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Articles 1 - 30 of 49
Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
“A New Era Of Black Thought”: Revisiting Gil Scott-Heron And The Hbcu Protest Novel, Magana J. Kabugi
“A New Era Of Black Thought”: Revisiting Gil Scott-Heron And The Hbcu Protest Novel, Magana J. Kabugi
The Vermont Connection
In 1972, spoken-word artist and poet Gil Scott-Heron published his second novel, controversially titled The Nigger Factory. As the student arm of the Civil Rights Movement started to shift its intellectual concerns from integration to questions of Black Power and self-determination, Scott-Heron’s novel burst onto the literary scene like a stick of dynamite. Literary critics and newspapers didn’t quite know what to make of the novel, which focused on a student government president and a fringe opposition group both vying for control over a student protest at a fictional historically Black college. Raw, direct, and full of rage, the book …
Gender And Orality In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Nessa Ordukhani
Gender And Orality In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Nessa Ordukhani
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
This essay explores the intersection of postmodernism and multiculturalism in Toni Morrison's novel, Song of Solomon. It delves into the destabilization of historical metanarratives by postmodernism through the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, which challenges the notion of a singular truth and questions who constructs popular historical narratives. The essay discusses the role of the victors, particularly white males, in shaping history and the process of legitimation through which historical facts are determined. It examines how Morrison's novel offers an alternative history that highlights African American perspectives and challenges the dominant white narrative. Additionally, the essay explores the tension between multiculturalism …
Effectively Affective: Examining The Ethos Of One Hbcu Writing Center, Karen Keaton Jackson, Amara Hand
Effectively Affective: Examining The Ethos Of One Hbcu Writing Center, Karen Keaton Jackson, Amara Hand
Writing Center Journal
Over the past several decades, writing center scholarship has evolved to include multiple theories and pedagogies that led to widely used best practices. As is the case in many disciplines, often writing centers at large, research PWIs are most often cited and highlighted within the scholarship. While many of those readings do offer helpful strategies for working with students at all levels, often they do not account for the unique contexts and diverse student populations that make up many HBCUs. As a result, more research from a variety of writing centers is needed so practitioners see there are multiple ways …
When Communities Fall: A Critical Analysis Of Toni Morrison's Sula, Sami Saigh
When Communities Fall: A Critical Analysis Of Toni Morrison's Sula, Sami Saigh
Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research
When women dare to self-actualize they frequently face barriers that tear their spirits down, leading to guilt, shame, and feelings of inadequacy. For the lineage of women in Toni Morrison’s Sula, these consequences are fatal for everyone. As these factors thwart fundamental social development, communal collapse becomes easier, leaving entire cultures vulnerable to erasure. Whether self-determination is expressed through promiscuity or properness, paradoxical moralism leaves no room for either. This essay explores how Morrison offers a retrospective look from the graveyard of a town while illustrating the impact of the loss of friends, lovers, and communities.
Double Consciousness, Mirrors, And The Children Within Them: A Conceptual Reading Of W. E. B. Du Bois's "As The Crow Flies", Adeline Navarro
Double Consciousness, Mirrors, And The Children Within Them: A Conceptual Reading Of W. E. B. Du Bois's "As The Crow Flies", Adeline Navarro
Rushton Journal of Undergraduate Humanities Research
This research essay argues that W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crow from his magazine column “As the Crow Flies” is a figurative device for double consciousness and examines how aspects of double consciousness are present in the frequent motifs of dialectic doubleness in the column. Drawing from scholar Rudine Sims Bishop, this essay explores how the Crow functions as a mirror that children can use to realize their own double consciousness and thus see themselves. This insight into Du Bois’s news column provides a further understanding of the significance of accessible, multicultural children’s literature.
Plotting The Plantationocene With The History Of Mary Prince, Shelby Johnson
Plotting The Plantationocene With The History Of Mary Prince, Shelby Johnson
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
In this essay, I consider how The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) extends vital affordances for assembling a literary history of ecological rupture, settler colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. These insights arise from my experiences teaching Prince in “Plotting the Plantationocene in Early Atlantic Literature” (Fall 2021), a course which took up what it means to orient to historical formations of climate change as co-emergent with plantation systems. I argue that my students explored how figures like Prince open politically vibrant pathways for being in the world otherwise to plantation modernity.
