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African American

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Reimagining Prince Hall: Race, Freemasonry, And Material Culture In Boston, 1775-1870, Sueanna Smith Jul 2021

Reimagining Prince Hall: Race, Freemasonry, And Material Culture In Boston, 1775-1870, Sueanna Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation revisits the subject of early black freemasonry and draws upon a new wealth of archival material to recontextualize it through the lens of social history and print and material culture. This study explores the way that freemasonry operated in the daily lives of black masons and presents a new social history of the formation of Boston’s first black masonic lodge. Turning specifically to print and material culture, it traces the way that the earliest black masons engaged in the broader print and material culture of the society, thus promoting interracial engagement. This study also traces how the Prince …


Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices And Radical Adaptation In Multi-Ethnic American Literary And Visual Culture, Michael M. Means Jan 2019

Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices And Radical Adaptation In Multi-Ethnic American Literary And Visual Culture, Michael M. Means

Theses and Dissertations

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant …


Going Hard, Going Easy, Going Home: Death And Dying In 20th Century African American Literature, Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper Jan 2013

Going Hard, Going Easy, Going Home: Death And Dying In 20th Century African American Literature, Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation answers the question: How can art represent the essential human experience of death, particularly when the creative context is one of extreme violence? And, what can be learned about the risks and rewards of the living's relationship with the dead by way of these artistic representations? Further, how do these aesthetic renderings of death construct the ethics of life for survivors? In the case of African America, discussion of, and responses to, these questions have been primarily explored in novelist and creative writing. This dissertation examines these novelistic treatments of death-tropes, or thanatropes in eight novels written by …