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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity
A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self-exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the …
"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, …