African American Studies Commons^™

An Intersectional Feminist Perspective Of Emmett Till In Young Adult Literature, Claire Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Emmett Till’s murder inspired many novelists, poets, and artists. Recently, Till has inspired several feminist young adult novelists who are introducing his case in an intersectional way to a new generation of readers. The works that I have studied are A Wreath for Emmett Till (2003) by Marilyn Nelson, The Hunger Games Trilogy (2008-2010) by Suzanne Collins, and Midnight without a Moon (2017) by Linda Jackson. By examining how the authors employ a feminist perspective, readers can understand how they are striving for a more inclusive, intersectional feminist movement. This is significant because the publishing industry, specifically for Young Adult …

A Sumitography: A Listing Of Postage Stamps Celebrating Contributions To Civil And Human Rights By Martin Luther King Jr. And Associates, Lillie R. Jenkins

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

This "sumitography" (from Latin "sumit" means postage stamp) is a listing of postage stamps celebrating contributions to civil right and human rights by Martin Luther King Jr. and associates. In addition to USA postage stamps, this listing includes stamps from other nations, including Cuba, Ghana, Sweden, Turks & Caicos Islands, and others. Also included are postage stamps honoring King associates--in the struggle for civil and human rights, Mohandas K. Gandi, Rosa Partks, A. Philp Randolph, and Malcolm X.

Don't Call King A 'Civil Rights' Leader: Toward Abolishing Poverty And War By Correcting Our Fatally Inadequate Remembering Of Mlk Jr., Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Remembering Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—primarily as a domestic “civil rights” leader—is inadequate, and sometimes harmful. The term “civil rights” fails to embrace King’s abolitionist movements toward the global abolition of poverty and war. Moreover, King was a Baptist preacher called by God. He advanced an optimistic realism (including a “realistic pacifism”) that improves upon pessimistic-cynical versions of political realism. And King went beyond advancing “civil rights” to advancing economic justice, economic rights, and human rights. He prescribed adding a social and economic bill of rights to the US Constitution, plus full-employment supplemented by “guaranteed income,” …

Development Of A Literary Dispositif: Convening Diasporan, Blues, And Cosmopolitan Lines Of Inquiry To Reveal The Cultural Dialogue Among Giuseppe Ungaretti, Langston Hughes, And Antonio D’Alfonso, Anna Ciamparella

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to create a literary dialogue among the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, the African American author Langston Hughes, and the Quebecois writer Antonio D’Alfonso. Giuseppe Ungaretti and Langston Hughes were more or less contemporaries. Ungaretti was born in 1888 and Hughes in 1902, and both were active in modernist movements that shaped the literary history of their own countries. D’Alfonso was born in Canada about half a center after Ungaretti and Hughes. Besides significant generational differences, these three authors also underwent personal and intellectual experiences that shaped their writing in seemingly incomparable ways. While a traditional comparative approach …

From Swing King To Swing Kids: The Jazz Era Of ‘Big Band Orchestras’ In World War Ii, Katie Victoria Burnopp

Student Scholar Showcase

Known as the ‘King of Swing’, clarinetist and band leader Benny Goodman (1909-1986) threatened the Nazi cause during WWII. With intent of improving music pedagogy, the purpose of this research was to investigate swing music during World War II. The particular problems of this study were to: (1) identify how the swing music of Benny Goodman (1909-1986) influenced adolescents in the United States of America, United Kingdom, and Germany; (2) explore the Nazi party view on ‘swing’ music of the era; (3) examine how the music of Charlie and his Orchestra became used as a tool for Nazi propaganda; and …

Racial Condition Of America Through ‘Uncle Tom’S Cabin’, Ellerie Ann Freisinger

2018 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Hip hop, as a cultural phenomenon, leverages rap as a narrative form in periods of acutely visible political unrest in the Black American community to combat pejorative narratives of Black America as revealed in the American criminal justice system’s treatment of Black Americans. Hip-hop themes were prevalent in golden-age rap of the 1980s in response Regan-era war-on-drugs policy, which severely disadvantaged the Black community and devalued the Black personhood. Hip hop used narrative to reclaim the Black personhood while it served to encourage political involvement in the Black community, urging Blacks to participate in rewriting the narrative of Black America. …

"I'S Not So Wicked As I Use To Was:" The Interplay Of Race And Dignity In Nineteenth-Century American Drama And Blackface Minstrelsy, Sam Volosky

