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Full-Text Articles in American Literature
The Communal "I": Exclusion And Belonging In American Autobiography, Melissa Coss Aquino
The Communal "I": Exclusion And Belonging In American Autobiography, Melissa Coss Aquino
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The Communal “I” in American autobiography emerges as an aesthetic response to the pressure of using “the master’s tools” to write from a community on the margins to disclose identity in the conflicts of exclusion and belonging. In this case “the master’s tools” to refer to several distinct elements the communal “I” is tasked with navigating: the use of what we have come to identify as standard English, the form and function of European autobiography as a celebration of individual exceptionalism, and the contradictory pressures on these autobiographies to both elevate and protect the communities in question from further marginalization. …
A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki
A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …