Unit 2 Checkpoint: Genealogy Paper
Assignment Overview
Write a 4–5 page paper analyzing one thinker from Unit 2: W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, or Marcus Garvey.
This assignment asks you to trace intellectual genealogies: to understand how these thinkers draw on, respond to, and transform the political thought of Unit 1 (David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Tubman).
Guiding Questions
Your paper should address all of the following:
On Intellectual Inheritance
- Which figures from Unit 1 is this thinker drawing on? Identify explicit references, thematic echoes, and conceptual inheritances from the slave narrative tradition and early African American political thought.
On Innovation
- What is this thinker adding to or changing from their predecessors? Analyze what new arguments, strategies, or insights they develop in response to the particular historical problems of their moment (1890–1945).
On Productive Resources
- What do the strengths of Unit 1 figures allow this thinker to accomplish? Where does the inherited tradition provide adequate intellectual resources for their analysis?
On Limitations
- What vulnerabilities or blindspots from Unit 1 figures persist in this thinker’s work? Analyze the genuine limits and tensions in their argument given the constraints of their historical position.
On Patterns
- How do the strengths and vulnerabilities of Unit 1 thinkers reappear in new forms in this thinker’s analysis? Identify patterns and recurring problems across the tradition.
Requirements
- Length: 4–5 pages
- Format: Chicago
- Due Date: Monday, March 16 at 11:59 PM
Tips for Success
- Use close textual analysis. Quote from both Unit 1 and Unit 2 texts to show the genealogical connections.
- Think about both explicit references and implicit echoes. Sometimes thinkers are in dialogue even without directly naming each other.
- Avoid purely descriptive summaries. The paper should make an argument about how ideas evolve and transform.
- Consider the historical context: What problems were Unit 2 thinkers responding to that Unit 1 thinkers were not?