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SelectedWorks

Selected Works

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Articles 1 - 24 of 24

Full-Text Articles in American Literature

Resume Of Joel Drotts Juris Doctorate, Joel M. Drotts Esq. Jan 2016

Resume Of Joel Drotts Juris Doctorate, Joel M. Drotts Esq.

Joel M. Drotts Esq.

This is the resume of the author Joel Drotts.


Keep Claiming Space!, Koritha Mitchell Dec 2015

Keep Claiming Space!, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

Substantial foreword to the "Hands Up. Don't Shoot!" special issue of CLAJ.


Black-Authored Lynching Drama’S Challenge To Theater History, Koritha Mitchell May 2014

Black-Authored Lynching Drama’S Challenge To Theater History, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

This essay argues that U.S. theater history is incomplete without considering the theatricality of lynching. Thomas Dixon Jr. was as important as a playwright as the early stage realists William Gillette and William Moody. The essay also demonstrates that African Americans living at the height of mob violence understood that there was a "theater/lynching alliance" that created important parallels between "lynchcraft" and "stagecraft."


Here, There, And In Between: Travel As Metaphor In Mixed Race Narratives Of The Harlem Renaissance, Colin Enriquez Apr 2014

Here, There, And In Between: Travel As Metaphor In Mixed Race Narratives Of The Harlem Renaissance, Colin Enriquez

Colin Enriquez

Created to comment on Antebellum and Reconstruction literature, the tragic mulatto concept is habitually applied to eras beyond the 19th century. After the turn of the century, the tragic mulatto has become an end rather than a means to questioning racist and abolitionist agendas. Rejecting the pathetic, selfish, and self-destructive traits inscribed by the tragic mulatto label, this dissertation uses geographic, cultural, and racial boundary crossing to theorize a rereading of the mixed race character of Harlem Renaissance literature. Focusing on instances of train, automobile, and boat travel, the study establishes a distinct relationship between the character, transportation, and technology …


No More Shame! Defeating The New Jim Crow With Antilynching Activism's Best Tools, Koritha Mitchell Mar 2014

No More Shame! Defeating The New Jim Crow With Antilynching Activism's Best Tools, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

This essay identifies similarities between racial violence of an earlier time period, lynching, and its most efficient form today, mass incarceration, suggesting that today’s racial violence be met with tools used by previous generations. I call for a critical demeanor of shamelessness that allows targeted communities and their allies to avoid taking on the shame that mainstream discourse encourages them to accept. People of color are incarcerated in staggering numbers, but not because they are disproportionately guilty of violent or even nonviolent crimes. Given the extreme racial disparities, being caught by the nation’s criminal (in)justice system is simply not a …


Love In Action: Noting Similarities Between Lynching Then & Anti-Lgbt Violence Now, Koritha Mitchell Sep 2013

Love In Action: Noting Similarities Between Lynching Then & Anti-Lgbt Violence Now, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

The more I learn about the violence currently plaguing LGBT communities, the more it reminds me of the brutal practice of lynching, which has been the focus my research for the past 15 years. Ultimately, both forms of violence are designed to deny targeted groups recognition as citizens. Relying on my expertise regarding racial violence as well as the data on anti-LGBT attacks collected by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), this essay notes similarities between lynching at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. The piece identifies five parallels: 1) the mundane quality of the …


Jim Crow In The Soviet Union, Rebecca Gould Jan 2013

Jim Crow In The Soviet Union, Rebecca Gould

Rebecca Gould

No abstract provided.


Belief And Performance, Morrison And Me, Koritha Mitchell Dec 2012

Belief And Performance, Morrison And Me, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

A chapter discussing the lessons I learned from Toni Morrison's THE BLUEST EYE that continue to guide me. The insights gained from that novel have informed my intellectual work and my ability to navigate the U.S. academy.


James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings The Blues For Mister Charlie, Koritha Mitchell Mar 2012

James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings The Blues For Mister Charlie, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

James Baldwin worked tirelessly to expose the myths that allowed Americans to delude themselves. Scholars have long recognized this as the driving force of his fiction and non-fiction, but this mission was also very much linked to Baldwin's conception of theater. This essay culls Baldwin's theater theory from his non-fiction, especially his seldom-discussed The Devil Finds Work (1976). Baldwin believed that theater could "re-create" people by helping us to re-discover our human connection, and he believed that stage actors could show the way. Baldwin's respect for stage actors develops over time, however. He reaches his conclusions only after realizing—in hindsight—how …


Sisters In Motherhood(?): The Politics Of Race And Gender In Lynching Drama, Koritha Mitchell Nov 2011

Sisters In Motherhood(?): The Politics Of Race And Gender In Lynching Drama, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

Chapter analyzing May Miller's Nails and Thorns, a lynching play not discussed in my book LIVING WITH LYNCHING.


The Parallel Between Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby And Jack Kerouac’S On The Road, Sahar Jaafar Al-Keshwan Jan 2011

The Parallel Between Fitzgerald’S The Great Gatsby And Jack Kerouac’S On The Road, Sahar Jaafar Al-Keshwan

SAHAR JAAFAR AL-KESHWAN

No abstract provided.


Performance Review Of By Hands Unknown, Koritha Mitchell Jan 2011

Performance Review Of By Hands Unknown, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

Performance Review of BY HANDS UNKNOWN, theatrical presentation composed of 7 one-act lynching plays from the 1920s and 1930s.


