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Articles 61 - 90 of 345

Full-Text Articles in African American Studies

Regardless, ‘I’ And ‘You’: Lessons From Black Feminist Literature, Jasmine Veronica Sauceda Jan 2022

Regardless, ‘I’ And ‘You’: Lessons From Black Feminist Literature, Jasmine Veronica Sauceda

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple from a Black feminist perspective to demonstrate oneness as capacious being. This project explores an I-You dialogue that works toward future-making through the notion of regardless, an idea from Walker’s definition of Womanist, deployed through sustained engagement with Kevin Quashie’s notion of oneness. Thus, this work extrapolates lessons found in the selected texts to demonstrate what it means to embody a capaciousness of being and how this then fosters healing in the face of trauma. In so doing, …


Jemimas, Jockeys, And Jolly Banks: The Racial Discourse Of Black Collectibles, Conrad Pruitt Jan 2022

Jemimas, Jockeys, And Jolly Banks: The Racial Discourse Of Black Collectibles, Conrad Pruitt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Over the last thirty years, an industry in black racist memorabilia has resurged. Bolstered by online commerce, social media trade, and a robust reproduction market, racist collectibles continue to circulate despite their functional obsolescence or presumed incongruity with current views of race. Many of these objects originated in the late nineteenth century, where the emergence of black citizenship was seen as a threat to a racial caste structure that ensured white supremacy. Following the impetus for supremacy that defined the Jim Crow era, the collectibles sought to crystallize conceptions of inherent black inferiority. The presumption that these originary conditions and …


Fleshcrawl, Shanita Jackson Jan 2022

Fleshcrawl, Shanita Jackson

Theses and Dissertations--English

I am fascinated with the spiritual, physical, and psychological experiences that occur when one’s flesh crawls. The experiences, akin to inverted goosebumps, result from provocations of the senses or of the mind. James Blake’s latest album, for example, triggers my flesh to crawl. The art on the album cover depicts a decaying body turned into a canyon-like labyrinth. In undergrad, attempts to conceptualize slave-deck diagrams disturbed my flesh to crawl. I am intrigued by how anxiety, epigenetics, and superstition all factor into the subjective intensities of this collective experience. As it seems, circumstance heightens the severity and frequency of the …


(Dis)Possessed Black Youth: How America's Architecture Challenges Coming Of Age In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century African American Women's Literature, Margaret Frymire Kelly Jan 2022

(Dis)Possessed Black Youth: How America's Architecture Challenges Coming Of Age In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century African American Women's Literature, Margaret Frymire Kelly

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation advances studies of Black childhood, particularly Black girlhood, by examining how African American women writers depict the troubled journey to adulthood in stories of segregation, immigration, and incarceration. I argue that authors of four representative literary works emphasize architectural structures as well as ancestral hauntings among which Black children grow up. Without examining the material structures, we cannot understand the strategies these haunted Black youth deploy to reach adulthood. Examining the architectural structures that the protagonists of Maud Martha (1953), Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Zami (1982), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) grow up in and around, I demonstrate …


Racial Spatial Relationships In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Thomas Jenson Jan 2022

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 Dec 2021

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 Oct 2021

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 Sep 2021

Book Review: Understanding Alice Walker, Cindy E. Garcia-Rivas

South Carolina Libraries

Cindy Garcia-Rivas reviews Understanding Alice Walker, written by Thadious M. Davis.


Mic Check : Finding Hip Hop's Place In The Literary Milieu, Victorio Reyes Aug 2021

Mic Check : Finding Hip Hop's Place In The Literary Milieu, Victorio Reyes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The study of Hip Hop poetics has been slowly gaining momentum as an area for scholarly inquiry. Accordingly, Mic Check rests on one critical assumption: Hip Hop is the most significant American form of poetry ever invented. To back up this claim, this project investigates Hip Hop lyricism from five critical angles: tradition, form, tone, medium, and practice. I argue that music’s foundational position in African American literature clarifies Hip Hop’s experiments with language, which operate within and extend an ongoing, centuries-old tradition of linguistic, rhythmic, and poetic experimentation. Comprehension of the longstanding literary/oral territory from which Hip Hop is …


Existentially Guilty: Where Do I Go From Here?, Devontae Wilson Jul 2021

Existentially Guilty: Where Do I Go From Here?, Devontae Wilson

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Teachers, students, parents, and even politicians have been forced to confront the by-products of not having difficult conversations about race and class. Political pundits are using this moment in history sparked by recorded injustice and the publicized murders of unarmed black people at the hands of law enforcement to demonize Critical Race Theory (CRT), a framework created to analyze how the law is racialized. This portfolio is largely a result of Dr. Rudine Sims-Bishop’s “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” and contextualizing it through my personal experience as a classroom teacher, as a black man in a majority white, female …


Skin Worlds: Black And Indigenous Science Fiction Theorizing Since The 1970s, Lou Cornum Jun 2021

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, …


Using Big Data To Facilitate A Lyrical Analysis Of Poetry And Rap, Remington Yve Giller May 2021

Using Big Data To Facilitate A Lyrical Analysis Of Poetry And Rap, Remington Yve Giller

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

Poetry and rap are dissected using text mining techniques in order to determine overall trends in the words used by both. With this data, the way in which ideas and concepts are expressed can be compared and contrasted as a way of showing the legitimacy of rap as a form of literary expression. Other topics within the paper are: a background of the history of rap and the digital humanities, and an example of a close reading featuring a medieval poem and a rap by Eminem. This demonstrates how even in a traditional way of handling texts, both poetry and …


Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton May 2021

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 …


Scenes Of Slavery And The 'Chinee' In Uncle Remus And A Minstrel Picture Book, Caroline H. Yang Apr 2021

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 Apr 2021

Editors' Introduction, Brigitte Fielder, Katrina Phillips

Research on Diversity in Youth Literature

No abstract provided.


Entertainment Media Perceptions Of Minorities In Young Adult Adaptations, Kynnadie Bennett Apr 2021

Entertainment Media Perceptions Of Minorities In Young Adult Adaptations, Kynnadie Bennett

Scholars Week

This is an exploration of stereotypical and racist portrayals of minorities, specifically African-American, Latinx, and Native American communities, in film and television in the past and how that has affected representation in film adaptations of young adult literature. Young adult literature is one of the highest-selling genres in literature, purchased by both young adults and actual adults. In recent years, young adult literature has been adapted into film and television series and while representation has improved since the early years of entertainment history, there are still problems in the industry: many of the stereotypes remain, some minorities lack representation, and …


Audre Lorde And The Power Of Provocative Imagery, Stephanie Morris Apr 2021

Audre Lorde And The Power Of Provocative Imagery, Stephanie Morris

Student Writing

This essay is an examination of Audre Lorde's use of graphic imagery in her poems to create awareness of injustice in America and promote healing and survival. Lorde incorporates this element in her poetry to evoke emotions that will remain with readers even after reading her work.


The Importance Of Black Love In Romance Novels, University Marketing And Communications, Julie Moody-Freeman Feb 2021

The Importance Of Black Love In Romance Novels, University Marketing And Communications, Julie Moody-Freeman

DePaul Download

For Julie Moody-Freeman, reading Black romance novels isn’t a guilty pleasure - it’s an area of study. Moody-Freeman is the director of DePaul's Center for Black Diaspora and a faculty member in the African and Black Diaspora Studies Department. On this episode, she discusses the history and importance of Black love in romance novels, which inspires her work as the host of The Black Romance Podcast. She also reflects on her conversations with Black romance writers, editors and scholars and the importance of their oral histories.


The Bus Murals Of Anniston: Teaching The Freedom Riders History, Joanne E. Gates Jan 2021

The Bus Murals Of Anniston: Teaching The Freedom Riders History, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

PBS's American Experience makes available in streaming format its documentary of the Freedom Riders from the PBS website. With that and with a more detailed photographic slide show of the information panels on Anniston's Burning Bus murals, I seek to bring my students to an awareness of ways that history, especially the history of the violence that met the Freedom Riders outside Anniston, is worthy of a revisiting in today's times. I want to bring into my classroom an appreciation for the bus murals that depict the full history of the incident so that students attending Jacksonville State University can …


Modeling Black Literature: Behind The Screen With The Black Bibliography Project, Brenna Bychowski, Melissa Barton Jan 2021

Modeling Black Literature: Behind The Screen With The Black Bibliography Project, Brenna Bychowski, Melissa Barton

