To the right, I chose to analyze a political cartoon about Nike sweatshop labor. This artifact surfaced on an anti-sweatshop Ezine (a magazine only available on the web) right after a Bangladesh sweatshop fire in November of 2012 that killed 112 people and injured hundreds.
This is an important American contemporary artifact because it depicts current "slave like" conditions, even though slavery was abolished over a century ago. The boss of the "sweatshop" I think is portrayed as a slave master. He has pointy "shark" like teeth, spikes on his shoes, he is triple the size of the workers. All these characteristics must instill great fear in the workers. A vary obvious feature of the man is that he is white, while all the the workers are colored, which make them look even more like "civil war era" slaves. The workers are weak, wearing the same outfit (in different colors), a minority race, and sitting on a bench working with a machine that has smoke spewing from it. If this image doesn't scream SLAVERY to you, you must be from another planet.
This artifact relates to my American Studies class because we spent a lot of time talking about slavery, civil rights, and sweatshop labor. Throughout these past five months, our class has analyzed countless numbers of texting ranging from movies to short stories, so I would like to analyze three different texts--a historical document, short story, NPR audio clip--and show the striking parallels between the texts and my artifact.