Structures Of Urban Poverty In Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue, Reginald B. Dyck Jan 2010

Structures Of Urban Poverty In Greg Sarris's Grand Avenue, Reginald B. Dyck

Reginald B Dyck

No abstract provided.


Indigenous Ways Of Knowing Capitalism In Simon Ortiz's Fight Back, Reginald B. Dyck Jan 2009

Indigenous Ways Of Knowing Capitalism In Simon Ortiz's Fight Back, Reginald B. Dyck

Reginald B Dyck

No abstract provided.


New Models For Western Literary Studies, Reginald B. Dyck Jan 2009

New Models For Western Literary Studies, Reginald B. Dyck

Reginald B Dyck

No abstract provided.


Generative Challenges: Notes On Artist/Critic Interaction, Koritha Mitchell Jan 2009

Generative Challenges: Notes On Artist/Critic Interaction, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

This essay recounts my experiences at an invigorating scholarly retreat. The community I encountered proved to be both challenging and affirming. In that way, it was quite different from the experience that academia typically generates for scholars of color. I write with honesty about institutionalized racism as an attempt to mentor through publication. I want others to know that if they notice the intractability of racism (even) in scholarly environments, they are not alone...and it is not just in their imagination.


Mamie Bradley's Unbearable Burden: Sexual And Aesthetic Politics In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Koritha Mitchell Jan 2008

Mamie Bradley's Unbearable Burden: Sexual And Aesthetic Politics In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

This essay offers a reading of Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, which re-imagines the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and its aftermath. I argue that the novel is a tribute to Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley, but that it also illustrates the agony of being the survivor whose pain occasions such tributes. Through Delotha Todd, the character loosely based on Bradley, Campbell imagines the mother's burden to have been especially unbearable because so many strangers, including Campbell herself, claimed to share it. In the process of acknowledging the many facets Delotha's pain, Campbell …


The Supreme Fiction: Fiction Or Fact?, Gregory Brazeal Jan 2007

The Supreme Fiction: Fiction Or Fact?, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

The article makes a case for giving up the quest to identify Wallace Stevens’ “supreme fiction.” The poet hoped to usher in the creation of an idea that would serve as a fictive replacement for the idea of God, known to be fictive but willfully believed. His hope has remained unfulfilled. By the poet’s own explicit standards, the supreme fiction does not appear in any of his poems, nor in his poetry as a whole, nor in poetry in general. The very idea of a supreme fiction may depend, at least in part, upon a problematic conception of belief drawn …


Wallace Stevens' Philosophical Evasions, Gregory Brazeal Jan 2007

Wallace Stevens' Philosophical Evasions, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

How could thought ever benefit from being formed in poetic language rather than philosophical prose? This essay attempts to clarify a single, relatively narrow respect in which poetry can perform philosophical work that prose, as such, cannot: the evasion of philosophical dogmatism through Stevensian qualification. What Helen Vendler in an early essay calls Stevens’ “qualified assertions,” and what Marjorie Perloff calls Stevens’ “ironic modes," are the basic techniques of Wallace Stevens' anti-dogmatic art.


Review Of Lynching In The West And A Spectacular Secret, Koritha Mitchell Jan 2007

Review Of Lynching In The West And A Spectacular Secret, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

No abstract provided.


The Alleged Pragmatism Of T.S. Eliot, Gregory Brazeal Jan 2006

The Alleged Pragmatism Of T.S. Eliot, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Before gaining recognition as a poet, T.S. Eliot pursued a doctoral degree in philosophy. His dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley has been a source of longstanding critical dispute. Some read the dissertation as a defense of Bradley’s views, while others read it as a repudiation of Bradley in favor of a kind of American philosophical pragmatism. This essay considers whether the dissertation can be properly characterized as pragmatist, despite Eliot’s enthusiastic and repeated dismissals of William James’ philosophy of truth. Eliot comes closest to a Jamesian view of belief when he writes of the endless ways we can …


(Anti-)Lynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, And The Evolution Of African American Drama, Koritha Mitchell Jan 2006

(Anti-)Lynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, And The Evolution Of African American Drama, Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell

My initial articulation of the history of black-authored lynching plays and their tendency to avoid portraying physical violence.


American Zeitgeist: Spontaneity In The Work Of Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker And Jack Kerouac, Randall Snyder Jan 2006

American Zeitgeist: Spontaneity In The Work Of Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker And Jack Kerouac, Randall Snyder

Randall Snyder

During the decade following World War Two, a body of artistic work was created that clearly articulated for the first time, a distinctly American aesthetic, independent of European models. This is not to say that celebrated works like The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Appalachian Spring and Roy Harris’ Third Symphony are not recognized as American masterpieces; but their American characteristics are expressed through content, rather than form or methods of production. Fitzgerald and Hemingway all furthered their apprenticeship in Europe during the 1920s while Copland and Harris studied in Paris with Boulanger. It remained for the next generation …


Revisiting And Revising The West: Willa Cather's My Antonia And Wright Morris's Plains Song, Reginald B. Dyck Jan 1990

Revisiting And Revising The West: Willa Cather's My Antonia And Wright Morris's Plains Song, Reginald B. Dyck

Reginald B Dyck

No abstract provided.