Essay On The Beat Generation

1943 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Jack Kerouac and the beat generation

Racist Depictions of Latinos/as in Beat Generation Literature

Studies regarding the Beat Generation have pulsated over the years since the movement itself was at its peak, but what has endured throughout the fifty years since their emergence is Beat literature’s popularity with the general public. To further add to the Beat’s influence, their literature has also had a tremendous impact on the American literary canon. During the past two decades, primary source materials of the Beat movement continue to be published. Major film adaptations are also being produced from some of their most influential works and their personal lives. The Beat Generation’s literature has been looked at through many different perspectives ranging from anthropological to sociological. Some have analyzed that the Beat’s—particularly Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs—were racist in their depictions of African Americans, but little research has been done regarding their depictions towards Latinos/as. The review of literature has shown that few to none have looked at the Beat’s racism toward Latinos/as and their culture despite the fact that they spent a significant amount of time in Mexico.
Who was the Beat Generation?

The Beat Generation was a subculture that arose from the post World War II Bohemian culture in the United States. Bohemians can be defined as persons, artists, who live an unconventional life, usually amongst others also practicing this lifestyle. Bohemianism, as such, has always had a strong affiliation with the development of avant-garde as movements within art; significantly, Bohemia has been called the “underworld of art.” The Bohemian culture itself “is characterized by an active, though perhaps, irregular communalism and group dyn...

... middle of paper ...

...hemselves from the mainstream American society, they weren’t so far from the period regarding their racist views. The time period that the Beats were most active was around the 1950s, and racism was still a norm during that time. So, although for many, the Beat Generation of writers—with their public refusal of social and cultural norms and their way of life governed by the pursuit of pleasure, belief, and truth—are celebrated for their literature, I would like to revisit their work. There has been little to no analyses regarding the Beat Generation’s depictions of Latinos/as, despite the fact that this minority group is depicted in multiple works by the Beats. I plan to see whether Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs’ social mores regarding racism reflect in their work by comparing their personal letters, journals, and essays to their published novels and poetry.

Show More
Related

  • The Hip Hop Generation Summary

    1126 Words  | 3 Pages

    In one of the chapters, ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ the author reveals how blacks in America use the music to express their anger and commitment to emerge as great people in an unfair community. Most songs are written to educate the society on the negative effects of racism. They encourage the society to love one another and embrace unity. The human nature is founded through a social platform where philosophers claim that people were created to love one another and live with peace and unity. Through this book, it is clear that the blacks in the hip-hop generation are money minded. However, this is expected in a world where the economy is tough. The author claims that the youth are the people who are majorly affected by racism. Many of them have been arrested for pity mistakes which are magnified in the courts due to the impression that the society has on the black people. They engage in dirty activities like drug dealings that that put them on the wrong side of the

    Read More

  • Summary Of Our Spiritual Strivings By W. E. B Dubois

    1141 Words  | 3 Pages

    It is no secret that there is a complicated history with race in America. The issue has been discussed by scholars such as Sterling Brown or W.E.B Dubois. Brown’s article, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors” outlines a variety of common stereotypes for black characters in American literature from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. DuBois went a step further in his essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”, in which he outlined his theory of “double-consciousness”, a theory that has shown itself time and time again, especially in hip hop. Kanye’s West’s fifth studio album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”, takes listeners on a lyrical journey through common stereotypes and double-consciousness. For example,

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Don 'T Hate Me Because I' M Beautiful

    1191 Words  | 3 Pages

    Rap started as a social movement during the mid-1970’s, once the 80’s arrived it started expanding dramatically, and became popular among white suburban youth. During the late 1980s and early 1990s rap became overtly political with its messages, which expanded its popularity further. Unfortunately, political rap lost its popularity in the mid-1990s; regardless of this artists and their voices have been marginalized because of corporate control. Although there does not seem to be a direct connection between rap music and its whitening, the author claims that it is not coincidental. Despite the political messages within the genre, rap has been viewed through a racist

    Read More

  • The Use of Drugs by 1950s Artists

    4706 Words  | 10 Pages

    Tytell, John. "The Beat Generation and the Continuing American Revolution". American Scholar 42 (1973): 308-317.

