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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Coded: Dialect Diversity In The Secondary American Classroom, Madeline Dunn
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 …
The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard
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 …
'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott
'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 …
Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt
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 …
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
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 …
“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
“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 …
Wilderness Is Not A Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used As A Form Of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History, Dorothy Irrera
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.
The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer
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 …
Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan
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 …
Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe
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 …
Regardless, ‘I’ And ‘You’: Lessons From Black Feminist Literature, Jasmine Veronica Sauceda
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
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 …
(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
(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 …