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The Black Plumb Line: Re-Evaluating Race And Africanist Images In Non-Black Authored American Texts, Lashondra Vanessa Robinson
The Black Plumb Line: Re-Evaluating Race And Africanist Images In Non-Black Authored American Texts, Lashondra Vanessa Robinson
Dissertations
This study evaluates Africanisms (representations of racialized or ethnicized blackness) within three contemporary non-black authors’ texts: Jewish American Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King, white southerner Melinda Haynes’ novel Mother of Pearl, and Nyurican poet Victor Hernández Cruz’s works “Mesa Blanca” and “White Table.” Though not entirely unproblematic, each selection somehow redefines black identity and agency to challenge denigrated representations of Africanist people and culture. In the process, each author subverts faulty components of American myths of racial purity, particularly stratifying black-white dualisms that promote whiteness, racial supremacy, and resulting undue privilege. This study also traces how Bellow, Haynes …
Bitter-Sweet Home: The Pastoral Ideal In African-American Literature, From Douglass To Wright, Robyn Merideth Preston-Mcgee
Bitter-Sweet Home: The Pastoral Ideal In African-American Literature, From Douglass To Wright, Robyn Merideth Preston-Mcgee
Dissertations
Discussions of the pastoral mode in American literary history frequently omit the complicated relationship between African Americans and the natural world, particularly as it relates to the South. The pastoral, as a sensibility, has long been an important part of the southern identity, for the mythos of the South long depended upon its association with a new “Garden of the World” image, a paradise dependent upon slave labor and a racial hierarchy to sustain it. For African Americans, the rural South has been both a home and a place of violence and oppression, particularly during the period of slavery through …
"I Unsex'd My Dress": Lord Byron's Seduction Of Gender In "The Corsair", "Lara", And "Don Juan", Alexis Spiceland Lee
"I Unsex'd My Dress": Lord Byron's Seduction Of Gender In "The Corsair", "Lara", And "Don Juan", Alexis Spiceland Lee
Dissertations
The goal of this project is to posit a theory of how Byron’s texts, specifically through the development of his hero, construct gender and sexuality as styles of seduction that resist easy classification by binary systems. I propose that Byron’s works characterize gender through ironic performances of seduction that, because they reveal that binary structures lack a stable core, dissolve systemic differentiation and thus fatally complicate any attempt to force the individual into rigid categories of gender or sexual identity. Byron’s works deploy seduction as a tactic of ironic representation of both gender and sexual practice that is necessarily multiplicitous …