HON499 projects

Blackface was an extremely popular and pervasive performance type unique to nineteenth century American performance. For years, the black characters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Octoroon were played by white actors in blackface makeup whereas mixed-raced characters were presented as white. These two plays, each having played a role in affecting public opinion toward slavery, do not stand out from the tradition of blackface minstrelsy and, subsequently, take part in subjugating black entertainers in the realm of theatre as well as society. The playwrights borrowed conventions of contemporary theatrical performance in order to cater to the tastes of their …

The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In 1921 Langston Hughes penned, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes 1254). Weaving the profound pain of the African American experience with the symbolism of the primordial river, Hughes recognized the inherent power of water as a means of spiritual communication and religious significance. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the American pastoral as typified by white poets such as Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, the African American poets emerging from the Harlem Renaissance established a more nuanced pastoral landscape embedded within urban cultures, utilizing water in particular as …

The Ethos Of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric And The Democratic Function Of American Protest And Countercultural Literature, Jeffrey Lorino Jr

Dissertations (1934 -)

My dissertation, “The Ethos of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric and the Democratic Function of American Protest and Countercultural Literature, 1940-1962,” establishes a theoretical frame-work, the literary epideictic, for reading the African American social protest literature of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and the American countercultural literature of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. I argue that epideictic rhetoric affords insight into how these authors’ narratives embody a post-World War II “ethos of dissent,” a counterdiscourse that emerges out of a climate of dynamism deadlocked with controlling ideologies. Epideictic, the branch of rhetoric concerned with civic matters, commends or censures a particular individual, …

"Tell Nobody But God": Reading Mothers, Sisters, And "The Father" In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

In my reading of The Color Purple, I make several interconnected arguments, the first being that “The Father,” that is any male, sanctioned by patriarchy, and in the context of a patriarchal, sexist male order, disrupts what would otherwise be a powerful and sustaining relationship, that of the mother-daughter relationship. I continue that sisterhood that is multifaceted and intergenerational serves as a corrective to the disrupted maternal and filial relationship. It is sisters in the novel and not mothers who step in to “mother,” that is nurture, protect, support, as well as challenge one another, even in the most harrowing …

“It Is Time For Artists To Be Heard”: Artists And Writers For Freedom, 1963–1964, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

In The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, James Smethurst writes that “Black arts cultural nationalism draws on a long history.” He describes the cultural nationalist stance we associate with Black Arts as involving a concept of liberation and self-determination that entails some notion of the development or recovery of a “true” national culture,” conveying “an already existing folk or popular culture,” often relying on recognizable African elements. Black arts cultural nationalism expressed the linkages between Black Arts and Black Power even before they were specifically named and identified. In particular, Black arts cultural nationalism …

The Rape Of Recy Taylor [Film Review], Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Nancy Buirksi’s documentary The Rape of Recy Taylor centers on a brutal sexual assault in Abbeville, Alabama in 1944. A 24-year-old African American wife and mother, coming home from a sanctified church service with a friend and her son, was forced into a car at gunpoint, and gang raped by six young white men. The beating heart of the film is the on-screen testimony of Taylor’s younger brother, Robert Corbitt, and her younger sister, Alma Daniels, who convey the unspeakably cruel and vicious character of the attack: Corbitt repeats the perpetrators’ directions to Recy: “They said they wanted her to …

The Making Of A Raisin In The Sun, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun premiered on the Broadway stage in January 1959 just as the edifice of national segregation was cracking open. Response to the momentous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Bd. of Education included both the important early challenges to long-accepted practices of white supremacy and the intensified mobilization of widespread white defiance to the ruling. Black Bus boycotters in Montgomery, Alabama, and their young minister leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black high school students attempting to attend Little Rock’s Central High and their families faced organized harassment and dangerous forms …

Neutral Ground Or Battleground? Hidden History, Tourism, And Spatial (In)Justice In The New Orleans French Quarter, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

In 2017, the city of New Orleans removed four monuments that paid homage to the city’s Confederate past. The removal came after contentious public debate and decades of intermittent grassroots protests. Despite the public process, details about the removal were closely guarded in the wake of death threats, vandalism, lawsuits, and organized resistance by monument supporters. Workers hired to dismantle the monuments did so surreptitiously under the cloak of darkness, protected by a heavy police presence, with their faces covered to conceal their identities. The divisiveness of this debate and the removal lay bare the contestation over public space, historical …

