Black Shack Alley, Zobel
Hello everyone! Week 6's reading is Black Shack Alley by Joseph Zobel, the longest book we have read so far. While past books were able to delve into topics in immense detail with only a small amount of pages, I liked that this reading had more space in order to fully explore its topics of colonialism, slavery, and growing up in this time. Specifically, it follows a boy growing up in Martinique, an island colonized by France, in the 1920s. To touch on the inclusion of the glossary in the beginning of the book, I believe this inclusion was important, especially for a book that touches on colonialism. In this course we are reading translated versions of books that were originally written in romance languages, and including this glossary made me think about how we may be losing some of the original readings by reading translated versions. I think language is a very important part of culture and nationality that can be lost, so I really liked that some key terms were not turned ...