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American Literature

City University of New York (CUNY)

Theses/Dissertations

African American

Publication Year

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas May 2018

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging and Kinships in African American Men’s Literature, 1953-1971 builds on the work of women-of-color feminists since the late 1960s and queer-of-color critique in the works of José Esteban Muñoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Roderic Ferguson, and Nadia Ellis, in order to chronicle the emergence of a queer tradition in mid twentieth century African American men’s literature. Through literary analysis and archival research on marginal figures of African American culture during this period, this dissertation proposes that the black pulp novels of Chester Himes, Robert Deane Pharr, Clarence Cooper Jr., and Iceberg Slim perform a queer critique of and …


Langston Hughes In Turkestan: Poems, Photos, And Notebooks 1932–1933, Zahera Z. Saed May 2018

Langston Hughes In Turkestan: Poems, Photos, And Notebooks 1932–1933, Zahera Z. Saed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In June 1932, Langston Hughes landed in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with a group of mainly African American artists, writers, craftsmen, and activists, to participate in the Soviet propaganda film, Black and White, by Mezhrabpom. When the film project fell apart, Hughes asked permission for the group to visit Central Asia, a request that, as he documents in his essay, “South to Samarkand,” was met with “a pause” by Soviet authorities since tourists and journalists were not permitted to enter Central Asia. He rode on the Trans-Siberian Rail with hanging lamps lighting the small compartment and simple wooden chairs, …


A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity Feb 2017

A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self-exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the …