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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell
"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, …
To "Plant Our Trees On American Soil, And Repose Beneath Their Shade": Africa, Colonization, And The Evolution Of A Black Identity Narrative In The United States, 1808-1861, Edward Jason Vickers
To "Plant Our Trees On American Soil, And Repose Beneath Their Shade": Africa, Colonization, And The Evolution Of A Black Identity Narrative In The United States, 1808-1861, Edward Jason Vickers
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This work explores the role that ideas about Africa played in the development of a specifically American identity among free blacks in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to the Civil War. Previous studies of the writings of free blacks in the Revolutionary period, and of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was devoted to removing them back to an African homeland, have suggested that black discussions of Africa virtually disappeared after 1816, when the colonization movement began. However, as this work illustrates, the letters, books, newspapers, and organizational records produced by free blacks in the antebellum era …
Slavery On Their Minds: Representing The Institution In Children's Picture Books, Raphael E. Rogers
Slavery On Their Minds: Representing The Institution In Children's Picture Books, Raphael E. Rogers
Doctoral Dissertations
This study examines how slavery is represented in contemporary children’s picture books. Given that many primary and secondary school teachers are committed to using picture book fiction to teach students about slavery, it is necessary to explore how slavery is depicted in these texts. One of the goals of this study is to contribute to the discussion about how the featured picture books engage with and respond to the early historiography of slavery, which asserted that Black slave were content and docile and that slave owners were kind and paternalistic. This study seeks to analyze how the picture books that …
Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin
Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …