Materials: “How to Read Like a Writer” by Mike Bunn; “Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment” by Catherine Savini; They Say, I Say (Introduction and Chapter 1) by Graff and Birkenstein; Easy Writer by Andrea Lunsford
In this essay, you will assume the persona of a cultural critic by endeavoring to investigate these questions. Using an object, artifact, tradition, or way of thinking, try to provide your audience with some new understanding, reveal an aspect of culture that is not readily visible, and spark a dialogue in the tradition of Brittney Cooper’s “Orchestrated Fury.”
Think about the fact that Cooper was able to develop an impactful argument because she situated a seemingly insignificant object such as Michelle Obama’s hair bun within the framework of a larger conversation on respectability politics. The argument not only provided the reader with an exploration of Black women’s hair culture, it also critiqued cultural and sociopolitical conventions. Cooper skillfully weaves her argument in “Orchestrated Fury” by knowing when to emphasize minutiae and when to focus the lens by peering into the bigger things related to the human condition: a woman enraged by events but constrained by social propriety from expressing that rage. In some sense, Cooper treated Obama’s hairstyle as a text that spoke on these larger topics, and she interpreted that text for her audience.
What can you explore in this way?
What unseen thing can you expose through analyzing the commonplace?