African American Studies Commons^™

Unmasking The Protester: The Meanings And Myths Of Collective Civil Resistance Movements In African American And Polish Postresistance Prose Fiction, Agnieszka Herra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My contention is that the narrative framework of social movements, especially the ones deemed “successful” such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Polish Solidarity Movement, reflects unity and collectivity within collective memory. During the period of the movements’ duration, this provides a clear rhetorical purpose: to give the appearance of unity in order to give effective voice to the demands. I argue that the voices that did not fit into the collective movements emerge subsequently to question this monologic language in literary form. This dissertation uses Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic language to argue that novels in the postresistance …

Em(Body)Ing Autonomy: Black Women’S Bodies And Self-Liberation In The Novels Of Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker, Caitlin Rose Riley Duttry

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …

The Merits Of Anger: "Put Out" And "Being Outdoors" In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, E. Frances Bower

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Speaking Silence Fluently: Encouraging Student Understanding Of Counterhegemonic Strategies In African American Literature, Kathleen S. Decker

Masters Theses

This thesis suggests that while mainstream multicultural education claims to promote both diversity and equality, it fails to adequately address, let alone improve, the living conditions of minority students. It further suggests that when teachers help students read through the lenses of critical multiculturalism and critical whiteness studies, students can better see that both canonical and non-canonical African American authors deliberately employ nuanced strategies to resist white supremacy. Specifically through the use of purposeful and discreet silences, these authors serve to promote new and actively counterhegemonic ways of thinking in the classroom.

Each chapter pairs two texts--one canonical and one …

“'You Done Cheat Mose Out O' De Job, Anyways; We All Knows Dat'”: Faith Healing In The Fiction Of Kate Chopin, Karen Kel Roop

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, the half-way mark of the century in which the country itself would be broken in two, Kate Chopin was destined to bear witness to the many divisions that have distinguished the United States. Especially noticeable in the post-Reconstruction period in which she wrote was the expanding chasm between the races. This dissertation argues that even Chopin's most seemingly orthodox Southern stories betray a quest for a theology capable of healing the physical, emotional, and spiritual ills omnipresent in the country and especially apparent in the post-Civil War South. The alternative to mainstream Protestantism …

Narrativizing Success : Attitudes Toward African American Vernacular English In The Composition Classroom, Christopher W. Diorio

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

My thesis analyzes academia’s response to African American Vernacular English (AAVE) features in academic writing and how teachers’ responses to AAVE writing create socially constructed personas for students based on their vernacular dialect features. The results show spoken language strongly influences written language, although the range of dialect use varies from single feature usage to use of multiple features, and occurrences of use are highly localized. While instances of AAVE in academic writing are irregular, instructor response to features shows a pattern of strikethroughs and imperative statements used to correct language. As studies demonstrate such approaches to writing have negligible …

Doers Of The Living Word: Gospel Ideology And The African American Womanist Novel, Rebecca Erin Huskey

Dissertations

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison issues a charge and illuminates the challenge that she and other African American writers face in defining the self through a racially oppressive language:

Neither blackness nor "people of color" stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive "othering" of people and language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and …

The Selected Language Styles Of African Americans In An Urban Environment, Danielle R. England

McCabe Thesis Collection

The overall scope of this research is to define and explain the different styles of African American English. What are they and how do they affect the American society? The means by which many African Americans communicate is different from what American deems as standard American English (SAE). To this date, the voice of Black America has been categorizes as Black Dialect, African American Vernacular English, and Black English. Only until recently has the Black voice been regarded as Ebonics. Where did these language styles originate and why do we continue to speak it? Of course, there is nothing wrong …

Revolutionary Trickster Communities: Re-Presenting Folk Heroes In Contemporary African American Novels, Susan C. Stinson

