Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Village On The Stage: Dramaturgies Of Modernity In African Concert Dance, Margit N. Edwards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, The Village on the Stage: Dramaturgies of Modernity in African Concert Dance, analyzes the underlying theatrical logic in African concert dance through a dramaturgical model I call the village on the stage. The village on the stage dramaturgy has had multiple iterations over the 20^th and 21^st centuries both across the African continent and the African diaspora. Commonly presented within the world-dance market as neo-traditional African dance, the village on the stage refers to a set of practices of staging traditional dance and music of Africa and the African diaspora and serves as a …

The Core Of It All: From The Forest To The Concrete Jungle, Ayo Andra J. Deas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Core of It All is a component of principle within Fasaha. The mission of Fasaha is to implement programming directed toward development of one’s Core through self-actualization. Self-Actualization is defined as bringing forth the total essential qualities of one’s own consciousness, character, and identity through positive behavior. Throughout this manuscript, principle is defined as the standard of natural essential qualities determining intrinsic consciousness, character and identity. Programming is defined as providing with intrinsic instructions for the automatic performance of a task.

Fasaha is a support service that enhances the existing organization’s service. Throughout this dissertation, it will be apparent …

A Journey To A Black Woman’S (Read Black Girl’S) Joy And Her Story Of Coming Home, Brittany Lauren Brock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an auto/ethnography about the self-actualizing journey of reclaiming storytelling as my native tongue and my journey to joy. Throughout, using my story and the stories of so many others, I not only lay out the wounds (the pain, the loss, then the hope that comes) within the academy and outside in the world but I also use storytelling as a tool of healing—my tool of healing—to show how I wrote myself free.

When Black women (read Black girls) go through The Reckoning (the moment we realize something isn’t right with how we are perceived by others) …

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.

‘The Power Of Three Will Set Us Free': Witchy Womanist Readings Of Toni Morrison’S Sula, Opal Palmer Adisa’S It Begins With Tears, And Migdalia Cruz’S The Have-Little And Miriam’S Flowers, Anamaría Flores

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Witchy womanism is a critical methodology for reading, teaching, and writing about literature in order to generate emancipatory knowledge, activate Queer, Black, and Indigenous consciousnesses, contribute to 21^st century women’s, Black, and Indigenous liberation movements, and foster (re)connections to ancestral rituals and knowledge. Born at the intersections of Black Studies, BIPOC Queer and Gender Studies, Caribbean Studies, English, Hip-Hop Studies and Latinx Studies, “‘The Power of Three Will Set Us Free’: Witchy Womanist Readings of Toni Morrison's Sula, Opal Palmer Adisa's It Begins With Tears, and Migdalia Cruz's The Have-Little and Miriam's Flowers" is a multidisciplinary …

A Blackgirl Artivisionary Mosaic: Art-Based Participatory Refusals To School Punishment, Tyese A. Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study participants were co-research partners and engaged in a Project Based Learning six-week summer project in an urban northeastern metropolis community-based non-profit where they received stipends for participation. This dissertation explored how Blackgirls (aged 14 -21) express their experiences with disparate school punishment through community-based participatory artmaking. We called the photos, poems, collages, sculptures, storyboards, digital art, visual art, songs, spoken word, and videos Artivisions (art I vision). In the Jam Sessions, a subset of the partners we called curators discussed the pieces, shared their experiences, and offered insight into Blackgirls’ responses, coping skills, and decision-making regarding school punishment. …

White Supremacist Print Culture And The Creation Of White Working-Class Ideology In 1860s New York City, Anna Meyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

J. H. Van Evrie believed in the biological basis of white racial supremacy and Black inferiority beliefs which he spread in his publications throughout the 19^th century. He generated support for Copperhead politicians, pro-slavery Northern Democrats, who would enact his racial policies, in his newspaper the Weekly Caucasian, published in New York City during the Civil War. He adapted the presentation of his racial theories to appeal to the economic concerns of among working-class white men and Irish immigrants by using allegories about the Civil War. The newspaper created a sense of white nationalism and racial solidarity with …

Politics Of Refusal: Justice And Liberation For Black Trans Lives, Quincy Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the challenges faced by Black trans people. In this thesis, I will explore how protest is used to highlight and confront the obstacles faced by the Black trans community. I will also examine the cultural work of Black trans people and what they teach us. The Brooklyn Liberation march and the TV show Pose is an important part of Black trans legacy. They both look at the complications surrounding Black trans lives and contributes to Black trans representation in protesting and fighting marginalization. This thesis will argue the importance of allyship to create safe space for Black …

