African American Studies Commons^™

Affect And Manhattan’S West Side Piers, Ricardo J. Millhouse

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Derek P. McCormack (2010) argues, "Affect, is like an atmosphere: it might not be visible, but at any given point it might be sensed ... Emotion, in turn, can be understood as the sociocultural expression of this felt intensity" (643). This paper puts McCormack (2010) and Ben Anderson (2009) into conversation to think through the ways in which atmosphere in relation to affective and emotive life has been conceptualized. I center the affective atmospheres that happen with queer bodies that make New York's west side piers queerly affective. I use "queer bodies" to signal the dis-identification with heteronormativity or binaristic …

African Americans In Madison County, Kentucky, Reinette F. Jones

Library Presentations

Reinette Jones, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Kentucky Libraries, speak about notable Madison County African Americans.

Gotta’ Go! African American Migration And Community Outside Kentucky, Reinette F. Jones

Library Presentations

Reinette Jones from the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center shares what she has learned about the fascinating and hidden story of the "out-migration" of African Americans from Kentucky while developing the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database (NKAA).

Please, Remember Me: African Americans From Scott County, Ky, Reinette F. Jones

Library Presentations

Reinette Jones, who created the Notable Kentucky African Americans (NKAA) Database, explains how to use this award-winning library tool while introducing us to some lesser-known Scott Countians. They include Sgt. Harrison Bradford, who led the San Pedro Springs Mutiny (TX) in 1867, in the fight for fair treatment of African American soldiers, and Lillian Nareen White, the first African American woman to play basketball at UK.

A Phewas Study Of A Large Observational Epidemiological Cohort Of African Americans From The Regards Study, Xueyan Zhao, Xin Geng, Vinodh Srinivasasainagendra, Ninad Chaudhary, Suzanne Judd, Virginia Wadley, Orlando M. Gutiérrez, Henry Wang, Ethan M. Lange, Leslie A. Lange, Daniel Woo, Frederick W. Unverzagt, Monika Safford, Mary Cushman, Nita Limdi, Rakale Quarells, Donna K. Arnett, Marguerite R. Irvin, Degui Zhi

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Background: Cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and kidney disease are among the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. However, knowledge of genetic determinants of those diseases in African Americans remains limited.

Results: In our study, associations between 4956 GWAS catalog reported SNPs and 67 traits were examined among 7726 African Americans from the REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study, which is focused on identifying factors that increase stroke risk. The prevalent and incident phenotypes studied included inflammation, kidney traits, cardiovascular traits and cognition. Our results validated 29 known associations, of which eight associations were reported for the …

In Black And White: Richmond’S Monument Avenue Recontextualized Through The Photographic Archive, Charlsa Anne Hensley

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

The release of the Monument Avenue Commission Report in July, 2018 was the culmination of over one year of research and collaboration with community members of Richmond, Virginia on how the city should approach the contentious history of Monument Avenue’s five Confederate centerpieces. What the monuments have symbolized within the predominately rich, white neighborhood and outside of its confines has been a matter of debate ever since they were unveiled, but the recent publicity accorded to Confederate monuments has led to considerations by historians, city leaders, and the public regarding recontextualization of Confederate monuments.

Recontextualization of the monuments should not …

Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney

Theses and Dissertations--English

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …

How Did Coalitions Form During The Civil Rights Era In Mississippi?, Kenyatta L. Mitchell

Posters-at-the-Capitol Presentations

Over the past century, African Americans took part in building organizations to bring about equal rights and social change. Many organizations formed before Jim Crow but reached prominence during the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was built on long-term strategies for gaining the right to vote, education, housing, and freedom from discrimination. Through organized nonviolent protests, the Civil Rights Movement broke the pattern of segregation at a national level through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Gender, Politics, Market Segmentation, And Taste: Adult Contemporary Radio At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Saesha Senger

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the …

“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …

But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr

Theses and Dissertations--English

“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a …