African American Studies Commons^™

Vizuri Kabisa 2019 Script, Vizuri Kabisa

Black Student Union

No abstract provided.

Ua45/6 Commencement Program, Wku Registrar

WKU Administration Documents

Commencement program listing graduates with order of exercises for all WKU campuses. Includes biography of Sam Bush, recipient of the honorary doctorate of fine arts.

Ua35/7 Commencement Program, Wku Gatton Academy Of Mathematics & Science In Kentucky

WKU Administration Documents

Commencement program listing graduates with order of exercises for Gatton Academy of Mathematics & Science.

Black Body Memory: A Philosophy Of The Talk, Autumn Redcross

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project offers the term Black body memory to point toward the threatened existential disposition of Black people in society today. Moreover, Black body memory points to the narrative paradigm of a shared experience. While popular conceptions theorize race as a social construction, the lived reality of Black people is frequently imbued by racialization and racism. Black body memory emerges from the intersection of the Black body articulated by Franz Fanon, Charles Johnson, and George Yancy, among others, and body memory, as described by Edward Casey and Thomas Fuchs. Black body memory is a culturally-laden and sedimented lived reality. The …

Silence As A Strategy, Jarvis L. Steele

Honors College Theses

Understanding the struggle that is peaceful protest is a task that has two unexplored components. The first is how leaders of political movements and protest groups are able to influence the masses to not waiver in their non-violent, peaceful approach. The second is how political groups learn from the failures and successes of the previous campaigns. We are given these circumstances where governmental violence and abuse would normally lead to a retaliatory response from groups, but in order to maintain the fidelity of the movement leaders of these political protests have to protect the nonviolent approach. These are instances where …

Kasserian Injera: And How Are The Children? The Lived Experiences And Perceptions Of Participants, Black And White, Who Attended Both Segregated And Desegregated Schools, Sherman Whitfield

Theses and Dissertations from 2019

This study was guided by the following research question: What are the perceptions and experiences of participants, Black and White, who attended both segregated and desegregated schools? This phenomenological research study was conducted using two focus groups divided homogeneously into one Black focus group and one White focus group. The Black focus group consisted of three Black females and two Black males. The White focus group consisted of six White females. The findings related to the research revealed that the Black focus group and the White focus group looked at this phenomenon differently along racial lines. These former students actually …

Stepping Beyond The Veil And Breaking The Pittsburgh Cycle: The American Dream, Otherness, And Generational Trauma In August Wilson's Cycle Plays, Kaitlin Stellingwerf

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is a series of ten plays that aims to “amend, to explore, and to add to our African consciousness and our African aesthetic” (Wilson qtd. in Gantt 5). Each play is set in a different decade but all share incredibly similar protagonists; all of them are African American men in their mid to late adulthood. The stories are separated by years but all articulate the generational trauma embedded in the African American consciousness in the twentieth century. Wilson’s plays span between the generations of African Americans living in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation to a …

Humanizing The Enslaved Of Fort Monroe’S Arc Of Freedom, William R. Kelly Jr.

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Fort Monroe, located in Hampton, Virginia, was a United States Army post until its deactivation in 2011. President Barack Obama proclaimed Fort Monroe a national monument due to its complex history, including its ties to slavery and emancipation. This paper outlines an ongoing research project designed to identify and humanize both the enslaved who helped build the fort and those who were declared as contraband there during the American Civil War. Housed in the National Archives and Records Administration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the United States Army Engineer Records from 1819 to 1866 is the main area of focus for this …

Paper: Investigating The Work Of William Styron: The Perpetuation Of The Fantastic Hegemonic Imagination, William Sikich

Womanist Ethics

William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner depicts a fictitious characterization of the historical Nat Turner. Styron, a white southerner, assumes Turner's perspective in order to tell a speculative story about his slave rebellion of 1831. Similarly, he tells the story of a fictional holocaust survivor in his novel, Sophie's Choice. The decision to take on these perspective evinces some arrogance on Styron's part, and the way in which he executes the narrative of each novel delivers their stories with varying levels of respect to their subjects: Styron's indirect telling of Sophie's story allows Styron some freedom to speculate, while …

“Flowing Along The Wall”: Anarcha-Feminist Bioethics And Resistance In Octavia E. Butler’S Dawn 2019., Theresa Mendez

Master's Theses

Science fiction (sf) texts conversant with the temporal play between past, present, and future push readers to imagine the extremes of human and environmental existence, interaction, and potential. Simultaneously, despite the sf genre’s tendency to traffic in extremes, these texts provoke readers to consider the ways in which these imagined worlds are grounded in history as well as in the contemporary social moment. As Donna Haraway has argued, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (306). This illusory boundary must continue to be traversed in order to consider how sf literatures, particularly those which imagine …

Jesse Routte: Using Style To Signify Injustice, Emma Nordmeyer

Race, Ethnicity, & Religion

Jesse Routte, first African-American student to graduate Augustana, made national headlines in 1947 for wearing a turban on a visit to Alabama. In this paper, I explore how Routte's stylistic choices uprooted and questioned the racism of the Jim Crow era.

