African American Studies Commons^™

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Justice, Pandemics, And Museums In Cyberspace: Archaeology Museums’ Decolonization Projects During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samuel Besse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores three Archeology Museums (Historic St. Mary’s City, James Madison’s Montpelier, and the American Museum of Natural History), their attempts at addressing the colonial narratives that museums are built on, and how the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over George Floyd’s death affected these projects. I place a special effort on the online presence of these museums, as this is the main way visitors interacted with the museums during the pandemic. After discussing the origins of museum’s decolonization efforts and their efforts to make an online presence, I talk about the Covid-19 pandemic and the events around George Floyd’s …

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

Children And The Cold War: Race & Hypocrisy Amid Fear Of Nuclear War, Richard D. Mctaggart Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

During the Cold War, American propaganda centered the wellbeing of the child in its messaging warning of atomic attack at the hands of the Soviet Union. However, despite American claims that all children were valued by the United States, this was proven untrue by its unequal treatment of Black children.

How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …

Intro To Jazz, Jon De Lucia

Open Educational Resources

OER Based Syllabus for MUS 145 Intro to Jazz course at City College. Covers the history and development of jazz along with basic music fundamental vocabulary.

Getting Back: The Chiffons’ Sonic Reclamation, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

Sixties girl group the Chiffons are famous for their soaring 1964 hit “He’s So Fine,” a song in turn remembered almost as often for its plagiarism by George Harrison than in its own right. Much of the rest of their catalogue, including the tremendous “I Have a Boyfriend,” gets shunted into historical and critical gaps that paint rock music history as controlled by men. In this article, I examine the Chiffons in their own right, reframing a story of well-worn sonic theft to center on the group it obscured, through and alongside interpretative contradictions, assumptions, and historical lacunae. I show …

Aloof: Black Divas Of Refusal, Kwame K. Ocran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Aloof: Black Divas of Refusal” studies performers Lena Horne and Billie Holiday as the progenitors of a new tradition of authentic representation of Black female interiority in the entertainment arts. As interiority denotes the wide-ranging amalgamation of human expression, these divas equipped themselves with a sense of refusal and aloofness to strategically posture themselves in conditions that suited their personal predilections best and considered their status as representatives of the Black community. Lena Horne’s evolution as an aloof diva successfully saw the singer and actress escape classist thought of racial uplift to the full embracing of the totality of Black …

Skin Worlds: Black And Indigenous Science Fiction Theorizing Since The 1970s, Lou Cornum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation unfolds along two trajectories, the first following from an ascendant interest in minoritarian traditions in speculative and science fiction and the second following the reiterative conversations across Black and Indigenous Studies. Science fiction theorizing is introduced as a frame for thinking these two trajectories together, with science fiction texts by authors Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko and Samuel Delany providing a paraliterary mode of imagining the planetary from which to understand the interconnected processes of settler colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery. Science Fiction theorizing across these texts disrupts notions of linear progressive time, human/alien boundaries, …

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

Dancing Through Time: A Biographical Look On The Evolution Of Tap Dance, Jaimie Cranford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A uniquely American art form, tap dance has often been misrepresented and under-appreciated when positioned alongside other dance forms. This is largely due to the form’s racialized history, which builds upon contributions from African-American culture. Unlike other dance forms, which stem from white European traditions, tap dance evolved out of a necessity for cultural preservation as enslaved Africans adapted to life in America. As tap dance evolved, its association with slave culture led to it not being taken seriously; if anything, tap dancers were viewed simply as “entertainers” – certainly not as artists. Using a biographical lens, this work looks …

Us, Abundantly: From Africa To The Americas, Karisma Jay

Theses and Dissertations

"Us, AbunDantly," a Live theatrical dance performance and film, delves into the African Diaspora and its influences. An artistic and academic project built upon the amplification of Black excellence and Black pride, this paper contextualizes a work within the oral histories and contemporary dance studies of a powerfully ancestral community.

