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Articles 1 - 30 of 36
Full-Text Articles in American Literature
The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem
The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem
Theses and Dissertations
The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …
Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria
Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria
Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship
“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that …
Why So Negative? Street Literature And Its Negative Effects On The African American Psyche, Lilly Lamia Simone
Why So Negative? Street Literature And Its Negative Effects On The African American Psyche, Lilly Lamia Simone
Theses (2016-Present)
Urban literature, more widely known as street lit is a genre of literature that glorifies and exaggerates drugs, violence, and sex in the lives of its African American characters. Through Street lit readers are introduced to the black man as a figure of power through illegal activity in his community, and black women as either overly aggressive or figures in need of protection. These novels choose loyalty over family, drugs, and athleticism over education, and money and power over morality. These novels and their glorifications cause African American people to see dream lives in goals that are not only unattainable …
"Second Sight": Acknowledging W.E.B. Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" As A Step Towards Dissolution, Alexandra M. Hudecki
"Second Sight": Acknowledging W.E.B. Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" As A Step Towards Dissolution, Alexandra M. Hudecki
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This project examines American scholar W.E.B.’s DuBois’ idea of “double consciousness”, from his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The idea of “double consciousness” has and continues to be utilized by Black scholars and artists in literary, theoretical, and psychological contexts, some of which I hope my paper will adequately survey. I begin by examining “double consciousness” from the perspective of particulars by understanding Du Bois’s original idea and the specificities of the American context he himself was a part, considering the legacy of slavery. Then, by focusing primarily on writers such as Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright and Paul …
Creating New Suns: Early Examples Of Afrofuturist Literature, Makeba Lavan
Creating New Suns: Early Examples Of Afrofuturist Literature, Makeba Lavan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Over the last twenty years, specifically with the summer 2002 issue of Social Text edited by Dr. Alondra Nelson, Afrofuturism has become a serious focus for academic inquiry. For people familiar with the term, Afrofuturism is presented as a movement borne of our contemporary moment. However, this dissertation explores the ways in which Afrofuturism is actually a cornerstone for both African American literature and the struggle for civil/human rights. I do this by exploring the following questions: How does the enslavement of African/ African Americans and its aftermath play out in early African American literature? How do African Americans writers …
"Yells Of Life In Constant Change": The Sonorous Criticism Of Amiri Baraka, Jack Luis Mckeon
"Yells Of Life In Constant Change": The Sonorous Criticism Of Amiri Baraka, Jack Luis Mckeon
Senior Projects Spring 2020
My research engages intersections of the racial and the sonic in the cultural criticism of poet and playwright Amiri Baraka. Focusing primarily on his music and political criticism published between 1961 and 1971, I am interested in questions of vernacular performance, as well as tensions between the verbal and the vocal that arise in his work. This project began with an interest in locating and understanding the moment in Baraka’s work where he began to turn away from the poetic style of contemporaries such as Frank O’Hara and Gary Snyder, choosing instead to shift towards a style reminiscent of jazz …
Race, American Enlightenment, And The End Times, Mark A. Mattes
Race, American Enlightenment, And The End Times, Mark A. Mattes
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visions of apocalypse regarding the future of black lives in the American body politic. It begins with readings of Jefferson’s fear of a black planet in Notes on the State of Virginia and Crèvecoeur’s depictions of racial terror in Letters from an American Farmer. The chapter then investigates the writing of an African American herald of the end times, Christopher MacPherson. The chapter reads the apocalyptic jeremiad of MacPherson’s pamphlet, Christ’s Millennium (1811), as a reparative response to the suppression of black voices and the annihilation of black lives.
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Theses and Dissertations--English
Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …
But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr
But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr
Theses and Dissertations--English
“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a …
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …
Nomads Of The Body, Exiles Of The Mind: Twentieth Century Transnational African American Mexican Art And Literature, Anahi A. Douglas
Nomads Of The Body, Exiles Of The Mind: Twentieth Century Transnational African American Mexican Art And Literature, Anahi A. Douglas
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the migration of African Americans from the U.S. to Mexico; however, these paths extend well beyond the North American continent and intersect with a much larger migration: the African Diaspora. The journeys of Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Willard Motley, and Elizabeth Catlett to Mexico illustrate an intricate web of rhizomatic connections spanning the Black Atlantic, the Caribbean Ocean, the Mississippi River and the Rio Grande. This dissertation examines the history of African American migration to Mexico during the twentieth century a well-documented, yet understudied area of research. These migrations offer an opportunity to reevaluate canon formation, Border …
Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald
Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis foregrounds the import of national geography in nineteenth-century African American literature. Authors like Elizabeth Keckley and Martin Delany confront problems of national geography by interrogating illusion, rewriting geographic space, and constructing themselves within both the physical and conceptual geography of the nation. In so doing, they challenge the fallacy of a uniform national geography and attend to the myriad historical conditions that exist within geographic spaces.
William Wells Brown; Or The Spook Who Sat By The Cabin Door From Black Ex-Slave Narratives To White Abolitionist Fiction: Understanding The First African American Novel And Its Origins, Elijah Coleman Jackson
William Wells Brown; Or The Spook Who Sat By The Cabin Door From Black Ex-Slave Narratives To White Abolitionist Fiction: Understanding The First African American Novel And Its Origins, Elijah Coleman Jackson
Senior Projects Spring 2018
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.
Little Black Books: Exploring Modes Of Reclamation Of Black American Identity Through Afro-American Children's Literature, Aaliyah Armani Barnes
Little Black Books: Exploring Modes Of Reclamation Of Black American Identity Through Afro-American Children's Literature, Aaliyah Armani Barnes
Senior Projects Spring 2018
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College
“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman
“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
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 Black Maternal And Cultural Healing In Twentieth Century Black Women's Fiction, Paula Wingard White
The Black Maternal And Cultural Healing In Twentieth Century Black Women's Fiction, Paula Wingard White
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This work examines representations of maternal relationships between black women in five contemporary novels: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Sula by Toni Morrison, The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Louisiana by Erna Brodber. Rather than situating the origins of black feminist literary studies during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, I argue that Hurston’s work shapes contemporary black feminist literary studies. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny provides a mothering archetype that inspires a dominant theme and practice—the black maternal, within contemporary black …
Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs
Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs
Theses and Dissertations--English
“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of …
The (Dis)Ability Of Color; Or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding Of 19th And 20th Century Passing Narratives, Julia S. Charles
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 …
Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn
Narratives Of Southern Contact Zones: Mobility And The Literary Imagination Of Zora Neale Hurston And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kyoko Shoji Hearn
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the literary works of the two Southern women writers, Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, based on the cultural contexts of the 1930s and the 1940s. It discusses how the two writers' works are in dialogue with each other, and with the particular historical period in which the South had gone through many social, economical, and cultural changes. Hurston and Rawlings, who became friends with each other beyond their racial background in the segregated South, shared physical and social mobility and the interest in the Southern folk cultures. They wrote fiction about the region and its …
Reading/Photography: Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’S Four Girls At Cottage City, Victoria Earle Matthews And The Woman’S Era, P. Foreman
P. Gabrielle Foreman
No abstract provided.
Passing And Its Prepositions, Or, Racial Recovery, Racial Death: An Introduction In Four Parts, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
Passing And Its Prepositions, Or, Racial Recovery, Racial Death: An Introduction In Four Parts, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
P. Gabrielle Foreman
No abstract provided.
Recovered Autobiographies And The Marketplace: Our Nig's Generic Genealogies And Harriet Wilson's Entrepreneurial Enterprise, P. Gabrielle Foreman
Recovered Autobiographies And The Marketplace: Our Nig's Generic Genealogies And Harriet Wilson's Entrepreneurial Enterprise, P. Gabrielle Foreman
P. Gabrielle Foreman
No abstract provided.
The Christian Recorder, Broken Families And Educated Nations: Julia Collins' Civil War Novel The Curse Of Caste, P. Gabrielle Foreman
The Christian Recorder, Broken Families And Educated Nations: Julia Collins' Civil War Novel The Curse Of Caste, P. Gabrielle Foreman
P. Gabrielle Foreman
This essay views Julia Collins’s The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865) through the racialized lens of Civil War’s promise and trauma. At first glance, the author’s narrative choices—her antebellum frame, her principal character’s racial indeterminacy and domestic concerns, even the overtly racialized advice she dispenses in the essays she publishes in the important Black paper, the Christian Recorder—seem distractingly distanced from the immediacy of the unfolding national conflict. Yet, readers can plot Collins’s story on the temporal and activist axes that she so explicitly engages by publishing in the Recorder, a paper that printed editorials …
Harlem Renaissance (1919-1929), A Yemisi Jimoh, Phd
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
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
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
Spiritual, Blues, And Jazz People In African American Fiction, A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd
A Yęmisi Jimoh
Literature and music
Who’S Your Mama?: ‘White’ Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography And Anti-Passing Narratives Of Slavery And Freedom, P. Foreman
P. Gabrielle Foreman
No abstract provided.
The Power Of Hoodoo: African Relic Symbolism In Amistad And The Narrative Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Alicia M. Simmons
The Power Of Hoodoo: African Relic Symbolism In Amistad And The Narrative Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Alicia M. Simmons
The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English
No abstract provided.