A Convergence Of Surrealism And Realism: Why Spirituality, Folklore, And The Supernatural Saturate The Work Of Toni Morrison, Kevon K. Harvey

Dissertations and Theses

This paper will analyze how Toni Morrison blends surrealistic elements into the recognized realism of her text by crafting various paradoxes within her work. Using three of Morrison’s books: Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, I will examine how each book ties a specific surrealistic component, as well as an equally relevant realistic element that will aid in the construct of a figurative bridge between the cultural past and present for African Americans. Moreover, I will discuss how the use of the surreal in Morrison’s work represents a dive into African traditions. Formed as a direct result of slavery, …

African-American Poetry, Music, And Politics, Tyler H. Macdonald

Honors Theses

The 2016 decision to award songwriter and musician Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature sparked a worldwide debate on the relationship between music and poetry and raised many questions about music’s place in literary canon. However, this debate is nothing new. Questions about the relationship between music and poetry have long been debated. Some scholars believe the two disciplines should be studied separately, while others prefer to consider the connections between the two.

My project begins with a question: if Bob Dylan’s songs can be considered poetry, what other forms of music might also be considered poetry? Rap implements …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.

Douglass’ Reply To A. C. C. Thompson’S ‘Letter From Frederick Douglass,’ As Reprinted In The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition Of Both Letters, With A Summary Of Maryland’S Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Kayla Hardy-Butler presents a famous letter by Frederick Douglass, as it was published in Ohio, with the letter that prompted it. This edition also includes a summary of Maryland slave statutes from the time to better explain the day-to-day experience of slavery debated in this correspondence.

Away From The End Of Motherhood: Sites Of Haunting In The Social Imaginary In Lemonade And The Handmaid's Tale, Julia Michele Fleming

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the television series adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, specifically the episode "A Woman's Place," and Beyoncé's Lemonade: A Visual Album. I argue that these cultural texts leverage representations of women's lived experiences to scrutinize contemporary American anxieties about motherhood and reproductive justice. Lemonade, a celebration of Black womanhood, presents a counterpoint to The Handmaid's Tale's preoccupation with white motherhood in way that speculates on the utopian potentials of a woman-centered society.

Using bell hooks' film analysis, Avery Gordon's "haunting," and Luce Irigaray's "mimicry," I examine two interconnected themes: feminist aesthetics and generational haunting. …

Radical Black Drama-As-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic On The Protracted Event-Horizon, Jaye Austin Williams

Faculty Journal Articles

In this essay, I elaborate my present project, grounded in what I call drama theory, the critical theoretical dimensions of dramatic writing, and address the deeply troubling intramural tensions across Black Studies, between those who read blackness, and black cultural production, through largely futurist, celebratory lenses; and those who apply a structural analysis to blackness as the site against, upon, and through which the world coheres its soci(et)al apparatuses and machinations. I situate myself within the latter constellation, and sample here two plays by Suzan-Lori Parks to demonstrate how I translate the analyses of antiblack violence by black feminist …

Kill Your Darlings: The Afterlives Of Pepe The Frog, Sherlock Holmes, And Jim Crow, Allison E. Sardinas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis works to establish a literary theory and cultural studies as a theoretical lens with which we can view harmful emerging pop culture phenomena like the so-called alt right. The premise is supposed in three parts, with the first being a simple introduction to the Pepe character and how he is grounded in literary studies through a comparison of Sherlock Holmes and his early fandom. The second part is a survey of the legacy of Jim Crow and I present the evidence that Pepe is very much Crow’s spiritual successor in their shared preoccupation with white anxiety. The third …

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

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 …

Meeting At The Threshold: Slavery’S Influence On Hospitality And Black Personhood In Late-Antebellum American Literature, Rebecca Wiltberger Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations--English

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to …

Ua1c6/8 Exhibit Photos, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Images of exhibits at Western Kentucky University.

Breaking Chains Of Oppression: Popular Culture And The Plundering Of Blackness, Corina Sacajawea Ambrose

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis focuses on the ways in which white supremacy created mass incarceration, specifically mass incarceration of black individuals, and how this continues to perpetuate a racial caste system in the United States. First, I examine contemporary novelist Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad to provide a historical background of white supremacy and slavery. Then, I argue that pop culture is one area in which artists are focused on the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and ending mass incarceration. Finally, I focus on JAY-Z‘s music video “The Story of O.J.“ and Beyoncé‘s visual album Lemonade and her 2018 Coachella performance to …