Form In Hip-Hop Music: Sections, Songs, And History, Stephen M. Gomez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores musical form in recorded hip-hop music from 1979–present. Form, defined as the large-scale organization of songs, is a parameter that artists consider in the creative process and fans experience while listening. Hip-hop’s historical foundation as a live, improvised, party-oriented genre influenced formal functions and patterning from the earliest days of its popular recorded life, beginning with the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. While many of the section and song form labels used by scholars of pop-rock music are transferable to the analysis of hip-hop, the latter genre conveys a unique sense of time rooted in …

Decolonization Of Knowledge Production In African Societies: Contextual Analysis Of Language Of Instruction, Oluremi Alapo

Open Educational Resources

A discussion on knowledge independence or knowledge-production decolonization with the assumption that an epistemological base for knowledge creation exists in most African societies by drawing from indigenous praxis which includes language and history.

The background to this study highlighted the usage of colonial languages by post-colonial African Societies as the language of knowledge transfer in schools and educational institutions, to the neglect of the mother tongue and local language. This prevents an intellectual dislocation that negatively affects the identity, creativity, and works of learners.

The two major theories at the base of this paper are postcolonial theory and Lev Vygotsky’s …

Teaching Beyond ‘Kings Leopold’S Ghost’: New Sources And Voices In A Global History Curriculum On The Democratic Republic, Jen Chapin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The complicated history of the Democratic Republic of Congo is not typically part of high school curricula, yet events and historical trends concerning this nation connect with many key topics and themes, including feudalism, Haitian Revolution, New Imperialism, genocide, World War I & 2, Decolonization movements, Cold War politics, neo-colonialism/globalization, modern China’s economic power, authoritarianism, cult of personality, grassroots democracy movements, responses to climate change, etc. Designing and delivering a rigorous yet accessible curriculum on Congo poses a challenge for teaching beyond “King Leopold’s Ghost”, meaning, working past the prevalence of materials focusing on Belgian king’s genocidal two-decade rule over …

Blacklash: Phenomenological Hermeneutics In Black Dance, Darvejon A. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

The horrors inflicted on Black bodies, souls, and spirits in the United States during the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and the current era (2023) have a lasting legacy of trauma metabolized through the body and transmuted generationally. Jones uses this data to contextualize the work of Black dance artists as hermeneutic phenomena in which the Black dance artist is a hermeneut tasked with delivering a message of the Black body/spirit complex: “I AM HUMAN. DO NOT KILL ME.” This paper examines how Black dance artists frequently petition for their survival — incessantly subjugated to the interpreter’s empathy, …

Black Feminist Thought: Black Women's Emerging Power As Agents Of Knowledge, Oluremi Alapo

Open Educational Resources

To understand the black 21st woman’s struggle to reclaim herself from her experiences from the oppression of Structural Oppression. To discover the new standards of womanhood set after the years of the Atlantic slavery. To examine ways in which Black women can be empowered and also be known as an Agent of Knowledge.

“How Eve Saved My Soul”: Sonic Lineage As The Prequel To The Playlist Project, Todd Craig

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Tell Virgil Write Brick On My Brick’: Doctoral Bashments, (Re)Visiting Hiphopography And The Digital Discursivity Of The Dj - A Mixed Down Methods Movement, Todd Craig

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Play: A Normative Theory Of Agency And Culture, Maxaie Belmont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From the beginning, people are introduced to many different attempts at engaging with various “cultures”, and of course, are born into their own. The extant literature of various fields in the social sciences have afforded us the realization that no one culture holds neither moral ground nor blueprint for how to be a culture, as our own culture is one of many, all a part of the world. Yet, because of the way our culture specifies how we are to engage and live, we tend towards the assumption that our culture has monopoly on the definition of culture. The following …

[Blst 103] Black Women In The Atlantic World, Oluremi "Remi" Alapo

Open Educational Resources

Course Description: This course examines the foundations, ideas, concerns, and implications of Black feminism within the context of the Black Atlantic. A major goal of this class is to foster dialogue and critical discussion about Black feminism as a site of theory and practice emphasizing social, political, and personal transformation.