The Black Wanderer: Reading The Black Diaspora, Resistance, And Becoming In The History Of Mary Prince In The Classroom, Nicole Carr
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This paper examines The History of Mary Prince as a pedagogical tool for exploring complexities within the Black Diaspora. As Paul Gilroy’s articulations of the Black Atlantic inform my approach, Prince’s circuitous journey through the West Indies and England situates her process of becoming as one mired in longing and loss. Encouraging students to consider Prince as a wandering soul in search of not only freedom, but also solid familiar connections lays the foundation for merging her narrative with other enslaved Black people traversing countries and regions on ships against their will. Ample research material available on the survivors of …
“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson
“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson
Criticism
Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …
Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa
Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa
Criticism
On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …
Du Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, And Creative Works, Caitlyn Aldersea, Justin Bravo, Sam Allen, Anna Block, Connor Block, Emma Buechler, Maria De Los Angeles Bustillos, Arianna Carlson, William Christensen, Olivia Kachulis, Noah Craver, Kate Dillon, Muskan Fatima, Angel Fernandes, Emma Finch, Colleen Cassidy, Amy Fishman, Andrea Francis, Stacia Fritz, Simran Gill, Emma Gries, Rylie Hansen, Shannon Powers, Jacqueline Martinez, Zachary Harker, Ashley Hasty, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Kathleen Hopps, Adelaide Kerenick, Colin Kleckner, Ci Koehring, Elijah Kruger, Braden Krumholz, Maddie Leake, Lyneé Alves, Seraphina Loukas, Yatzari Lozano Vazquez, Haley Maki, Emily Martinez, Sierra Mckinney, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Audrey Mitchell, Kipling Newman, Audrey Ng, Megan Lucyshyn, Andrew Nguyen, Stevie Ostman, Casandra Pearson, Alexandra Penney, Julia Gielczynski, Tyler Ball, Anna Rini, Christina Rorres, Simon Ruland, Helayna Schafer, Emma Sellers, Sarah Schuller, Claire Shaver, Kevin Summers, Isabella Shaw, Madison Sinar, Claudia Pena, Apshara Siwakoti, Carter Sorensen, Madi Sousa, Anna Sparling, Alexandra Revier, Brandon Thierry, Dylan Tyree, Maggie Williams, Lauren Wols
Du Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, And Creative Works, Caitlyn Aldersea, Justin Bravo, Sam Allen, Anna Block, Connor Block, Emma Buechler, Maria De Los Angeles Bustillos, Arianna Carlson, William Christensen, Olivia Kachulis, Noah Craver, Kate Dillon, Muskan Fatima, Angel Fernandes, Emma Finch, Colleen Cassidy, Amy Fishman, Andrea Francis, Stacia Fritz, Simran Gill, Emma Gries, Rylie Hansen, Shannon Powers, Jacqueline Martinez, Zachary Harker, Ashley Hasty, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Kathleen Hopps, Adelaide Kerenick, Colin Kleckner, Ci Koehring, Elijah Kruger, Braden Krumholz, Maddie Leake, Lyneé Alves, Seraphina Loukas, Yatzari Lozano Vazquez, Haley Maki, Emily Martinez, Sierra Mckinney, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Audrey Mitchell, Kipling Newman, Audrey Ng, Megan Lucyshyn, Andrew Nguyen, Stevie Ostman, Casandra Pearson, Alexandra Penney, Julia Gielczynski, Tyler Ball, Anna Rini, Christina Rorres, Simon Ruland, Helayna Schafer, Emma Sellers, Sarah Schuller, Claire Shaver, Kevin Summers, Isabella Shaw, Madison Sinar, Claudia Pena, Apshara Siwakoti, Carter Sorensen, Madi Sousa, Anna Sparling, Alexandra Revier, Brandon Thierry, Dylan Tyree, Maggie Williams, Lauren Wols
DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive
DU Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Works
Beyond Blackface: Minstrel Shows In Modern Day America, Cheyenne Burns
Beyond Blackface: Minstrel Shows In Modern Day America, Cheyenne Burns
The Confluence
This essay explores the history of Blackface in America and how not addressing or treating Blackface as a taboo has allowed for microaggressions within the media to continue.
