The essay should not be merely a description of the text you are writing about, or of its plot. (In other words, it should not be a book report.) Rather, your essay should revolve around a central thesis, or argument that you are making about the text. Your thesis should be a combination of description and analysis; in other words, your thesis must not only describe what is portrayed in the text, but state what you see as the significance of this portrayal what it can teach us, what we can learn from it, why it matters. And you must support your central argument and main points with textual evidence — specific examples from the text consisting of both summary and direct quotations.Racial Uplift and Double Consciousness
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
The Harlem Renaissance: A literary movement that began in the 1920s in the almost exclusively African American area of Harlem in New York City. Harlem had grown tremendously following World War I, when a mass migration of black Americans out of the South and into northern cities had taken place. Thanks to the Harlem Renaissance, African American culture was for the first time deliberately highlighted for a diverse national audience. The Harlem area became not only the nexus of black literature, theater, music, and dance but also, for a time, an intellectual and artistic nerve center for the entire nation. Writers as varied as Countee Cullen, W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer captivated America, as did such musical legends as Duke Ellington. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 2nd ed.
For more information see the Oxford African American Studies Center:
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The Online Authority on the African American Experience
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Racial Uplift: This is a term used by Harlem Renaissance leaders to refer to their common mission to uplift the black race. However, they didnt all agree on how racial uplift should be achieved. Some felt that it should be achieved through black separatism, whereas others felt that it should be achieved through the combined efforts of blacks and whites working together. Some felt that it should be achieved by preparing blacks to be successful in accordance with white culture, whereas others felt it should be achieved by encouraging African Americans to unearth their own history and to cultivate their own unique culture and experience in light of this history. These different philosophies of racial uplift caused conflict among Harlem Renaissance leaders, especially W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. In his Atlanta Compromise speech in 1895, Washington argued that African Americans should focus on achieving economic self-reliance through vocational education and put off the struggle for equal rights, a strategy that many, including Du Bois, strongly disagreed with; Du Bois challenged this idea in The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903.
Click here to read more about the different uplift philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois
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Double Consciousness: This is a term coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. It basically refers to what he felt was the divided consciousness of Blacks at the turn of the century. Today this term could be extended to pertain to anyone who occupies a minority position within the dominant culture. DuBois describes double consciousness as this sense of always looking at ones self through the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. Per DuBois, one ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength along keeps it from being torn asunder. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th ed., Vol.C., Page 883-884.