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Rationale

For my final e-portfolio I have chosen to include my two reflection essays on the movies
we viewed in class this semester, Twelve Years a Slave and Django, a revised version of my
midterm essay, a syllabus designed for a college class on slavery in the literary imagination with
a particular focus on the militant abolitionist tradition, and a review of Walkers Appeal by David
Walker (and obviously my about the blogger section). The short essays were the easiest to
select for revision and inclusion in this final project. Although I greatly enjoyed studying the
various ways in which slavery was engaged in the African American literary imagination, these
ideas were made all the more interesting to me through their portrayal in film. Examining
slavery in this context creates many more elements to be considered in its portrayal, such as
score, camera angles, etc. Additionally, both the major films we watched in this class were made
very recently, which allows us to consider the way our view of slavery has changed in the years
since its narratives were first being written.
For Twelve Years a Slave I only made minor revisions; my goal with that essay was
mostly to add that the differences between the narrative and the film were valuable to the films
general portrayal of slavery. I think when I first wrote the reflection I was more critical of the
liberties that were taken in creating the film, but now I feel that any changes to the structure of
the narrative were beneficial for the sake of addressing a wider scope of issues related to the
slave condition. I was more invasive with my essay on Django: Unchained though. At first I
felt that Tarantino was successful in his attempt to criticize slavery with his usual comical
violence but after our discussion in class I decided that he was overreaching at least a little. He
definitely approaches an attempt to satirize the condition of slavery, but crosses one too many
lines for the attempt to be totally successful. Ultimately it comes off more as a slave narrative

taken out of context in his typically campy gory style than a legitimate attempt to criticize
slavery and the way it is portrayed in other media.
In spite of these misgivings I chose to include Django among other texts in the syllabus I
created for a college course. Since we have already spent the past semester reading and
discussing texts that almost all fall into the peaceful or neutral abolitionist camp (and because I
already wrote my research paper about this), I chose to focus my own class around texts that
examine the militant tradition of slavery and abolition. The majority of these texts were
circulating in the early to mid-1800s when ideas of abolition were already being articulated
throughout the United States, but I have included a few modern-day interpretations of and
reactions to this tradition as well. The course begins with an examination of Walkers Appeal and
following criticisms of it, then explores resulting publications including several texts and later a
movie that focus on Nat Turners Rebellion. In my creation of the syllabus this Rebellion
inadvertently became the focus of the course, but many of the works that engage it also talk
about other aspects of the tradition in relation to it.
For my review of a work I have read outside of class I talked about Walkers Appeal,
which I am already extremely familiar with because I wrote my research paper about it. I
thought an examination of this work would fit in nicely with my syllabus and provide a
refreshing contrast to my papers on the works we have read in class, as well as a possible middle
ground between these papers and my reflection on Django. In my review I give a basic
summary of each part of Walkers Appeal and explain how this makes it such a revolutionary text
for its day. This text was one of the first and most radical publications of its time, and serves as
an important stepping stone on the road to abolition in the American south.

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