Utopian Promises, Dystopic Realities: Teaching Bell Hooks “No Love In The Wild”, Naimah H. Ford
Utopian Promises, Dystopic Realities: Teaching Bell Hooks “No Love In The Wild”, Naimah H. Ford
Feminist Pedagogy
This original teaching activity discusses bell hooks’ film review of Beasts of The Southern Wild and explains how it can be used to encourage students to recognize how popular culture reproduces and reinforces disturbing paradigms. This original teaching activity, based on hooks’ review “No Love in The Wild,” encourages students to be informed while navigating visual images in popular culture. This activity also explains how hooks’ film review and the film can be used to empower students with strategies to analyze film and other visual images that are seemingly progressive but support the strictures and structures that reinforce patriarchy, racism, …
Economies Of Extinction: Animals, Labour, And Inheritance In The Longleaf Pine Forests Of The Us South, Nathaniel Otjen
Economies Of Extinction: Animals, Labour, And Inheritance In The Longleaf Pine Forests Of The Us South, Nathaniel Otjen
Animal Studies Journal
Despite mounting critiques, extinction continues to be framed as a unidirectional problem where humans, through acts of negligence and intent, lead nonhuman species to their demise. In addition to universalizing the actors and processes involved, unidirectional approaches overlook the ways nonhuman beings participate in the extinction of others and the ways extinction continues to impact multispecies communities long after the violent event or the death of an endling. With its focus on how nonhuman animals experience and navigate violence, the field of critical animal studies can illustrate how nonhuman animals contribute to extinction events and how extinction unfolds across distinct …
A Material Stratum: Black Bodies And Environmental Exploitation In Edward P. Jones' The Known World, Julia Woodward
A Material Stratum: Black Bodies And Environmental Exploitation In Edward P. Jones' The Known World, Julia Woodward
The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal
This paper seeks to reckon with the entwined realities of black lives, environmental degradation, and the Anthropocene through engagement with Edward P. Jones’ 2003 novel The Known World and Kathryn Yusoff’s recent critical work on the Black Anthropocenes. Yusoff contends that, “Literally stretching black and brown bodies across the seismic fault lines of the earth, Black Anthropocenes subtend White Geology as a material stratum,” (xii). This paper will examine the ways in which Yusoff and Jones are in conversation, and try to elucidate the ways in which the Anthropocene is both built upon and a harbinger of mass death. How …
A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin
A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin
Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship
Literary critics conducting a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple diligently tend to the relationship between the two women, particularly at an intertextual level. This paper sheds light on an important third member of this relationship: Black women readers. An articulation of Black regality, which involves the incorporation of monarchical symbols and titles in characterizations of Black people, provides these readers with political tools poised to liberate Black women from hegemonic male authority and control. Examining the significance of adornment for the self exclusively to combat invisibility, the power …
Dismantling Structural Systems Of Oppression Through A Revolutionized Pedagogy, Ambar A. Quintanilla
Dismantling Structural Systems Of Oppression Through A Revolutionized Pedagogy, Ambar A. Quintanilla
Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine
No abstract provided.
Racial Spatial Relationships In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Thomas Jenson
Racial Spatial Relationships In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Thomas Jenson
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine addresses topics from segregation to police brutality to indicate the extreme spatial relationships between racial groups. Her work reveals the geographic mechanisms that confine African Americans to certain locations as well as the coerce them to violently share space with their white counterparts. Drawing upon spatial theory, which exposes the structures of unjust geography, my analysis also considers language as an additional spatial force that harms the black community as much as more physical phenomena.
Disrupters:Three Women Of Color Tell Their Stories, Dulce María Gray, Denise A. Harrison, Yuko Kurahashi
Disrupters:Three Women Of Color Tell Their Stories, Dulce María Gray, Denise A. Harrison, Yuko Kurahashi
The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal
This essay is an amplified version of the presentation we made at the 7th Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues. Our aim is to story back into the world our first experiences and motivations for investing in suffrage and democratic activism. We are three American professors of disciplines in the humanities, who for decades have taught and lived across the United States and have traveled the world. Yuko Kurahashi’s essay tells the story of how Raichō Hiratsuka and Fusae Ichikawa, Japanese activists in their suffrage and peace movements, helped shape her personal and professional life. Denise Harrison talks about the first wave …
My Brain Is All The Super-Power I Need’: Examining Black Girls In Stem And Schooling Spaces In Marvel Comics, Christian Hines
My Brain Is All The Super-Power I Need’: Examining Black Girls In Stem And Schooling Spaces In Marvel Comics, Christian Hines
Research on Diversity in Youth Literature
No abstract provided.