Sonic Femininity: The Ronettes' Transgressive Gender Performance, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

Iconic sixties girl group the Ronettes are frequently (and justly) celebrated for anchoring the Wall of Sound and inspiring the Beatles, but in their own right, they transgressed social, gendered expectations in revolutionary ways. Framed by a notion I call the sonic feminine, a recuperative theoretical space for the revolutionarily transgressive work of female and femme artists, I argue that the Ronettes, and lead singer Ronnie Spector in particular, enacted a kind of cultural rebellion: they crafted their images to made-up heights that tease the boundaries of drag across the spaces of the stage, the recording studio, the bathroom, and …

Henry Adams: An Education In Autobiography, Marcellus Richie

Dissertations and Theses

This essay will begin by breaking down Henry Adams’s starting sentence in his autobiography word by word, piece by piece – pondering its meanings and permutations in the context of subsequent chapters of this iconic memoir. The essay will then consider whether Adams’s Education should still be regarded as a classic of American autobiography or seen merely as an irrelevant and out-of-date artifact. In a nation radically transformed since Adams’s time, does the book still deserve its high flung reputation? In other words, which of the images cited above is most relevant to The Education: an image of optimistic youth …

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

Dear Black Child: A Discussion On The Formation Of Identity For African Diasporic Adolescents In The U.S., Sokhnagade B. Ndiaye

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this capstone project, I am using art, photography, and music to depict the experiences of African diasporic youth in the United States. I will explore the white supremacist systems that contribute to the anxiety that comes with being a black child in America. In this project, I plan to discuss the ways in which African diasporic adolescents develop their identity and consciousness and the ways in which living in American society helps and/or hinders the development of this identity and consciousness. I argue that living in the United States forces black youth to form double and triple consciousnesses, which …

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

The Sigh Of Triple Consciousness: Blacks Who Blurred The Color Line In Films From The 1930s Through The 1950s, Audrey Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will identify an over looked subset of racial identity as seen through film narratives from the 1930’s through the 1950’s pre-Civil Rights era. The subcategory of racial identity is the necessity of passing for Black people then identified as Negro. The primary film narratives include Veiled Aristocrats (1932), Lost Boundaries (1949), Pinky (1949) and Imitation of Life (1934). These images will deploy the troupe of passing as a racialized historical image. These films depict the pain and anguish Passers endured while escaping their racial identity. Through these stories we identify, sympathize and understand the needs of Black …

Wolf Packs: U.S. Carceral Logics And The Case Of The New Jersey Four, Leilani Dowell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On an evening in 2006 a group of black queer women and gender non-conforming people, traveled from Newark, New Jersey, to New York’s Greenwich Village for a night out. When Dwayne Buckle, an African-American man selling DVDs on the street, attempted to flirt with one of them, they told him that they were lesbians. Buckle physically assaulted them and, at some point in the four-minute melee, was stabbed. The seven were arrested. While three of them accepted plea bargains, the other four maintained their right to defend themselves from attack. A New York judge convicted the New Jersey Four (as …

Just A Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy And Racialized Performance In Black Vaudeville, The Chop Suey Circuit, And Las Carpas, Michael Shane Breaux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the practice of white musical variety clowns embodying stereotypes of African, Chinese, and Mexican Americans has been widely documented and theorized in scholarship on US American popular performance, it has been done largely in segregated studies that maintain the idea that racial impersonations in musical variety is a privilege of white performers. For instance, no study exists that focuses on more than one stereotype at a time, and the performer’s body is always either white or of the same “color” as the type being played. In addition, very little has been written about the tours and circuits run by …

The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American …

Limits Of The Black Radical Tradition And The Value-Form, Shemon Salam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Black Radical Tradition was supposed to be victorious against racial capitalism. Instead the tradition was defeated by the early 1970s never to return again. Surprisingly the scholarship still treats the tradition as if this world historic defeat never happened. Furthermore, geographers have not reckoned with this defeat. Limits of the Black Radical Tradition and the Value-formbegins the process of starting a debate, hoping to ignite radical rethinking around the nature of the Black Radical Tradition, racial capitalism, and the value-form.

The Evidence Of Things Unseen: Experimental Form As Black Feminist Praxis, Shelly J. Eversley

Publications and Research

This essay reads Carlene Hatcher Polite's little-known experimental novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play and situates it within Black Aesthetics and black feminist theory to argue that experimental forms is crucial to black feminist praxis. The form also exposes critical violences that not only diminish and obscure black feminist writing, but also black women writers.