Theses & Honors Papers

In this thesis, the three novelists, as tricksters, manipulate one’s reading process by overlapping the visible with the invisible world. This thesis explores the tricksters communities and will focus on the novelists as trickster. Sherley Anne Williams, Ernest Gaines, and Gloria Naylor parody the rebel or loner trickster tradition in literature and conceptualize a world in which African Americans, white Americans, and Native Americans work communally to deconstruct the stereotypes associated with race, age, and gender. The authors use parody as a humorous narrative technique. The humor enables the modern reader to look into the past at the wrongs imposed …

Giving Her A Voice: The Representation Of The Black Woman In Four Short Stories, Jennifer Sheeler

Theses & Honors Papers

Black women have had to work very hard to pull themselves up the social ladder. Literature reflects society, and the black female experience in the South is a part of American society which has not been overlooked by its literature. This thesis examines short stories by the similarities and tempered differences to develop a closer understanding of the true black female experience. The examination found that the gender and race of each author of the four short stories does not correspond to the amount of power each one gives to his or her black female character the way the reader …

An Unblinking Gaze: Readerly Response-Ability And Racial Reconstructions In Toni Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye' And 'Beloved', Lara Mary Fulton

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis examines Toni Morrison's reconstruction of racial representations in The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Morrison stresses the need for a transformation of current representations of black and white culture in her critical study, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, in which Morrison examines how black culture has been (mis)represented and (mis)perceived by white Western culture and discourse. She argues that idealized and valorized notions of "whiteness," white identity, and white culture have been constructed from denigrating, binary oppositional (mis)perceptions of "blackness," black identity, and black culture. These stereotypical (mis)perceptions maintain white cultural dominance over …

Zora Neale Hurston’S Search For Identity In Moses, Man Of The Mountain, Joan E. Sebastian

Masters Theses

Zora Neale Hurston, Afro-American writer of the 1920s and 1930s, has gained critical recognition for her novels and studies about the Afro-American masses. Hurston, also an anthropologist and folklorist, worked directly with southern Afro-Americans through her research in both of these fields. Her folklore collecting journeys enabled her to see and to capture the cultural traditions and oral heritage of Afro-Americans. It was her search into the cultural traditions, moreover, that led her to find her own identity. Hurston, therefore, depicted her protagonists as searching for an identity in most of her novels, with this quest especially apparent in Moses, …

Jean Toomer's Cane: A Work In The American Grotesque Genre, Kathryn M. Olsen

Masters Theses

In my thesis I will discuss the fact that Jean Toomer’s Cane is a grotesque work, one which in several ways resembles Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. While Jean Toomer never specifically alludes to any of the characters in Cane as grotesques, they consistently exhibit three of the strongest, most characteristic elements of the grotesque: physical and/or psychic deformities, alienation from the reader/viewer, and, most importantly, unrelenting conflict from two opposing elements. In fact, the figures in Cane show even more development of grotesque themes than the characters in Winesburg, Ohio, a collection known for its portrayals of modern …

A Critical Analysis Of Negro Character In The American Novel Of The South 1935-1940, Alice Veronica Johnson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

I have observed in reading novels by both white and Negro authors that only certain types of Negroes have been portrayed. The question kept rising in my mind, Why? Usually it is the highly colorful, sensational, immoral type that is shown to the exclusion of the self-respecting, decent living, ordinary, everyday Negro.

The Concept Of God In The Poetry Of The American Negro, Mary H. Jones Sr.

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

Many authors have written much about the Negro and religion. Those who know the black man in American readily concede that he is by nature a lover of God, and that this great innate belief manifests itself in his daily life. Books of deep and light reading- some written in prose, others in verse- have been produced by American Negro men and women. Many of their works have mirrored forth the concept of God in the mind of the Afro-American; but this concept has not remained the same- this great faith is at present suffering decay.

The Development Of Race Pride In American Negro Poetry, Sister Mary Boniface Adams

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

The study of the development of race pride in the poetry of American Negro seeks to trace the though of the Negro from his entry into America to the present, including the important periods of history which affected this development and his reaction to them.