Book Review: Understanding Alice Walker, Cindy E. Garcia-Rivas
Book Review: Understanding Alice Walker, Cindy E. Garcia-Rivas
South Carolina Libraries
Cindy Garcia-Rivas reviews Understanding Alice Walker, written by Thadious M. Davis.
Scenes Of Slavery And The 'Chinee' In Uncle Remus And A Minstrel Picture Book, Caroline H. Yang
Scenes Of Slavery And The 'Chinee' In Uncle Remus And A Minstrel Picture Book, Caroline H. Yang
Research on Diversity in Youth Literature
No abstract provided.
Editors' Introduction, Brigitte Fielder, Katrina Phillips
Editors' Introduction, Brigitte Fielder, Katrina Phillips
Research on Diversity in Youth Literature
No abstract provided.
Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa
Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa
Conspectus Borealis
In her classic 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry explores the impacts of generations of violence, exploitation, and discrimination on an African American family in Chicago’s Southside. Throughout the play, a family house plant comes to symbolize the matriarch's hopes for her children, and her ability to nourish the plant reflects on her ability to fulfil her own modest dreams and provide for the dreams of her progeny. Similarly, we see plants fulfilling the same role in another tale of American racial injustice, namely Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, an illustrated personal account of the artist’s experience …
Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, And Maternal Power In The Novels Of Toni Morrison, Jonathan Garren
Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, And Maternal Power In The Novels Of Toni Morrison, Jonathan Garren
South Carolina Libraries
Jonathan Garren reviews Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison by Geneva Cobb Moore.
Book Reviews, Sean Cox, Eileen Hagerman, George Kotlik, Thomas Peace, Hannah Schmidt, Eric Toups
Book Reviews, Sean Cox, Eileen Hagerman, George Kotlik, Thomas Peace, Hannah Schmidt, Eric Toups
Maine History
Reviews of the following books: Historic Acadia National Park, The Stories Behind One of America's Great Treasures by Catherine Schmitt; Without Benefit of Insects: The Story of Edith M. Patch of the University of Maine by Elizabeth Gibbs; French and Indian Wars in Maine by Michael Dekker; Wabanaki Homeland and the New State of Maine: The 1820 Journal and Plans of Survey of Joseph Treat edited by Micah Pawling; The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright by Ann M. Little; Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War by Lisa Books
Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet
Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet
The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research
This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …
African American English And Urban Literature: Creating Culturally Caring Classrooms, Erin E. Campbell, Joseph J. Nicol
African American English And Urban Literature: Creating Culturally Caring Classrooms, Erin E. Campbell, Joseph J. Nicol
#CritEdPol: Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies at Swarthmore College
Language and literacy are a means of delivering care through consideration of students’ home culture; however, a cultural mismatch between the predominantly white, female educator population and the diverse urban student population is reflected in language and literacy instruction. Urban curricula often fail to incorporate culturally relevant literature, in part due to a dearth of texts that reflect student experiences. Dialectal differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) and a history of racism have attached a reformatory stigma to AAE and its speakers. The authors assert that language and literacy instruction that validates children’s lived experience …
Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin
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. …
The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland
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 Hybridizing Nature Of Ancestor Presence In Morrison’S Sula, Mounica V. Kota Ms.
The Hybridizing Nature Of Ancestor Presence In Morrison’S Sula, Mounica V. Kota Ms.
Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research
In her writings, Toni Morrison works towards a common goal of establishing a black literary canon, once that represents black characters as autonomous and nuanced human beings unable to be boxed into a one-dimensional narrative. Part of this overarching project appears to be creating a hybridizing narrative in which the cultural roots of various African-American communities are integrated with the social movements of the modern diaspora. One common theme between her novels is the inclusion of a specific ancestral figure, one that functions as some kind of pushing point or learning tool for the community within the story. In examining …