In your midterm paper, you’ll analyze at least two of the texts we’ve read in the first half of the semester, discussing the ways in which they attempt to represent working-class exploitation, race and gender oppression, and struggles against these forms of degradation. The main question you should be trying to answer in this paper is the following: What economic functions to racial and/or gender oppression perform for capitalism? How are these oppressions related to economic exploitation? And what do the folks we’ve read suggest must be done in order to root out oppression?

Minimum Primary Texts: 2
Minimum Quotes (Primary Texts): 4
Minimum Secondary Resources: 2
In your midterm paper, you’ll analyze at least two of the texts we’ve read in the first half of the semester, discussing the ways in which they attempt to represent working-class exploitation, race and gender oppression, and struggles against these forms of degradation. The main question you should be trying to answer in this paper is the following: What economic functions to racial and/or gender oppression perform for capitalism? How are these oppressions related to economic exploitation? And what do the folks we’ve read suggest must be done in order to root out oppression?

Primary sources refer to the narrative texts we’ve read or will read in class. Basically, if it’s some sort of story, it’s a primary source. You can focus on any of the stories we’ll read before your Midterm Paper is due on November 8: Wilson’s Our Nig (1859); Wright’s “Ethics,” “Fire and Cloud,” and “Bright and Morning Star,” from UTC (1938/40); Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy (South Africa, 1946); Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns (Palestine, 1976); and Ida B. Wells’s Mob Rule in New Orleans (US, 1900).
Secondary sources refer to the non-narrative texts we’ve used to make sense of our primary narrative texts. Here are some examples: Taylor’s “From #BLM to Black Liberation”; Post’s “Beyond Racial Capitalism”; the Combahee River Collective Statement; etc. There are many secondary sources to choose from. You can also find your own secondary sources through the Howard University Library Database, which we’ll demonstrate in class, and through websites like JSTOR and Project Muse.

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