Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- American Studies (11)
- History (7)
- Social and Behavioral Sciences (6)
- American Literature (5)
- Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (5)
-
- English Language and Literature (4)
- Race and Ethnicity (4)
- Sociology (4)
- Cultural History (3)
- Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority (3)
- American Popular Culture (2)
- Ethnic Studies (2)
- Latina/o Studies (2)
- Literature in English, North America (2)
- Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration (2)
- Sociology of Culture (2)
- Theatre and Performance Studies (2)
- United States History (2)
- Women's Studies (2)
- Audio Arts and Acoustics (1)
- Business (1)
- Christianity (1)
- Communication (1)
- Comparative Literature (1)
- Criminal Procedure (1)
- Critical and Cultural Studies (1)
- Digital Humanities (1)
- Keyword
-
- Race (3)
- Slavery (3)
- African American (2)
- Fashion (2)
- Power (2)
-
- United States (2)
- Women (2)
- "red scare" (1)
- Abolition (1)
- Aesthetics (1)
- African Americans (1)
- African-American (1)
- American Literature (1)
- Antebellum slavery (1)
- Atlantic (1)
- Authors (1)
- Black Lives Matter (1)
- Black Marxism (1)
- Black Radical Tradition (1)
- Black Women (1)
- Business of Fashion (1)
- Capital (1)
- Children's theatre (1)
- Christianity (1)
- Civil Rights Movement (1)
- Craven County (1)
- Culture (1)
- Depression (1)
- Diaspora (1)
- Feminism (1)
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Hair Is The Root Of A Revolution: How Black Women Are Embracing Their Identity With Hair, Shanel Dawson
Hair Is The Root Of A Revolution: How Black Women Are Embracing Their Identity With Hair, Shanel Dawson
Capstones
For years, black women have been demeaned for their features; their noses, complexions and hair. Straight hair and wavy hair have been considered “good hair.” And for centuries these ideas have been perpetuated by images in the media, cultural messages and even policies in schools and professional settings.
Today black women, nationwide, are rejecting straightening chemicals and embracing their natural hair as a point of pride. I spoke with several black women who are attempting to distance themselves from these negative narratives by honoring their roots.
For black women in America, hair has been the easiest way to connect on …
Mask On: How Fashion Erased The Politics Of Streetwear In 2017, Frances Sola-Santiago
Mask On: How Fashion Erased The Politics Of Streetwear In 2017, Frances Sola-Santiago
Capstones
This year, fashion embraced streetwear in the highest echelons of luxury. From a Louis Vuitton and Supreme collaboration to Gucci’s support of Harlem designer Dapper Dan’s store reopening, streetwear was catapulted into the fashion zeitgeist— hoodies, do-rags, sneakers, and chains included. But fashion’s history of temporary blackness questions the industry’s ability to deal with the politics of criminalization, discrimination, appropriation, and inequality that come with this trend.
In an era when white supremacy lives within the mainstream conversation and African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately targeted by police and criminal justice, it’s clear that what we wear and the culture …
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Theses and Dissertations
This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …
Harriet Jacobs And Toni Morrison: A Tradition Of Narrative Resistance, Allyson L. Molloy
Harriet Jacobs And Toni Morrison: A Tradition Of Narrative Resistance, Allyson L. Molloy
Theses and Dissertations
This article considers historical constructions of power and the narrative as a mode of resistance. Working in different centuries, under extremely disparate circumstances, Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Toni Morrison in her novel The Bluest Eye, utilize specific narrative strategies to challenge and question institutionalized power which is evidenced through their deliberate employment of narrative strategies not only to challenge the institution of slavery or the hegemonic ideal, but also to question the racial and gender oppression systemic to those institutions of power.