Black Feminism: Switching The Script On Traditional Feminist Narratives, Monee Reis

Senior Honors Projects

MONEE REIS (Gender and Women’s Studies, Africana Studies) Black Feminism: Switching the Script on Traditional Feminist Narratives

Sponsor: Kathleen McIntyre (Gender and Women’s Studies, Honors Program)

I developed a 300-level undergraduate course aimed at exploring the history of Black feminism. This idea came to me after reading Audre Lorde’s 1984 article “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Lorde detailed the various ways Black women’s contributions to feminism are underrepresented in the overarching historical narrative. Lorde’s 1980s activism and feminist scholarship ultimately influenced legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to coin the term intersectionality in 1989. Intersectionality, the multiple ways that …

The Rupture Repeats, Jennifer Everett

Graduate School of Art Theses

Rupture repeats without regard. Occurring on macro and micro scales, these historical, financial, and social upheavals continue throughout our lives, remaking our worlds and leaving us to respond as best we can. Rupture is a condition of human existence. For marginalized communities and Black Americans specifically, rupture is familiar and precarious. Historically, Black people respond to the space that rupture makes through a rigorous, interdisciplinary, creative tradition which serves as a strategy for survival and a way to produce and transmit knowledge. These methods of knowledge production exist in excess of formal training and are evident of quiet and expansive …

Socially Constructing Marijuana Policy And Target Populations In The News Media, Jonathan Taylor Langner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on different aspects of the co-construction African Americans and marijuana in the news. First, the historical background of modern drug laws, including marijuana prohibition, and how this was dependent on racialized fears in the wake of the abolition of slavery. Next, the prevalence and variety of marijuana constructions in a national newspaper, with careful attention paid to associations with racial identifiers. Finally, how African American athletes and marijuana are co-constructed in an exemplary article.

Chapter 2 describes how racial fears relate to the social construction of disadvantaged population in the media. We first describe the current situation …

The Farmers’ Federation: Regional Racial Mythologies As Agricultural Capital, Jama Mcmurtery Grove

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1927, the Farmers’ Federation agricultural cooperative in Western North Carolina launched an organization to solicit funds from wealthy donors. The money raised through philanthropic campaigns enabled the cooperative to fund large-scale agricultural projects, which helped members navigate the dramatic agricultural transformations of the early twentieth century. Although the cooperative advocated a progressive program of business-minded, scientific farming, its leadership modified programs to reflect farmer members’ limited resources and the realities of mountain production. As a result, the co-op provided a crucial bridge between white farmers and new methods of agricultural production that reached deep into peoples’ familial and productive …

Does Family Income Determine A Children Future Educational Attainment Level?, Diaisha T. Richards

Applied Economics Theses

Family income and education have been a major concern in a variety of researches, and as a topic in society. These two components are a major concern because they are known to be key elements in determining future success for an individual. Various studies investigated the significance, correlations and impacts these two factors have on one another. It is common for the amount of family income obtained to determine how much education one will receive in the future. This study focuses on testing the hypothesis that family income determines how much education a child will receive in the future. By …

Can A Latin-Based Intervention Improve Vocabulary Among Black Early Readers In The Second Grade: An Explanatory Analysis., Zwila Burks Martinez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigated whether a relationship between learning a Latin-based intervention in elementary school and improving vocabulary skills among 2nd grade Black students in low-performing schools. Research conducted 100 years ago revealed that the implementation of a Latin-based intervention improved vocabulary and reading skills (Perkins, 1918). In 2008, the results of a national survey revealed that only 15% of public elementary schools offered foreign language instruction, while more than 50% of private schools provided foreign language instruction. By examining a Latin-based intervention, the researcher hoped to identify positive outcomes in improving vocabulary skills for second grade Black students in low-performing …

The Segregation, Integration, And Resegregation Of High Schools In Jones County, Mississippi, Anna Morgan

Honors Theses

There have been numerous works on segregation and desegregation in Mississippi schools. However, much of that research focuses on schools that are in cities, not rural areas. Jones County, Mississippi, a once rural area in southern Mississippi, has had an extensive record of racial segregation in their schools. “The Segregation, Integration, and Resegregation of High Schools in Jones County, Mississippi” focuses on effects of the integration of Jones County High Schools. Jones County fought a desperate fight to continue to segregate its students. With the eventual external integration of the high schools came internal segregation, which had lasting effects on …

Losing Louisiana: Race, Techno-Science, And The Disappearing Geographies Of The Lower Mississippi River Delta, Monica Patrice Barra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic and historical research in southeast coastal Louisiana (USA), this dissertation explores the racial histories, engineering and scientific practices, and geophysical processes that have shaped land loss and coastal restoration in the lower Mississippi River Delta. Rather than treating land loss simply as a natural process or matter of environmental restoration, this ethnography examines its cultural, material, and political dimensions, especially for communities of color that have already experienced long histories of loss — of property, livelihood, and political rights. A focus on the geophysical transformations of the river - dictating land growth, sinking, and …

Racial Becoming: How Agentic (Self-Initiated) Encounter Events Inform Racial Identity Refinement, Devin A. Heyward

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Racial identity literature has typically focused on identity formation through a series of stages. It also has centered how the experience of negative encounter events informs racial identity formation. With the advent of new genealogical and genomic technology, it is imperative to expand the focus of identity literatures to include encounter events, which participants elect to experience (i.e. self-initiated or agentic encounter events). By using this frame, identity processes become fluid and informed by individual life experiences. In the context of this study, direct to consumer genetic ancestry tests (DTC-GAT) are operationalized as a self-initiated encounter event. Participants were …