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Attica Locke's "Black Water Rising" (2009) - Coggle Diagram
Attica Locke's "Black Water Rising" (2009)
Overview of the text
• Attica Locke’s “Black Water Rising” (2009) is a crime thriller novel that centres around an African-American lawyer called Jay Porter, a working-class lawyer living in 1981 Houston who was placed against a society that supports the exploitation of the land for oil reserves while discriminating people of colour for access to these resources.
Locke’s novel covers themes of individualism, commerce, capital and corporate greed in 1980s Houston, Texas. It observes how oil companies represented by the fictional Cole Oil Industries shape industrialised environments by promoting unfair labour relationships between black and white people.
Locke shifts from the 1980s America to the 1970s with the presence of the civil rights demonstrations, to challenge the sustainability of equal race relations. It also calls attention to the “New Jim Crow” culture enforced by white people that still affects social relationships in different work environments (Kim, Julie H., 2014).
Setting the Context
Locke's BWR is set against the energy crises of the 1970s to ask whether progress has been made since then and whether people's lives have improved. The 1970s saw substantial social, political, and economic changes in American society.
In 1973, the United States faced an energy crisis caused by oil shortages and higher oil prices as a result of the OAPEC embargo. Because the US did not have enough gasoline sources, the US economic market struggled to adapt to fulfil worldwide demands. As a result, there was a lot of inflation and unemployment. The US government aimed to tackle the oil crisis by reducing gas supplies which would help save energy.
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