in my political theory class, and I was fascinated by how his analysis of colonialism could be applied to "Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler. For Fanon, colonialism is an order that is typified by violence. It is created by violence, first of all, when the colonizer destroys the institutions and self-government of the native to make them submit to colonial power. Overtime, this violence begins to seem normal to the colonizer, it becomes baked into their identity and way of life. They work, go to school, and play in territories seized from the native people, who are constantly being monitored and excluded from such territories by a police state. Their subsistence is often dependent on crops and products created by the natives in exploitative conditions. The violence of colonialism becomes normal to the colonizer, and it creates and reproduces their distinct identity. Because the identity and lif...

Question Investigated: What role do associations between technology and religious imagery play in "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury and "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler? "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Rad Bradbury draws a clear comparison between religion and technology, specifically the functions of the automated house that the story centers around. The text states, "The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the Gods had gone away and the ritual of the religion continued, uselessly" (Bradbury 324). Although the text references humans as the Gods technology must serve, I think a closer reading of the text actually complicates that statement. Diving into the story, we immediately see how the house's functions have been tailored for human consumption, in particular that of an idyllic suburban family. The clock announces in a jovial rhyme, " Seven-nine, breakfast, time...