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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Consent In Conversation: Education Of Sexual Violence In Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Emily Benning Apr 2023

Consent In Conversation: Education Of Sexual Violence In Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Emily Benning

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

Maya Angelou’s memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is just one of many titles challenged and banned in public schools for “sexually explicit” content. On page 71 of her 281 page autobiography, Angelou discloses that she was raped at 8 years old by her mother’s boyfriend, and despite it being followed with scenes that emphasize the value of healing through literature, public attention has been directed to the (non-consensual) intercourse itself as a reason for censorship. As censorship efforts have expanded in the past two decades, challengers have continued to add more ban-worthy qualities to the list …


Black Women’S Wellbeing: The Intersections Of Race, Immigrant Status, And Mental Health Among African Diasporan Women In Houston, Texas, Sianneh Vesslee Jul 2019

Black Women’S Wellbeing: The Intersections Of Race, Immigrant Status, And Mental Health Among African Diasporan Women In Houston, Texas, Sianneh Vesslee

African American and Africana Studies Summer Fellows

My central research question is: how has white supremacy impacted African Diaspora women’s mental health, access to mental healthcare, and identities as mental health patients in the United States as discernible in advertisements and state policies for psychological wellness? More specifically, I will investigate whether and/or how white supremacy shapes the ways in which advertising and state policies for mental healthcare address the particular needs of black women who immigrate to Houston, Texas from Lagos, Nigeria and Coahuila, Mexico. I choose those geographies because Houston is a U.S. city with one of the highest populations of black immigrants from Nigeria …


Statistical Plight Of Black Women, Kimberly-Joy M. Walters Jul 2016

Statistical Plight Of Black Women, Kimberly-Joy M. Walters

Sociology Summer Fellows

The purpose of this research is to examine how television shows and their portrayals of professional Black women impact the interpretation of marriage rates by race and perpetuate ideologies about the angry, unlovable Black woman. Using a content analysis of cable and network television shows with Black professional women as lead characters, this study connects an analysis of the characters’ lived experiences to normative expectations of Black women in relationships to call into question the prevailing narrative that Black women are in part personally responsible for their statistical plight. I will closely study how the two stereotypes, the Jezebel and …


Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith Dec 2015

Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith

English Faculty Publications

Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …