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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
An Oblique Blackness: Reading Racial Formation In The Aesthetics Of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand, And Wayde Compton, Jeremy D. Haynes B.A.H.
An Oblique Blackness: Reading Racial Formation In The Aesthetics Of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand, And Wayde Compton, Jeremy D. Haynes B.A.H.
Jeremy D Haynes B.A.H.
This thesis examines how the poetics of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand and Wayde Compton articulate unique aesthetic voices that are representative of a range of ethnic communities that collectively make-up blackness in Canada. Despite the different backgrounds, geographies, and ethnicities of these authors, blackness in Canada is regularly viewed as a homogeneous community that is most closely tied to the cultural histories of the American South and the Atlantic slave trade. Black Canadians have historically been excluded from the official narratives of the nation, disassociating blackness from Canadian-ness. Epithets such as “African-Canadian” are indicative of the way race distances …
Reconstructing Race: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach To A Normative Politics Of Identity, Andrew Pierce
Reconstructing Race: A Discourse-Theoretical Approach To A Normative Politics Of Identity, Andrew Pierce
Andrew J. Pierce
This paper aims to get clear on the normative implications of the idea that race is a “social construction,” not just for political practice in non-ideal societies where racial oppression remains, but in “ideal” (presumably non-racist) societies as well. That is, I pursue the question of whether race and/or racial identity would have any legitimate place in an ideally just society, or to state it another way, whether the concept of race can be extricated from the history of racial oppression from which it arose. The position I defend is a version of what has come to be called a …
Walking In Another’S Skin: Failure Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird, Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Walking In Another’S Skin: Failure Of Empathy In To Kill A Mockingbird, Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Empathy — how it is discussed and deployed by both the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird and by the author, Lee — is a useful lens to view the depictions of racial injustice in the novel because empathy is the moral fulcrum on which the narrative turns. In this essay, I argue that To Kill a Mockingbird fails to aptly demonstrate the practice of cross-racial empathy. As a consequence, readers cannot empathize with the (largely silent) black characters of the novel. In order to examine the concept of empathy, I have developed a critical framework derived from rhetorician Kenneth …