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The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez Sep 2016

The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a provocative style of autobiographical verse had emerged in postwar America, literary critics christened the new genre “confessional poetry.” Confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s are often characterized by scholars of contemporary poetry as a cohort of writers who, unlike previous generations before them, dared to explore in their work the personal and inherited traumas of mental illness, family suicides, failed marriages, and crushing addictions. As a result, the body of work these writers produced is often experienced as a collection of stylized, literary self-portraits. What can these self-portraits reveal to us about the connection between confessional poetry …


Sacred Freedom: Sustaining Afrocentric Spiritual Jazz In 21st Century Chicago, Adam Zanolini Sep 2016

Sacred Freedom: Sustaining Afrocentric Spiritual Jazz In 21st Century Chicago, Adam Zanolini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the historical and ideological headwaters of a certain form of Great Black Music that I call Afrocentric spiritual jazz in Chicago. However, that label is quickly expended as the work begins by examining the resistance of these Black musicians to any label. I theorize that this resistance is due to the experiences of Black history, throughout which labels have been used to enslave, exploit, and control people. I begin by discussing early musical labels, several important n-words, and then the innovation of African diasporic subjecthood and its labels. Then Black is examined, along with several corollary social …


Engagement And Resistance: African Americans, Saudi Arabia And Islamic Transnationalisms, 1975 To 2000, Jeffrey Diamant Sep 2016

Engagement And Resistance: African Americans, Saudi Arabia And Islamic Transnationalisms, 1975 To 2000, Jeffrey Diamant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1960s, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has financed missionary efforts to Muslims around the world, attempting to spread a Salafi form of Islam that professes strict adherence to Islamic sacred scripture. The effects of this transnational proselytization have depended on numerous factors in “host countries.” This project explores the various impacts of Saudi transnational religious influence in the United States among African-Americans. By relying on previously unused documentary sources and fresh oral histories, it shows how Saudi “soft power” attempted to effect change in religious practices of African-American Muslims from 1975 through 2000. It provides the most detailed …


What The Tides May Bring: Political "Tigueraje" Disposession And Popular Dissent In Samaná, Dominican Republic, Ryan A. Mann-Hamilton Jun 2016

What The Tides May Bring: Political "Tigueraje" Disposession And Popular Dissent In Samaná, Dominican Republic, Ryan A. Mann-Hamilton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is a historical and ethnographic project that delves into the conflictive relationship between the development of the Dominican state and the formation of the community of the port city of Samaná. The African diasporic community of Samaná has actively constructed the local space throughout shifting political projects, while sustaining their collective voices against the waves of dispossession crashing on their shores. Using a combination of archival research, participant observation, oral history and ethnography, I document multiple instances of state intervention to understand how the Samaná community has been coerced over time to consent to these processes. I juxtapose …


Descent: American Individualism, American Blackness And The Trouble With Invention, Simone White Jun 2016

Descent: American Individualism, American Blackness And The Trouble With Invention, Simone White

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Descent is metacritical, ranging across disciplines to take up – as flash points or instances – failed attempts to revolutionize knowledge, considering these as descents, or movements into the deep, that remain stiff or un-poetic in their attitudes toward the American truisms “individualism,” “blackness” and “invention.” Beginning with William Carlos Williams’ formulation of descent (as a practice necessary for establishing national literary identity) in In the American Grain, the project resolves around the question, How can the critic make peace with her desire to dominate the object of critique by proposing its perpetual sameness in relation to the critic? …


A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki Jun 2016

A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …


A Means To An End: Articulations Of Diasporic Blackness, Class And Survival Among Female Afro-Caribbean Service Workers In New York City, Christine A. Pinnock Jun 2016

A Means To An End: Articulations Of Diasporic Blackness, Class And Survival Among Female Afro-Caribbean Service Workers In New York City, Christine A. Pinnock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the oral histories and personal narratives of Afro-Caribbean women who migrated to New York from 1961-2008 and explores how they articulate and negotiate multiple identities surrounding diasporic Blackness, class, and gender. This dissertation studies Afro-Caribbean women in the spaces they live namely, the Northeast Bronx, New York City, and Westchester and takes an interdisciplinary approach to theorize Afro-Caribbean women's experiences. Based on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, this study explores the challenges of Afro-Caribbean women working in the service sector who perform as: domestics, healthcare workers, retail workers, and food service workers and …


Suburbs In Black And White: Race, Jobs & Poverty In Twentieth-Century Long Island, Tim Keogh Jun 2016

Suburbs In Black And White: Race, Jobs & Poverty In Twentieth-Century Long Island, Tim Keogh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Suburbs in Black and White” examines how economic development shaped African American suburbanization on Long Island, New York from 1920 through 1980. After 1940, the fortunes of Long Island’s growing black population shifted from widespread poverty to upward social mobility, though by the 1960s, a divide emerged between the rising black middle class and black working poor, and distinctly ‘black’ suburbs emerged with problems familiar to postwar inner cities. While urban racial inequality is often framed in terms of housing segregation and the city/suburb divide, census and labor market data reveal that structural economic change across the New York metropolitan …


Locked In: Melancholia In The Modern American Prison Literature Of R. Dwayne Betts And Jarvis Jay Masters, Johnna Scrabis Feb 2016

Locked In: Melancholia In The Modern American Prison Literature Of R. Dwayne Betts And Jarvis Jay Masters, Johnna Scrabis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the theme of melancholia in the writing of currently and formerly incarcerated African American men during the late 20th and early 21st century. Melancholia, with its rich history in literature from ancient times to the present, is discernable in the works of many people with prison experience. In their writing, melancholia is expressed primarily as a loss and as a disconnection with time, as well as an empowering creative force. The work of Jarvis Jay Masters and R. Dwayne Betts reflects the paradox of melancholia: just as it shows the depressive element of the condition, …


The Fictions Of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, And The Construction Of Race In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867), Philip E. Kadish Feb 2016

The Fictions Of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, And The Construction Of Race In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867), Philip E. Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fictions of Whiteness argues that political beliefs preceded and determined the race science theories which nineteenth century American white novelists applied or invoked in their work, the inverse of the current critical consensus. For issues ranging from Indian removal to slavery and Reconstruction, and utilizing theories from of Condorcet, Buffon, Camper, Louis Agassiz, James Pritchard, Johannes Blumenbach, and George Borrow these authors shifted allegiances to divergent race theories between and within works, applied those theories selectively to white, black, and Indians characters, and applied the same scientific race theories to politically divergent rhetorical ends. By analyzing shifting application of different …