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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
The Cultural Self: The Novel As Griot In African American Fiction, Eric Christian Atkinson
The Cultural Self: The Novel As Griot In African American Fiction, Eric Christian Atkinson
Theses Digitization Project
This paper addresses the Western African oral concept of griot, as it utilizes nommo, the Bantu term which denotes the magical power of words to cause change, as a critical African American lexical lens. It will foreground the fiction of Octavia E. Butler and John Edgar Wideman through the critical lens of griot as a means to construct African American community and culture through narrative by utilizing nommo. Nommo is an "African concept in which the word is a life force; the word is creator rather than created" even after it has been spoken or written. Traditionally the griot is …
What Child Is This?: Closely Reading Collectivity And Queer Childrearing In Lackawanna Blues And Noah’S Arc, Vincent L. Stephens
What Child Is This?: Closely Reading Collectivity And Queer Childrearing In Lackawanna Blues And Noah’S Arc, Vincent L. Stephens
Vincent L Stephens
Increasing hostilities toward intimate change are rooted in longstanding affective investments in a sexual normativity that oppresses multiple strands of intimacy, including African American kinship networks and same-sex coupling. Since homosexuality is always racialized sexuality and African American kinship patterns have always been marginal by U. S. heteronormative standards, the present essay unmasks the ways sexual normativity has obscured collectivity as a resistive strategy in the lives of two "alternative" intimate groups with important overlaps, black gay and lesbian communities and African American extended families. The essay interrogates sexual normativity by defining and affirming the relevance of black collectivity to …