1. Race in Cane by Jean Toomer
Before transatlantic slavery, Caribs the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean islands had their own slaves, who were forced into slavery mainly due to what we would now consider to be classism. ... Orlando Patterson noted that this tradition was forced upon slaves to mark the morning of their own death: 'the shorn head of a slave was a permanent condition of liminality and that he the slave must forever mourn his own death'.20 Toomer uses the aesthetic of hair to show the ways in which his characters mourn their own social death within society, that they essentially have no socia...
- Word Count: 3347
- Approx Pages: 13