The Emperor Jones

By King Meera -
10-11 on 31 Aug
  • Cockney (dialect) a marker of being part of the lowest stratum of society
  • sense of persecution - guilty coz black
  • "oversoul"
  • end result of slavery is dehumanization
  • hegemony
  • only way of overcoming - keeping hope alive, fighting back, not accepting
  • other end of spectrum (of dealing with things) is fatalism
  • feeling of being a fugitive (phenomenon) (to be black in America) even to this day  runaway - <Black like me>
  • equal (nuomena) but segregated
  • Blacks in sports and entertainment rather than policy making- if you must be equal to us then do things that entertain us
  • Zora Lee Hurston - jazz not a part of the white man
  • Chapter is a dry comment on America- it is all a projection and thereby construction of power.
  • notion of constantly being a fugitive - victim of law and his own psyche- collective unconsciousness
  • Jones himself running from the law for murder.
  • crown berry - song
  • figure of hobo - gonzo journalism
  • okay to be a rolling stone, gathers no moss (baggage, identity, comfort, guilt)
  • Realism - picture of reality, true to reality.
  • Naturalism- interpretation, ironic situations
11-12 on 1 Sept
  • sense of foreshadowing
  • archetype -> symbols -> stereotypes
  • money can buy justice - but not for a black man
  • Jones vs. Smithers - conflict between two caricatures - lowest in both their societies - crass
  • Freedom Train (was an orchestrated back movement led by Harriett Tubman)
  • running away is a trope in black American writing
  • pathetic fallacy employed
  • devils and ghosts shown are our innermost fears - collective unconscious
  • if God is on our side - in God we trust - religious hypocrisy errwhere
  • actions similar to animal rummaging
  • fear of defamiliarization seen
10-11 on 7 Sept
  • plays operate on a central mechanism that direct their movement - the Emperor Jones is a linear introspective narrative. There are no flashbacks; the sequence of events is simple, narrated as they occur.
  • Significance of linearity of narrative is that although it is boring and predictable (we know what is going to happen) it is meant to teach us something, and we expect a lesson.
  • Brutus - brute force (animal-like, forest setting, spontaneous, instinctive) (not derogatory) or a character of suspicion (as in Julius Caesar)
  • a man who is a product of society is a social construct
  • forest signifies a return to the roots and to the origin of people especially in contrast to a concrete jungle. It is an indistinct form, an amorphous entity. It symbolizes bounty, inconvenience, lack of direction and is a laboratory for the human soul. Also, a different law exists in the jungle - survival of the fittest - the fittest in society are the industrious, the resourceful, the adaptable and the white (in social context, white man is the fittest and possesses constructed and projected power and an advantage)
  • ^the black man and society therefore have the collective unconscious (also includes sense of fear) notion that he cannot prosper
  • Jones' method similar to Hansel and Gretel trail of breadcrumbs but fails because society has gotten to his head - he is drunk on power and confidence and is therefore not careful or observant enough
  • the silver bullet is his symbol of invincibility - ma'am compared this fail to Kempegowda's four pillars of Bengaluru
11-12 on 8 Sept
  • legislature has been internalized - changing it affects nothing 
  • dialects (Caribbean and Cockney) - language structure, syntax, regional (accent peculiar to language, seen only when speaking in another)
  • within our natural habitat, the world is too much with us (which is why authors shove their characters into the forest) (or send him on a journey)
  • taxation in all things
QUICK RECAP WITH BHAVANI MA'AM
  • white civilization
  • setting - wilderness
  • African and white consciousness
  • Emperor Jones (henceforth EJ) assumes white mindset
  • collective vs individual consciousness
  • Negro identity from point of view of EJ and Smithers
  • elements: tom-tom beating, darkness in forest
  • charactersketch

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