Contextualizing

All texts reflect historical and cultural assumptions, values, and attitudes that may differ from your own. To read thoughtfully, you need to become aware of these differences. Contextualizing is a critical reading strategy that enables you to make inferences about a reading’s historical and cultural context and to examine the differences between its context and your own.

The excerpt from King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a good example of a text that benefits from being read contextually. If you knew little about the history of slavery and segregation in the United States, it would be difficult to understand the passion expressed in this passage. To understand the historical and cultural context in which King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” you could do some library or Internet research. Comparing the situation at the time to situations with which you are familiar would help you understand some of your own attitudes toward King and the civil rights movement.

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Here is what one reader wrote to contextualize King’s writing:

I have seen documentaries showing civil rights demonstrators being attacked by dogs, doused by fire hoses, beaten and dragged by helmeted police. Such images give me a sense of the violence, fear, and hatred that King was responding to. The creative tension King refers to comes across in his writing. He uses his anger and frustration to inspire his critics. He also threatens them, although he denies it. I saw a film on Malcolm X, so I could see that King was giving white people a choice between his own nonviolent way and Malcolm’s more confrontational way.

Things have certainly changed since the 1960s. For one: Barack Obama was elected president for two terms! When I read King’s “Letter” today, I feel like I’m reading history. But then again, there have been a number of reports recently—often caught as cell-phone videos—of police brutality (like the death of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who was shot in the back eight times by a cop in North Charleston, South Carolina). Some people have also suggested that in recent elections, there have been efforts to deprive African Americans and other minorities of the right to vote in some areas of the country.

ANALYZE & WRITE

  1. Describe the historical and cultural situation as it is represented in the reading you have been working with and in other sources with which you are familiar. Your knowledge may come from other reading, television or film, school, or elsewhere. (If you know nothing about the historical and cultural context, you could do some library or Internet research.)

  2. Compare the historical and cultural situation in which the text was written with your own historical and cultural situation. Consider how your understanding and judgment of the reading are affected by your own context.