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Black Amerinquen, Kayla Marie Rodriguez May 2019

Black Amerinquen, Kayla Marie Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When did the racial categories of ‘Black’ and ‘Puerto Rican’ appear? In the history of colonization and imperialism, how did these categories and the communities come to form? What memories come to Black and Puerto Rican identity? How does ‘passing’, or movement between spaces, come to impact these categories? How does language, the word we use and the stories we tell come to define racial categories? This work is about how racial categories come to happen through history, memory, movement, and language.


Reframing As Reclamation: Trauma Theory, African Spiritualism, And Ecocriticism In Jesmyn Ward’S Sing, Unburied, Sing, Alexandra Cohl Ms. Jan 2019

Reframing As Reclamation: Trauma Theory, African Spiritualism, And Ecocriticism In Jesmyn Ward’S Sing, Unburied, Sing, Alexandra Cohl Ms.

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how ecocriticism and trauma theory intersect within Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to tackle the complex act of collective healing. Trauma, and its subset transgenerational trauma, have often been a focal point for critical analysis of other African American texts that engage with ghosts and hauntings, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Often, these ghosts are symbolic of transgenerational trauma in fictional works. While this association is apparent in Ward’s novel, this thesis applies the aforementioned modes of scholarship alongside African-based spiritualism to investigate further the inclusion of ghosts. To accomplish this approach, this thesis …