As many of you know by now, the video for Childish Gambino’s song “This Is America” became viral instantaneously. Once it reached viral status, here came the cultural critics telling us decidedly all the symbols, connections, and statements the video was making and referencing that we most certainly didn’t know ourselves. Childish Gambino references cultural and historical periods, artifacts, and movements for a particular purpose that many, many people have written about. I want you to not only find as many of the articles about this video that you can that do this work, but I also want you to research all the symbols the video references.
For your final, I would like you to write a fan fiction of this video, i.e. you will write a piece of short fiction inspired by the video itself. Your main character will be one of the characters depicted in the music video, except Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino. Within this short fiction, I want you to integrate both the title of the song, as well as all of the lyrics within the text of your fiction itself – don’t worry about repeating repeated phrases, every distinct line/sentence will do. This should be fan fiction – in other words, the story itself can be provoked by the video, but do not merely tell the story/plot of the video itself, but use the video as the jumping off point for your own story. At least one symbol employed in the video (and what it symbolizes, which you would have learned from the research you did as explained in the first paragraph), however, should be included in your story in some way. Otherwise, the choice is yours.5-7 pages double spaced, minimum.
NO LATE ASSIGNMENTS ACCEPTED.
When you use any other sources within your story, including lyrics, please cite them using footnotes. In your footnote, give author, and title of work. For example, when you integrate one of the quotes from the song, your footnote would read: Childish Gambino, “This Is America.”
Reminder: The protagonist of your story can be anyone EXCEPT Childish Gambino – that is way too easy! 😉 If you do not know what fan fiction is, please take a few minutes and look it up as it is a rapidly evolving substantial subgenre of literature!