    Read More

  • Masculinity In Hip Hop

    1594 Words  | 4 Pages

    When looking at the landscape of Hip-Hop among African Americans, from the spawn of gangsta rap in the mid 1980s to current day, masculinity and an idea of hardness is central to their image and performance. Stereotypical to Black masculinity, the idea of a strong Black male - one who keeps it real, and is defiant to the point of violence - is prevalent in the genre. This resistant, or even compensatory masculinity, encompasses: the hyper masculinity rife in the Western world, misogyny, and homophobia, all noticeable in their lyrics, which is in part a result of their containment within the Black community. The link of masculinity and rap music was established due to this containment, early innovators remaking public spaces in their segregated neighbourhoods. A notion of authentic masculinity arose from the resistant nature of the genre, but the move to the mainstream in the 90s created a contradiction to their very image - resistance. Ultimately, this in part led to the construction of the masculinity defined earlier, one that prides itself on its authenticity. I’ll be exploring how gender is constructed and performed in Hip Hop, beginning with a historical framework, with the caveat of showing that differing masculine identities in the genre, including artists

    Read More

  • Essay On The Beatnik Riot

    815 Words  | 2 Pages

    In 1961, previous to the outbreak of Occupy Wall Street, Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park was filled with three–thousand young beatnik protestors. Playing instruments and singing folk music symbolized the starvation that these young folks wanted of freedom and equality for America. Protestors demonstrated mixed cultures, individualistic beliefs that went against the status quo of America after the post-war years. The Beatnik Riot involved young traditional Americans fighting not just for the musical crisis of that time, but for the social, racial, and cultural segregations that were brought on by the years of war. Acting as a catalytic reaction, the Beatnik Riot put in motion a new modernized America.

    Read More

  • Hip-Hop: A Voice for the Chican@-Latin@ Community

    2213 Words  | 5 Pages

    In the words of rapper Busta Rhymes, “hip-hop reflects the truth, and the problem is that hip-hop exposes a lot of the negative truth that society tries to conceal. It’s a platform where we could offer information, but it’s also an escape” Hip-hop is a culture that emerged from the Bronx, New York, during the early 1970s. Hip-Hop was a result of African American and Latino youth redirecting their hardships brought by marginalization from society to creativity in the forms of MCing, DJing, aerosol art, and breakdancing. Hip-hop serves as a vehicle for empowerment while transcending borders, skin color, and age. However, the paper will focus on hip-hop from the Chican@-Latin@ population in the United States. In the face of oppression, the Chican@-Latin@ population utilized hip hop music as a means to voice the community’s various issues, desires, and in the process empower its people.

    Read More

  • Jack Kerouac’s On The Road - The Impact of Dean on Sal's Identity

    1030 Words  | 3 Pages

    Tytell, John. Naked Angels: the Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

    Read More

  • Essay On Hip Hop

    1735 Words  | 4 Pages

    Since hip-hop has expanded from the undergrounds in Bronx in the 70’s it has grew into a popular accepted music genre. Consequently, as it progressed from the golden age it gradually grew away from its original roots. If one were to evaluate the change of lyrics in hip-hop, they would see a difference between early hip-hop and today’s hip-hop. The current state of hip-hop is in a stage where things like hey young world are outdated. Instead of broadcasting out a positive message, hip-hop sends out a message of sex, drug, and violence. The early musicians who helped solidify hip-hop, by producing music that told stories on subjects of race, respect, or even music that had a positive message.

    Read More

  • Latino Music

    1800 Words  | 4 Pages

    I grew up listening to Hip-Hop just as I did listening to my mother’s blaring Bachata and Merengue every Sunday morning and from what I can recall, the artists I primarily listened to were black, or Eminem. The only Spanish rappers I did listen to were Reggaeton artists, meaning I did not listen to many predominately English speaking Latino rappers. This revelation of my early musical tastes begs the question as to why I was not exposed to more Latino rappers during the late nineties and early millennium. In learning about how Latino’s have participated within the realm of Hip-Hop, one learns that while Latino’s have played a major role in its foundations, the call for a strong identity has emerged due to various group’s rejections of the Latino presence. In order to understand the distinct contributions of Latinos in regards to Hip Hop and how they have been taken advantage of and such, one must be aware of the areas of Latino influence within the genre over the years.

    Read More

  • Africanist Presence in American Culture

    549 Words  | 2 Pages

    In 1960, the American sociologist Paul Goodman published his seminal work, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society. Having observed that, since World War II, there had been an increasing rise in juvenile delinquency – especially amongst white, middle-class, educated males – Goodman set out to study both the source and forms of delinquency. Simply put, he wanted to understand why and how young men were rebelling not just from the previous generation but from society as a whole. Goodman ultimately posited that having been frustrated by an increasingly bureaucratic and corporate culture, the only way for these young men to begin forging their personal identities was to reject the very middle-class culture and values from which they had emerged. Goodman then discovered that many of these young men began to find solace and freedom, to quote Allen Ginsberg, “by dragging themselves through negro hipster streets.” These middle-class young men – or what Goodman would ultimately label as “the white negroes” – found for themselves an entirely new cultural frontier by embracing what they felt to be the only free space available: within the bosom of black culture. The fact middle-class, white males listening to “black music” would hardly raise an eyebrow today only serves as a testament to the enduring power of blackness as a cultural trope. Whether it be jazz in the 1950s or hip-hop at the turn of the century, white youth have continued to find avenues of self-expression and self-formation through what Toni Morrison calls an Africanist presence.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Hip Hop

    1282 Words  | 3 Pages

    Hip Hop a grass movement started in 1974 in the South Bronx in New York City. Created to end gang violence, a voice for the underrepresented minority. Rap music is critical to understanding the hip hop generation’s gender crisis, a crisis between sexes that allows African American males to blatantly disrespect African American women for the sake of the culture. The consistent referencing of African American women as ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ and the hyper sexualization of their bodies is harmful to the African American community. These images instill that it is alright to represent black women in this nature, and harmful to the young girls who are intaking all these negative images. Harmful to both the perspective of young men and women Hip-Hop is like a pillar in the African American culture. It represents how each generation views themselves in this society and how they internalized these narratives. In this essay I will summarize the main arguments in Chapter 7 of Gender talk , discuss the creation and deconstruction on views

    Read More

  • The History of Hip Hop Music and Its Transition to Popular Music

    893 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hip hop has multiple branches of style and is a culture of these. This essay will examine Hip Hop from the point of view of the following three popular music scholars, Johnson, Jeffries and Smitherman. It will delve deeper into their understanding of what hip hop is and its relation to the different people that identify with its message and contents. It will also identify the history of Hip hop and its transition into popular music. In particular this essay will focus on what hip hop represents in the black community and how it can be used as a social movement against inequalities faced by them. This will then open up the discussion for the how this has influenced society, and the impact it has had in terms of race issues which hip hop itself often represents through music.

    Read More

  • The White Negro Analysis

    2120 Words  | 5 Pages

    By carefully analyzing the synapses between the existential Negro and the Hipster, we can deduce the reflections on the wider umbrella of American popular culture. The elements of music, politics, language and general human characteristics resulting from American popular culture all worked together to create the “white negro”- a person who can be simply referred to as a white person with black or “negro”

    Read More

  • Allen Ginsberg and American Protest Literature

    1363 Words  | 3 Pages

    Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was an important figure in the Beat Generation Movement that took place right before the revolutionary American 60¡¦s. Other major beat writers (also called ¡§beatnicks¡¨) were: Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. The beat poetry was meant to be oral and very effective in readings. It developed out of poetry readings in underground clubs.(a beautiful image of these secret clubs can be found in the movie called ¡§Dead Poet¡¦s Society¡¨ with Robin Williams playing the main character). Some argued that it was the grandparent of rap music. The term ¡§Beat Generation¡¨ was coined by Kerouac in the fall of the 1948 in New York City. The word ¡§beat¡¨ referred loosely to their shared sense of spiritual exhaustion and diffuse feelings of rebellion against what they experienced as the general conformity, hypocrisy and materialism of a larger society around them caught up in he unprecedented prosperity of postwar America.

    Read More

More about Essay On The Beat Generation

Open Document