Afn 122 Course Design Worksheet And Content: An Anti - Racist And Culturally Inclusive Pedagogy, Oluremi "Remi" Alapo

Open Educational Resources

Studying (and teaching) such a vast and diverse continent can be challenging. Because no introductory course can claim to be fully comprehensive, this one will explore several themes in the history of Africa and its peoples that the professor finds important and noteworthy. The readings, lectures, films, and activities will consider broad regions of the continent, and the goals of this course include both knowledge and enjoyment. You should come away from this class with a new appreciation for Africa and a general idea of its history from 1500 to the present.

Fragmentation And Fabulation: Reflexivity And The New Black Documentary, Joanna Lehan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis concerns the photographic representation of Black bodies in new, reflexive documentary forms that have been increasingly produced and exhibited in the midst of America’s renewed discourse on race. Approaching this argument categorically, focused on the themes of fabulation and fragmentation, my task here is to uncover the gaps and overlaps between earlier critiques of the documentary image and more recent discourse on photography and race by exploring the specific methods through which select recent documentary projects embed and expand these critiques.

Fragmentation is a category of production I use to frame a movement of Black photographic artists …

The Problem Of Blackness In America: Becoming When The Being Never Comes To Be, Nkiru Anyaegbunam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The problem of Blackness in America is a consequence of the historical reality and continued legacies of colonialism, the triangular trade and chattel slavery that have been facilitated through violence and capitalism. This thesis will argue that this problem that is pronounced through racialized institutional systems of violence such as mass incarceration and housing inequality, which disproportionately negatively impacts Black Americans is part of a larger discourse on the human and (mis)recognition. This violence has created a quintessential incompleteness for Black Americans who neither are recognized as citizens nor human. The problem of Blackness will be continuously grounded in this …

Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …

Meet And Run, Gia M. Binner

Theses and Dissertations

A defense for Gia Binner’s MFA Thesis, Meet and Run, argues that accessible art, known in this paper as commercial dance, is a meaningful vehicle for social change and that it has the ability to dismantle the outdated, European concert dance dominance by modeling the interdependency of both worlds.

Unraveling The Geographies Of The U.S. Public Education System: An Analysis Of Scale, Segregation, And Hegemony, Olivia Ildefonso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Other than one or two studies that focus on specific state-wide systems of public education, there has been no accounting for how the U.S. public education system came about in relation to space and scale. My dissertation research seeks to fill in this gap. Through focusing on the development of public education in the North and the South, I provide a foundation for understanding the grounded and contested processes of scale production that largely determined the U.S. public education system’s design and function.

In each of the seven chapters, I detail how fights over the structure and purpose of public …

Who Taught You To Hate Yourself: Disentangling My Black Identity From White Christian Doctrine, Patrice Lorna Lebron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How does white Christian doctrine fragment Black existence? When African slaves bound in chains landed on the shores of the Americas, they brought their religious and cultural traditions into that oppressive environment. They were dehumanized and compelled to embrace white Christian doctrine enforced on them by white theologians and white enslavers. Slaves were branded as inhuman and inferior beings. Biblical scriptures became a vessel for their prayers, dreams and sacred ceremonies. They transformed their deities into biblical prophets. Their African identity, religious and cultural beliefs were demolished and shrouded with biblical mis-interpretations to promote white supremacy.

This capstone project WHO …

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

Intro To Jazz, Jon De Lucia

Open Educational Resources

OER Based Syllabus for MUS 145 Intro to Jazz course at City College. Covers the history and development of jazz along with basic music fundamental vocabulary.

African American History Since Emancipation, Laurie Woodard

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus is designed for a lecture course on Post-Emancipation African American history.

What Faith Teaches Us: An Essay On Faith Adiele, Rochelle Spencer

Publications and Research

Essay on the writer Faith Adiele and women's bodies.

Working With West African Hair Braiders In Nyc, Houreidja Tall

Capstones

This project is a culmination of collaboration efforts with a group of West African hair braiders in Harlem, New York City. Through listening efforts, a WhatsApp group was formed.

https://houreidja-tall.medium.com/reflections-on-working-with-west-african-hair-braiders-in-nyc-5086a173ac9c

Introduction: From Solidão, To Isolation, To Solidão-Rity, Luciane Ramos Silva, Tanya Saunders, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

Solidão is a concept from Black Brazilian Gender Studies that does not have a US Black feminist or queer of color equivalent, nor does it translate into a single word in the English language. It describes shared isolation as an affective relational phenomenon with meanings as multiple as there are Black women. Solidão is inherent to the experiences of Black women considering the historical, social, and racial vectors that traverse individual experiences.

But how do you frame intersectional theory with Afro-Atlantic and African knowledge production outside of the United States? This is an introduction to the 2021 special issue of …