Harlem Hopscotch Essay

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Napoleon and Tabitha Dumo’s “Maya Angelou’s Harlem Hopscotch: Official Music Video” uses dance and rhythmic music to express the social, political, and cultural issues that are ailing American society. Dumo’s video describes the state of racism in America from Harlem to Hollywood. In Maya Angelou’s poem “Harlem Hopscotch” she incorporates the children's game hopscotch with the everyday life of the African American’s in harlem. While the poem is directed towards Harlem, the music video is aimed at all of American society. Maya Angelou recites her poem “Harlem Hopscotch” over rhythmic music while the video displays people of all races dancing. The video showcases many different people and styles of dance to make the message universal. The first scene of the video is shown in black and white of a man on the streets of Harlem. It goes on to show the fast paced movement from the east to the west coast. The video ends in Hollywood with a scene shot in color of a group of people dancing to the rhythm of Angelou’s poem.
Race conflict in American society is the main theme of Napoleon and Tabitha Dumo’s video. The video uses Angelou’s poem as a way to reinvent her main theme of African American struggle, to show that racism is still …show more content…

Harlem Hopscotch portrays the life of the aforementioned blacks as a round of hopscotch. As originally indicated by Angelou in the poem version, several stanzas of the poem exhibit the possibility of neediness. The ballad starts with the guidelines for playing regular rounds of Hopscotch. The verses are composed utilizing a third-person account of the ongoings of the sidewalk, aside from the last line of the ballad, which utilizes the individual pronoun “I”; this makes the sonnet illustrative of both the Harlem locals with the addition of the speaker at the time of the ‘I’s’ mentioning, as well as an inference throughout the entirety of the

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