Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
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 …
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 …
"You Your Best Thing”: The Anti-Colonial Power Of The Mind In Black And Chicanx American Literature, Grace Keir
"You Your Best Thing”: The Anti-Colonial Power Of The Mind In Black And Chicanx American Literature, Grace Keir
English Honors Theses
In the year 1987, two of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, Toni Morrison and Gloria Anzaldúa, published what many consider to be their respective magnum opuses: Morrison’s Beloved and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In these groundbreaking texts, Morrison and Anzaldúa boldly confront the complex legacies of American imperialism and slavery, examining the effect colonization has had on their respective communities, ancestors, and selves. In this essay, I argue that literature emerging from marginalized communities within the United States can and should be considered among global postcolonial texts; Morrison and Anzaldúa illustrate the ways …
The Gothic Other: A Critique Of Race, Gender, Slavery, And Systemic Oppression Found In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, And Hannah Crafts, Kelly Franklin
The Gothic Other: A Critique Of Race, Gender, Slavery, And Systemic Oppression Found In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, And Hannah Crafts, Kelly Franklin
Boise State University Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines three novels all communicating ideas about race, gender, and slavery under the conventions of Gothic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) show how patriarchy oppressed and haunted women while keeping slavery at the margins. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison, fictionalizes the account of a female slave who murdered her child to assert her power and reject slavery. However, Morrison rewrites and defies aspects of the Gothic mode by bringing the ghost of the murdered child back to life, and later showing steps the community can take to heal from their collective trauma. The …
Dissonances Of Dispossession: Narrating Colonialism And Slavery In The Expansion Of Capitalism, W. Oliver Baker
Dissonances Of Dispossession: Narrating Colonialism And Slavery In The Expansion Of Capitalism, W. Oliver Baker
English Language and Literature ETDs
This project studies how ethnic American literature of the long nineteenth century represents the relationship between the dispossession of lands and lives—the histories of settler colonialism and slavery—and the making of democracy and capitalism in the United States. We often think of this relationship in terms of temporally distinct stages in which the formal equality of democracy and the marketplace overcome and thus leave behind the direct domination of colonization and enslavement. However, I focus on how the early novels of Indigenous, African, and Mexican American writers from the period of manifest destiny to the New Deal era represent the …
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
“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 …
"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell
"The Imagination And Construction Of The Black Criminal In American Literature, 1741-1910", Emahunn Campbell
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, …
Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin
Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …