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Theses/Dissertations

English Language and Literature

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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies

Restorative Practices In English Language Arts: My Journey Towards Linguistic Justice, Ariana Skeese Apr 2024

Restorative Practices In English Language Arts: My Journey Towards Linguistic Justice, Ariana Skeese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this final portfolio, I examine anti-racist pedagogy in English Language Arts Education.

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Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston Jan 2024

Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …

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Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas Oct 2023

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

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Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham Sep 2023

Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the scope of digital humanities scholarship, this thesis interrogates ‘memory’ as a conceptual frame for remembering Black life, both past and present, in the face of missing historical data and in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. Such a concept—increasingly taken up as method in the humanities, along with related allusions to the ephemeral, spectral, or haunted—is sought to refuse historiographical and techno-scientific claims to empirical certainty or transparency, and instead affirm its gaps and absences as themselves productive sites for self-reflexive speculation on the complexities of lived experience. Applied to the digital study of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, memory comes …

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The Impact Of Slavery And Colonialism On The Black Consciousness: Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, The Confessions Of Nat Turner, And Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Mariam Badawi Jun 2023

The Impact Of Slavery And Colonialism On The Black Consciousness: Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, The Confessions Of Nat Turner, And Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Mariam Badawi

Theses and Dissertations

According to the German author, essayist, and empirical psychologist Karl Philipp Moritz, to be able to analyze someone psychologically, we have to be able to analyze ourselves as one would know oneself better than one would know anyone else. Therefore, he proposed the study of autobiographies to be able to delve into a writer's "innermost soul"; through their knowledge of themselves" (qtd. in Schlumbohm 32). Moreover, "the psychological effect that the ideology of white supremacy and European imperialism, in the form of slavery and colonialism, has had on Africa and her people has never been fully addressed and understood" (Nobles …

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Reproduction: The Ultimate Enemy Of Racial Passing In Harlem Renaissance Literature, Veronica Kordmany May 2023

Reproduction: The Ultimate Enemy Of Racial Passing In Harlem Renaissance Literature, Veronica Kordmany

Student Theses

"In this essay, I examine three texts that consider the repercussions of passing for Black Americans. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) serves as a namesake for this general idea, as two light-skinned African American women represent the divisionary approach to racial passing. In George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) we see a passing Black man’s virility being tested as he enters an ‘alternate universe’, in which a scientific invention grants him full access to the wondrous white world he’d always dreamed of entering. Finally, in the middle of this textual spectrum is Angelina W. Grimké’s 1919 short story, “The Closing …

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Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez May 2023

Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez

English Language and Literature ETDs

There is a war for recognition happening on the Hollywood battlefield. Traditionally, in every war there is an enemy and an alley; in this study, the enemy is systemic racism, and the alley is Black culture. That is, this dissertation seeks to detail the past, present, and future implications of this battle for truth, inclusion, and recognition in American pop culture. This discussion examines how various multi-media forms like literature, film, television, and comic books work as tools to combat racism in American society. More importantly, the theories presented in this text are all linked to actual tactics of military …

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Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard May 2023

Steps Toward Healing From The Possessive Other: The Vital Role Of Fantastical Literature In Trauma Theory, Rebekah Izard

English (MA) Theses

Fantastical narratives such as fairy tales and magical realist literature utilizes fantastic and intangible spaces to unpack that which is often beyond the limitations imposed on our understanding by reality: the stunting experience of individual and generational traumas. This study aims to contribute to the current literary discourse’s understandings of fantastic literature and its subgenres as a tool for healing from trauma through the application of ontological notions of Selfhood and Otherness supplied by 20th century philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, and the notion of Orientalism by postcolonial scholar, Edward Said. The dialogue generated by these schools of thought provide a space …

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Becoming “Living Matter”: Alive Things In Octavia Butler’S Xenogenesis Series, Zackary Gregory May 2023

Becoming “Living Matter”: Alive Things In Octavia Butler’S Xenogenesis Series, Zackary Gregory

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This project seeks to explore the ways Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy complicates humans' understandings of subjectivity and human exceptionalism by challenging the concept of Otherness. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series focuses on adaptability and acceptance of the nonhuman Other by depicting a forced encounter between humans and an alien species called the Oankali. Characters within the series grapple with a dynamic understanding of themselves, having to renegotiate the concept of the Other as they deal with intelligent nonhuman Beings and animate objects. Further, characters in the series are coerced into accepting the transformation of humanity into something other than human as …

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The Strong Black Woman ≠ Superwoman: Shattering Stereotypes Of Strength In Black Literature, Tricia Inez Thomas May 2023

The Strong Black Woman ≠ Superwoman: Shattering Stereotypes Of Strength In Black Literature, Tricia Inez Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

That the Black woman must be strong in order to endure the oppression she has been forced to withstand is a double-edged sword that equally contributes to both her dehumanization and willpower to survive. This project interrogates the patterns and characteristics that contribute to the schema of the strong Black woman through the examination of cultural texts foregrounded in biblical scriptures against literature written by prominent Black women through Beyoncé. Specific tropes explored include the jezebel, the mammy, and the sapphire with a conclusion that these harmful and dehumanizing stereotypes have cultivated a fallacious assumption of supernatural strength and resiliency …

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The Black Testament: A Portrait Of Female Genealogy In The African Diaspora, Raven Mcshan May 2023

The Black Testament: A Portrait Of Female Genealogy In The African Diaspora, Raven Mcshan

<strong> Theses and Dissertations </strong>

The Black Testament: A Portrait of Genealogy in the African Diaspora is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction and poetry. These pieces are based on my genealogical research into my family history. The collection traces from my discoveries in the present time back through my lived experiences, the lives of my relatives, and the lives of my ancestors. The subject of the work focuses on the women in my family and the various influences they have had in my life. The collection grapples with themes such as black womanhood, diasporic existence, and complex heritage. The traveling back of genealogical research …

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The Hate U Give As Counternarrative: A Rhetorical Site Of Competing Frames & The Disruption Of Dominant Narratives Through Counter-Storytelling & Homing, Jackeline Camacho May 2023

The Hate U Give As Counternarrative: A Rhetorical Site Of Competing Frames & The Disruption Of Dominant Narratives Through Counter-Storytelling & Homing, Jackeline Camacho

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Angie Thomas’s novel, The Hate U Give, is an African American Young Adult novel (AAYA) that captures the violence and devastating effects of police brutality and the gruesome rhetorical strategies that the dominant public sphere uses to criminalize, regulate, and dehumanize Black Americans. In this paper, I use the theoretical framework of counter-storytelling, the theoretical concept of homing, and the rhetorical strategy of framing, to analyze how Thomas exposes the ways in which the dominant public sphere silences, excludes, and discredits the voices and experiences of Black people to give readers access to the dominant public sphere in order …

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The Black Ancestral Artist Path, Cerina Zuleica Shippey Jan 2023

The Black Ancestral Artist Path, Cerina Zuleica Shippey

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The Black Ancestral Artist Path is a project dedicated to uncovering the migratory pattern between Black American Creatives from NY to Paris. Why has this trend continued today from those of the Lost Generation? What about France entices the American? And how does living there change their art and sense of self? This project also compared Black French artists and their understanding of the French colonial empire. When these two groups are brought together, how do they learn from one another? Black Americans are forced to reckon with the both the freedom and the privilege they experience being able to …

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Coded: Dialect Diversity In The Secondary American Classroom, Madeline Dunn Oct 2022

Coded: Dialect Diversity In The Secondary American Classroom, Madeline Dunn

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the differences between dialects along racial, cultural, and ethnic lines with a specific focus on Black and Latine students inside the public secondary classrooms of America. The focus of the paper is on two linguistic tactics: “code-switching,” a linguistic practice which teaches students to separate their home language from the language they use in formal or professional settings, and “code-meshing,” a linguistic practice to teach students how to mesh together multiple dialects with which a student is familiar. Through the creation of a historical framework and an analysis of existing literature, theory, and pedagogical practices regarding the …

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The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard Jun 2022

The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard

Doctoral Dissertations

The Burdens of Responsibility traces the emergence of moral responsibility as both a concept and problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, philosophy, domestic manuals, newspaper archives – I show how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Although ethicists today take this distinction for granted, it was an emergent and problematic space in the nineteenth-century United States, brought into being by historical forces, including the rise of market capitalism, abolition, changing women’s roles, and increasing concern …

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'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott May 2022

'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For this project, I am interested in the study of nuanced self-representations of Black rage that appear within African American literary traditions, specifically the blues aesthetic, wherein artists narrativize a wide spectrum of intelligent and specific emotion--not just melancholy. Blues narratives in which Black people self-represent are in direct opposition to flattened narratives of certain affective modes such as anger as a useless, backwards, pathologized, and flat feeling that appear within dominant U.S. and global iconographies. What I see in the blues aesthetic is the capacity for a multichromatic approach to studying rage and Black authorship in America. By using …

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Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt May 2022

Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Restructuring of Blackness, examines Black speculative fiction as a site of theorization within worlds where Black existence has not already been pre-determined by the forces of slavery and ideologies of race and culture in a white supremacist world. In this sense, my dissertation models ways of reading Black literature that demonstrates how Blackness can disturb, rather than reproduce, notions of racial meaning and the Human. I argue that writers of Black speculative fiction go beyond the creation of alternative realities to produce sites that allow for nearly limitless …

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The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’S “The Vanishing Half” And Her Intent On Revealing The Unseen In The Tradition Of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue May 2022

The Unarticulated Unseen: Britt Bennett’S “The Vanishing Half” And Her Intent On Revealing The Unseen In The Tradition Of Racial Passing, Caroline Maas Rue

All Theses

Throughout the trajectory of passing literature, there have been varying projections of racial identity as it is intertwined with choice and power. Despite the many commonalities between the archetypal passing novel, the differences in the way that passing is demarcated in various novels is indicative of the racial climate out of which it came. This paper considers Britt Bennett’s 2020 novel, The Vanishing Half, as a socio-political artifact of an allegedly post-racial era. In considering Bennett’s novel as a reflection of post-raciality, a comparative study incorporating Nella Larsen’s Passing, Douglas Sirk’s Adaptation of Imitation of Life, and Danzy …

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“People Like They Historical Shit In A Certain Way”: The Civil War Plays Of Suzan-Lori Parks, Or Commercialized Memory And Black Lives, Brandon Eric Fisher May 2022

“People Like They Historical Shit In A Certain Way”: The Civil War Plays Of Suzan-Lori Parks, Or Commercialized Memory And Black Lives, Brandon Eric Fisher

All Theses

Suzan-Lori Parks has explored the relationship between Blackness, slavery, and capitalism throughout her career. I argue that Parks’s three works—The America Play (1995), Topdog/Underdog (2001), and Father Comes Home from the Wars (2015)—should receive critical attention as her Civil War plays. By this phrase, I mean that Parks embeds her critiques of racial capitalism in historical narratives about America’s bloodiest conflict. In these three plays, she takes up several white supremacist Civil War tropes—tropes like what scholar Cody Marrs calls the “Father Abraham” story and the “Agrarian Imagination” myth—and criticizes them as narratives that deny African American history. To …

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Wilderness Is Not A Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used As A Form Of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History, Dorothy Irrera Apr 2022

Wilderness Is Not A Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used As A Form Of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History, Dorothy Irrera

English Honors Theses

This Capstone won Skidmore's Racial Justice Student Award. An analysis of literature, American history, and pop culture, Wilderness Is Not a Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used as a Form of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History uses a sociological lens to approach the inherent relationship between racism and wilderness.

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The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer Apr 2022

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

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Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan Feb 2022

Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to understand how the actions of Black women from the past have inspired the modern Black female literary movement. This thesis focuses on three historical women: Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Freeman, and Cathay Williams, and their literary sisters: bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. By viewing the lives of these historical women through a modern-day lens, we can understand how their actions created a ripple effect that Black women are still discussing today. Black feminism did not start in a vacuum, and the actions of everyday Black women have pushed us forward to being more accepting …

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Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe Jan 2022

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

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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, …

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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 …

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(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 …

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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 …

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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, …

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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 …

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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. …

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