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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Hearing/S: Will In The Carceral Archive, Kayla Morse
Hearing/S: Will In The Carceral Archive, Kayla Morse
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This long-form poetry project follows the human will — in this case the “criminal,” or captive will — as it is manhandled through an archive of reverends, wardens and superintendents narrating the future of prison reform. Drawing primarily from National Prison Association Conference archives between the years 1874 and 1895, these documents saturate the work with a will resistant but compelled towards subjugation by the state — as it appears within the text across forced labor economies, eugenic prison science that dictates starvation, classification, and isolation as the rule, the dehumanization of banal bureaucratic processes, the visceral and spectacular violence …
Wolf Packs: U.S. Carceral Logics And The Case Of The New Jersey Four, Leilani Dowell
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 …
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 …