Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Stepping Beyond The Veil And Breaking The Pittsburgh Cycle: The American Dream, Otherness, And Generational Trauma In August Wilson's Cycle Plays, Kaitlin Stellingwerf
Stepping Beyond The Veil And Breaking The Pittsburgh Cycle: The American Dream, Otherness, And Generational Trauma In August Wilson's Cycle Plays, Kaitlin Stellingwerf
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is a series of ten plays that aims to “amend, to explore, and to add to our African consciousness and our African aesthetic” (Wilson qtd. in Gantt 5). Each play is set in a different decade but all share incredibly similar protagonists; all of them are African American men in their mid to late adulthood. The stories are separated by years but all articulate the generational trauma embedded in the African American consciousness in the twentieth century. Wilson’s plays span between the generations of African Americans living in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation to a …
Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence
Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence
Theses and Dissertations
The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …
The Hollow Class: African-American Class-Passing And The Popular, Whitney Martin
The Hollow Class: African-American Class-Passing And The Popular, Whitney Martin
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
My project presses to include popular fiction, television, and film for serious critical consideration. To contextualize my research, I use theories that critically examine popular literature, connecting to the work of Janice Radway and Keenan Norris, and I study the African-American focus on class as explored by E. Franklin Frazier. In focusing on the popular, I highlight the everydayness of class and race anxieties. I build on Gwendolyn Foster’s work on class passing but stress racial intersections with identity performance. I rely on New Historicism and Critical Race Theory to substantiate my examination of the literature. I look at specific …
"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell
"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, …