كتاب إلكتروني
No Black Agency on the Back Seat: The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963
| العنوان: | No Black Agency on the Back Seat: The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 |
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| المؤلفون: | Julien, Claude |
| المصدر: | Presses universitaires François-RabelaisOpenAIRE. |
| بيانات النشر: | Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2017-06-01. |
| سنة النشر: | 2017 |
| وصف مادي: | 253-265 |
| مصطلحات موضوعية: | DS, Literature (General), littérature, enfance |
| الوصف: | No back agency on the back seat: the Watsons go to Birmingham-1963.The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 is a highly popular 1995 novel involving a lower middle class black family of five. The father, Daniel, is a factory worker in the automobile industry. Wilona, the mother, is a homemaker who moved up from Birmingham as a young bride. Of the three siblings, Byron is about 14, Joetta, the last born, is about 7 and Kenneth, the narrator is about 10.Byron is a troublesome child and the parents decide to drive down to Birmingham to have his disciplinarian grandmother teach him the realities of black life in the United States.The novel is full of humor, especially as Daniel is a nononsense black man while Wilona romanticizes the “down home” of her youth.The overnight drive from Michigan (a challenge Daniel imposes upon himself) is smooth and the family reunion after 10 years is pleasant —although Wilona fails to approve of her widowed mother’s decision to live with a companion.Nice Kenneth is the one who gets out of line and bathes in a dangerous place, only to be rescued by Byron at the last minute. The trauma of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church concludes the novel, and the family drive home to protect Joetta from the horror of it all.The essay takes issue with the novel for its silence about the events of the spring of 1963. Apart from the heinous bombing, the book’s overall vision of the racist South is bland. Here is a story written for children which fails to instruct. The “children’s crusade” was a very special movement of the civil rights campaign involving thousands of young protesters who marched, braved police dogs, billy clubs, water cannons, and went to jail because they believed in promises of fairness and equality. Black agency deserves better than the novel’s representation of the past. Racial fairness remains a promise even today, but whatever progress has been made did not come easily. |
| نوع الوثيقة: | Chapter |
| اللغة: | English |
| ردمك: | 978-2-86906-483-6 978-2-86906-234-4 |
| Relation: | http://books.openedition.org/pufr/basictei/4965; http://books.openedition.org/pufr/tei/4965 |
| DOI: | 10.4000/books.pufr.4965 |
| URL الوصول: | http://books.openedition.org/pufr/4965 |
| رقم الأكسشن: | edsrev.B80C750D |
| قاعدة البيانات: | Openedition.org |
| ردمك: | 9782869064836 9782869062344 |
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| DOI: | 10.4000/books.pufr.4965 |