Library Staff Publications

The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) plans to produce a bibliographic database of printed works by Black writers from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. With the support of the Beinecke Library and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, project co-PIs and codirectors Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill collaborated with a team of librarians from Yale to develop the data model for their database. Drawing on Beinecke’s James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection to pull case studies, the team of librarians developed a Linked Data model for BBP in an instance of Wikibase and trained and supported a group of graduate student …


Adding A Dimension: Illustrating Triple Consciousness Theory In The African American Literary Tradition, Asia Wesley Jan 2021

Adding A Dimension: Illustrating Triple Consciousness Theory In The African American Literary Tradition, Asia Wesley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way gender expands and nuances W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness theory, which depicts the African American identity as a doubleness that is both American and Negro. Black feminist criticism’s nuanced formulation of DuBois’s formulation of Black identity allows the African American literary tradition to be seen through three lenses: an American, a Negro, and an African American’s gender identity. In order to further contemporize the pre-existing Black feminist criticism, I examine Hurston, Brooks, and Morrison in the three time periods that followed DuBois’s coining of double consciousness theory: (1) the Harlem Renaissance, (2) the Civil Rights Movement …


"Trying Hard To Keep Her From Feeling Outdoors": Race, Ability, And Eugenics In Early Morrison, Grace Caraway Jan 2021

"Trying Hard To Keep Her From Feeling Outdoors": Race, Ability, And Eugenics In Early Morrison, Grace Caraway

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.


Henry Adams: An Education In Autobiography, Marcellus Richie Jan 2021

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 …


Educating For Global Competence: Co-Constructing Outcomes In The Field: An Action Research Project, Kristina A. Van Winkle Jan 2021

Educating For Global Competence: Co-Constructing Outcomes In The Field: An Action Research Project, Kristina A. Van Winkle

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Capacity building for globally competent educators is a 21st Century imperative to address contemporary complex and constantly changing challenges. This action research project is grounded in positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, relational cultural theory, and relational leadership practices. It sought to identify adaptive challenges educators face as they try to integrate globally competent teaching practices into their curricula, demonstrate learning and growth experienced by the educators in this project, and provide guidance and solutions to the challenges globally competent educators face. Six educators participated in this three-phase project, which included focus groups, reflective journal entries, and an exit interview. Data …


Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel Jan 2021

Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Race Youth in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture argues for the centrality of black youth, both real and literary, to the trajectories of African American literature and its repudiation of white supremacy. Drawing on research into the rise of the adolescent and teenager as distinct social categories, I argue that age-based subjectivity should inform how we read race-based subjectivity. My first chapter explores how early twentieth-century black periodicals push back against white supremacist theories of human development in an explicit appeal to what I call “race youth,” the children and adolescents who would take up the mantle of racial uplift. …


Wilderness Of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Captivity Narratives, And Genre Transformation In Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Hannah Gautsch Jan 2021

Wilderness Of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Captivity Narratives, And Genre Transformation In Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Hannah Gautsch

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a modiste well-versed in the social expectations of the domestic world, Elizabeth Keckley crafted an autobiography that would appeal to this wide variety of audiences. Throughout the 1850s, women across the nation negotiated the terms of True Womanhood and identified activism as a space where women could engage with national concerns. At the same time, literary production in the US was increasing exponentially, creating room for literature to be used as a means of social change. Contemporary scholars have devoted much attention to the ways Keckley’s Behind the Scenes combines elements of multiple genres to assure its long-term survival …


African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper Dec 2020

African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Justina Ireland’s young adult novels Dread Nation (2017) and Deathless Divide (2020) tell the story of a Black girl by the name of Jane living in the aftermath of the Civil War, around 1880.


Exploring The Rhetorical Power Of Speculative Fiction Through Jewelle Gomez’S The Gilda Stories And Octavia Butler’S Fledgling, Monique Dixon Dec 2020

Exploring The Rhetorical Power Of Speculative Fiction Through Jewelle Gomez’S The Gilda Stories And Octavia Butler’S Fledgling, Monique Dixon

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

There are apparent similarities between Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. However, this thesis will demonstrate that they share more than similar subject matter and yet differ in substantial ways. Utilizing Black feminist theory and alternative rhetoric this thesis examines how Gomez and Butler harness the potential of speculative fiction to critique the world around them and imagine an alternative world for those who are intersectionally marginalized.


“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey Dec 2020

“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 …


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 Oct 2020

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 …