Beyond The Vale: Visualizing Slavery In Craven County, North Carolina, Marissa N. Kinsey
Beyond The Vale: Visualizing Slavery In Craven County, North Carolina, Marissa N. Kinsey
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Beyond the Vale is a data visualization project dedicated to the study of slavery in antebellum North Carolina. Focusing on Gooding’s Township, a rural farming community in the eastern county of Craven, it is designed to address basic questions about the experiences of the county’s antebellum enslaved population. These questions represent points of contention between local heritage narratives and the direct testimonies of former slaves. Where former slaves describe a complex, yet undeniably exploitative system in which they had only minimal control over their own lives, county literature echoes larger themes in North Carolina state scholarship by either overlooking slavery, …
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …
The Legacy Of Slavery And The Continued Marginalization Of Communities Of Color Within The Legal System, Julia N. Alvarez
The Legacy Of Slavery And The Continued Marginalization Of Communities Of Color Within The Legal System, Julia N. Alvarez
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The aim of this thesis paper is to demonstrate how the history of slavery in the United States continues to marginalize communities of color. The history of slavery in America was the result of various factors. Some of these factors included but were not limited to; economic, legal, and social. Slavery provided a reliable and self-reproducing workforce. The laws enacted during slavery ensured the continuation of the social order of the time. This social order was based on the generalized understanding that blacks were born into servitude. Those born into slavery were not given the same legal or economic status …
"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen
"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My thesis explores and analyzes the Federal Theater Project’s cultural and political impact during the Depression, as well as the contested legacy of this unique experiment in government-sponsored, broadly accessible cultural expression. Part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration, the FTP aimed to provide jobs for playwrights, actors, designers, stagehands, and other theater professionals on relief in the stark period from 1935 to 1939. But the project became a nationwide political and artistic flashpoint, spurring fierce debate over the leadership, politics and impact of this “people’s theater.” The FTP gave professional theater an unprecedented reach into working-class and black …
Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton
Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed …
Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green
Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …
Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman
Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …
Dark Stars Of The Evening: Performing African American Citizenship And Identity In Germany, 1890-1920, Kristin L. Moriah
Dark Stars Of The Evening: Performing African American Citizenship And Identity In Germany, 1890-1920, Kristin L. Moriah
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Dark Stars of the Evening: Performing African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890-1920 demonstrates that black performers in Germany developed wide networks in the performance world as they sought artistic opportunities beyond the racist circumscription of the American popular stage. Their performances became emblematic of modernity, globalization, and imperial might for German audiences at the turn of the century. African American-styled blackness contributed to the formation of the city of Berlin while allowing African American performers to assert themselves on the global stage. Groups like the Four Black Diamonds had a lengthy engagement with the popular stage in Berlin, …
Harlem Hospital's Journey To Patient Navigation, Christine W. Thorpe
Harlem Hospital's Journey To Patient Navigation, Christine W. Thorpe
Publications and Research
This essay discusses the history of 20th century black migration to Harlem, New York and the utilization of Harlem Hospital. This examination is based on New York newspaper articles in the 1920’s. They tell the story, from a journalist’s perspective, of the challenges African Americans experienced in their interactions with Harlem Hospital. The implicit communication of segregation of Harlem Hospital at that time is connected to the development of patient navigation in the 1970’s. The creation of patient navigation will be discussed in the context of historical health disparities that are increasingly manifested today.
Gubernamentalidad Espacial Y Agencia Criminal Negra En Cali Y São Paulo: Aproximaciones Para Una Antropología 'Fuera De La Ley.', Jaime Alves
Publications and Research
En los últimos años realicé visitas semanales a la cárcel, participado en reuniones mensuales de rendición de cuentas de la policía comunitária, “parchado” con los pandilleros en las “ollas”, entrevistado a las madres de los jóvenes negros asesinados por la policía o por otros jóvenes en las guerras sin fin entre pandillas. A lo largo de mi experiencia etnográfica, he tenido la “oportunidad” de escuchar varios relatos de horror, como por ejemplo las prácticas de “Los Matadores”, el escuadrón de la muerte compuesto por policías en la zona sur de São Paulo. Tal como lo he señalado en trabajo anterior, …
“The Monster They've Engendered In Me”: Gothic Strategies In African American And Latina/O Prison Literature, 1945-2000, Jason Baumann
“The Monster They've Engendered In Me”: Gothic Strategies In African American And Latina/O Prison Literature, 1945-2000, Jason Baumann
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Recent scholarship on American prison literature, such as Caleb Smith’s pivotal study The Prison in the American Imagination, has uncovered the power that the terrifying realities of the modern prison have had as an inspiration for the development of Gothic literature, as well as the ways that prison writers have in turn drawn upon these Gothic images. However, these scholars have considered prison writers as passively trapped by Gothic discourses that ultimately objectify them as monsters. In contrast, I will argue that African American and Latina/o prison writers in the post-war period have consciously transformed these Gothic themes in …
A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity
A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self-exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the …
Toward A Reoriented Radicalism: Black Marxism And Orientalism, Alexandros Orphanides
Toward A Reoriented Radicalism: Black Marxism And Orientalism, Alexandros Orphanides
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The 21st century has witnessed the unquestioned supremacy of late capitalism. It holds coercive power over nation states; it generates increased inequality within countries and around the globe. It can, today, exploit everywhere at once. The poorest countries in the world reside in the Global South. Of the twenty poorest countries in the world, seventeen are in Africa; the rest are elsewhere in the Global South. Of the hundred poorest countries in world, over 95 percent are in the Global South. In the United States, Blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous people have poverty rates that greatly exceed the national average. Poverty …