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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

“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 …


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 (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles Aug 2015

The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the …


Harlem Renaissance (1919-1929), A Yemisi Jimoh, Phd Jan 2005

Harlem Renaissance (1919-1929), A Yemisi Jimoh, Phd

Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.


Harlem Renaissance (1919-1929), A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd Jan 2005

Harlem Renaissance (1919-1929), A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd

A Yęmisi Jimoh

Article on New Negro/Harlem Renaissance era.


Spiritual, Blues, And Jazz People In African American Fiction, A Yemisi Jimoh, Phd Jan 2002

Spiritual, Blues, And Jazz People In African American Fiction, A Yemisi Jimoh, Phd

Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.


Spiritual, Blues, And Jazz People In African American Fiction, A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd Jan 2002

Spiritual, Blues, And Jazz People In African American Fiction, A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd

A Yęmisi Jimoh

Literature and music