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Demanding Spaces: 1970s U.S. Women's Novels As Sites Of Struggle, Kate Marantz Nov 2017

Demanding Spaces: 1970s U.S. Women's Novels As Sites Of Struggle, Kate Marantz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a new view of 1970s gender and race politics in the United States by analyzing struggles in and over space in four women’s novels: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977). My project reads space as a dynamic, politically charged realm of interactions between lived bodies, physical landscapes, and imaginative territories—including the formal characteristics of fiction. Using this critical lens, I highlight how these authors interrogate conditions of sexism and racism by representing their characters making and responding to “demands” for …


“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman Nov 2017

“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman

Doctoral Dissertations

The central claim in this dissertation is that much contemporary African American cultural expression would be better conceptualized not as “post-black,” as some would have it, but as what I call “meta-black.” I use the preface “meta-” because while this contemporary black identity also resists sometimes constrictive conceptions of “authentic” black identity from within the African American community, I diverge from theorists of “post-blackness” in observing the ways that, as Nicole Fleetwood observes, blackness necessarily “circulates” within a technologically-driven mediascape, and these postmodern black subjects work within and against the constraints of this aural-visual regime of blackness in order to …


A Site Of Nation: Black Utopian Novels In The Late 19th And Early 20th Centuries, Xianzhi Meng Nov 2017

A Site Of Nation: Black Utopian Novels In The Late 19th And Early 20th Centuries, Xianzhi Meng

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT Contrary to the traditional view that there is lack of utopian dimension in African American literature, this dissertation argues that African American literature not only develops an exuberant utopian tradition, but also forms its own utopian uniqueness. Based on this conclusion, the dissertation specially focuses on the period between the 1880s and the first two decades of the 20th century that witnessed the first peak of African American utopian writing. Meanwhile, this era has been claimed as the “Golden Age” of Black Nationalism. Through the examination of the historical background of the co-existence of these two conflicting strains, …


‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor Nov 2017

‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor

Doctoral Dissertations

Race-sex narratives that dominated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries permeated the political, scientific, and social fabric of the nation, but did not solely center on black bodies. These narratives demeaned and degraded a race of black citizens, characterizing them as sexually deviant social pariahs. Consequently, these same notions elevated whites to the highest rungs of society, marking them as moral and desirable. This crafting of racial identity acted as just one way to justify racial subordination through the creation of notions that proved detrimental to black life and worthiness. Writer-activists penning their tales of fiction after the Civil War …


Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding And (Re)Imagining Street Lit And Culture, 1990-2007, Jacinta Saffold Jul 2017

Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding And (Re)Imagining Street Lit And Culture, 1990-2007, Jacinta Saffold

Doctoral Dissertations

“Stories Written on Concrete: Understanding and Re-imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007,” coalesces around stories of urbanity and coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the Hip Hop generation reflected on the social, economic, and cultural shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, they took up paper and pen to immortalize the conflicting duality of the gritty and glamorous experience of growing up on a concrete cityscape in America. I interrogate how street lit disrupts normative literary representations of black life in print. Specifically, I consider how urban fiction writes against the African American literary canon in …


The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki Jul 2017

The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki

Doctoral Dissertations

Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of …


Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo Jul 2017

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …