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The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’S “The Vanishing Half” And Her Intent On Revealing The Unseen In The Tradition Of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue May 2022

The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’S “The Vanishing Half” And Her Intent On Revealing The Unseen In The Tradition Of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue

All Theses

Throughout the trajectory of passing literature, there have been varying projections of racial identity as it is intertwined with choice and power. Despite the many commonalities between the archetypal passing novel, the differences in the way that passing is demarcated in various novels is indicative of the racial climate out of which it came. This paper considers Britt Bennett’s 2020 novel, The Vanishing Half, as a socio-political artifact of an allegedly post-racial era. In considering Bennett’s novel as a reflection of post-raciality, a comparative study incorporating Nella Larsen’s Passing, Douglas Sirk’s Adaptation of Imitation of Life, and Danzy …


"Custome Is An Idiot": How Genre Bending Opens New Meanings For Hæc Vir, Or The Womanish Man, Stephen Montgomery-Anderson May 2022

"Custome Is An Idiot": How Genre Bending Opens New Meanings For Hæc Vir, Or The Womanish Man, Stephen Montgomery-Anderson

All Theses

Hæc Vir, or the Womanish Man is often conceived of as a satirical pamphlet. Moreover, scholars such as Linda Woodbridge and Simone Chess read the pamphlet as ultimately and explicitly arguing for a normative rendering of gender. Such readings, while acknowledging the rhetorical power and feminist nature of the crossdressed female character Hic Mulier’s arguments, invariably discount them in favor of a supposed return to normalcy. I instead suggest that Hic Mulier’s arguments be read as genuine and potentially altering. I further argue that we should read Hæc Vir as a closet drama. Bending the genre of the …


“People Like They Historical Shit In A Certain Way”: The Civil War Plays Of Suzan-Lori Parks, Or Commercialized Memory And Black Lives, Brandon Eric Fisher May 2022

“People Like They Historical Shit In A Certain Way”: The Civil War Plays Of Suzan-Lori Parks, Or Commercialized Memory And Black Lives, Brandon Eric Fisher

All Theses

Suzan-Lori Parks has explored the relationship between Blackness, slavery, and capitalism throughout her career. I argue that Parks’s three works—The America Play (1995), Topdog/Underdog (2001), and Father Comes Home from the Wars (2015)—should receive critical attention as her Civil War plays. By this phrase, I mean that Parks embeds her critiques of racial capitalism in historical narratives about America’s bloodiest conflict. In these three plays, she takes up several white supremacist Civil War tropes—tropes like what scholar Cody Marrs calls the “Father Abraham” story and the “Agrarian Imagination” myth—and criticizes them as narratives that deny African American history. To …


Enclosure In Flesh And Stone: Intermediaries And Access To God In Revelations Of Divine Love, Emily Danuser May 2022

Enclosure In Flesh And Stone: Intermediaries And Access To God In Revelations Of Divine Love, Emily Danuser

All Theses

In this thesis, I argue that in Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich uses the topic of enclosure (both in flesh and stone) as a means to delineate her arguments regarding the role of intermediaries and the way they can facilitate access to God while opening opportunities for dialogue within the broader public. Through a close-reading and historical contextualization of her writing on the topic of enclosure, I demonstrate that even some of Julian’s more controversial doctrinal claims can be reconciled if one understands the levels and role she assigned to intermediaries.