Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Spring 2025 | Paper 7

Due Saturday, April 19, 5:00 p.m., to your conference leader

Target length: 1,400-1,600 words

Choose one of the following topics:

  1. Reflect on how truth-telling is conceived and practiced in Ida B. Wells’s “Southern Horrors” and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Propaganda of History.” Consider the arguments made by each author about how to grapple with facts and the consequences of the ways in which facts are presented. What do Wells’s and Du Bois’s works have in common and how do they differ?

  2. How does W. E. B. Du Bois use imagery relating to sight, such as “second sight,” “the veil,” and “clairvoyance” to reveal a new understanding of the past, inquire into the present, and/or construct a future for a people living under white supremacy and racial violence? Base your answer on a comparison of two essays by Du Bois.

  3. Compare Gwendolyn Bennett’s “Hatred” to Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem.” Pay particular attention to how each poem uses direct address (first-person speaker addressing a “you”). How do you understand the significance of direct address in each text?

  4. Do you think that Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is consistent with the agenda she articulates in “What White Publishers Won’t Print”? Why or why not?  Close read relevant passages from the novel in dialogue with the essay’s claims to justify your answer.

  5. How do the sensory descriptions in Richard Bruce Nugent's “Smoke, Lilies, Jade” contribute to the story’s exploration of identity, gender, and sexuality?

  6. Compare Elena Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments in terms of the techniques they use to give voice to those omitted from official histories. Make sure to include consideration of both Poniatowska’s and Hartman’s articulations of their objectives and method (Poniatowska pp.199 and 202-208; Hartman pp.  XIII-XV).

  7. How does the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s “Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” envision solidarity among Black communities globally? How does it account for the diverse experiences of Africans and the African diaspora in different geographical contexts?  Consider the document’s language, articulation of collective ideals and experiences, and call to action.

  8. How do Zora Neale Hurston (“Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals”), W.E.B. Du Bois (“The Sorrow Songs”), and Alain Locke (“The Negro Spirituals”) think about cultural continuity and change in their discussions of spirituals?