Author Question: The decade of the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II prompted the postmodern shift from ... (Read 58 times)

bclement10 · **on:** Sep 28, 2018

The decade of the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II prompted the postmodern shift from an industrial Age (dominated by farming and manufacturing) to a(n)

A.
computer age.

B.
service-sector age.

C.
information age.

D.
neo-Renaissance age.

Question 2

Discuss the quest for gender equality as reflected in feminist literature and art.

What will be an ideal response?

Question 3

Discuss the quest for racial equality and its proponents in the arts.

What will be an ideal response?

joewallace · **Reply #1 on:** Sep 28, 2018

Answer to Question 1

C

Answer to Question 2

As with the struggle for racial equality, women over the world have struggled for gender equality. While women make up the majority of the population in many cultures, they have exercised little significant political or economic power. In the twentieth century, the quest for female liberation took the form of an international movement.
Although the history of feminismreaches back at least to the fourteenth century, it was not until the nineteenth century that issues of female equality took a forward place in the arts. In the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Angelina Grimk, and Virginia Woolf, misogyny and gender inequalities were highlighted, arguing for equal opportunity for education and economic advantage. Woolf, in her novels and essays, proposed that women could become powerful only by achieving financial and psychological independence from men. Freedom, she argued, is the prerequisite for creativity: for a woman to secure her own creative freedom, she must have money and the privacy provided by a room of her own. Building on Woolf's ideas of psychological independence, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that it is women themselves who complacently accept their subordinate position. De Beauvoir called on women everywhere to renounce all advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with men.
American feminist writers and artists took inspiration from the civil rights movement, and fought gender discrimination. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which claimed that American societyand commercial advertising in particularhad brainwashed women to prefer the roles of wives and mothers to other positions in life. Further, women began to decry the fact that women were woefully underrepresented in the history of culture and the arts. Change is happening, however, and since the middle of the twentieth century, the number of women in the visual artssculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, photographers Ana Mendieta and Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, are a few exampleshas been greater than ever before in history.

Answer to Question 3

The consequences of slavery were confronted head on during the civil rights era. Separation of the races by segregated housing, inferior schools, and exclusion from voting and equal employment were only a few of the inequities suffered by African-Americans in the post-emancipation United States. It was to these issues and to the more general problem of racism that many African-Americans addressed themselves after World War I. Much of this fight took place in the legal system and through political messages, led by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. However, artists also played a major role in the quest for racial equality.
Writers of the Harlem RenaissanceZora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, among otherscaptured the African-American experience through the use of slang dialect, the rhythms of jazz and blues, the musical qualities of the African oral tradition, as well as by expressing the anger of a people who had known physical punishment and repeated injustice at the hands of whites.