Arts and Humanities Commons^™

African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Justina Ireland’s young adult novels Dread Nation (2017) and Deathless Divide (2020) tell the story of a Black girl by the name of Jane living in the aftermath of the Civil War, around 1880.

Acknowledging Our Past: Race, Landscape And History, Alea Harris, Kaycia Best, Dieran Mcgowan, Destiny Shippy, Vera Oberg, Bryson Coleman, Luke Meagher, Rhiannon Leebrick Ph.D., Phillip Stone

Student Scholarship

This book is the product of nearly a year's worth of student research on Wofford College's history, undertaken as part of a grant by the Council of Independent Colleges in the Humanities Research for the Public Good initiative. The research was supervised and directed by Dr. Rhiannon Leebrick.

"Guiding Research Questions:

How did Wofford College and its early stakeholders support and participate in slavery?

How is the legacy of slavery present in the landscape of our campus (buildings, statues, names, etc.)?

How can we better understand Wofford as an institution during the time of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era? …

Black Lives Matter, Armando Delgado

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The Black Lives Matter movement first started in 2013 by three strong African Americans women: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. The movement was created after black lives were being taken by police officers in shootings that could have been deescalated. The research project introduces on how the movement was started and the goal is for the readers to understand why the people are so angry, the reasons they are protesting and to fight for equality around the United States. Since this is still an accruing issue, I tried to get all the info I could get in as …

A Name Change May Be A Start, But It Is Not Enough, Leah D. Williams

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Since the broadcast killing of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers on May 25, all levels of government, and institutions of every kind, have scrambled with breakneck speed to confront their own ties to America’s most deeply entrenched demons: White supremacy and systematic racism. Washington and Lee has certainly not been exempt from this reckoning. A majority of its faculty and student body have already passed resolutions calling for the removal of Robert E. Lee’s name from the university. As a direct descendent of those enslaved by the school, I commend these resolutions; yet, I strongly offer that a …

Safekeeping: Slavery, Capitalism, And The Carceral State In Washington, D.C., 1830-1863, Brandon Wilson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the 1830s, incarceration emerged as a two-pronged solution for racial control and economic expansion. Local and federal government built jails around the District of Columbia to detain "rowdy negro boys," men, and women, as a means to stymie their rapid movement and fuel a burgeoning domestic slave trade. People were jailed, fined, and often sold to the Deep South, providing a wellspring of capital for enslavers, justified through the lens of criminality. For the crime of petty theft, missing free papers, or in at least one case "using foul language," black people of the Washington region could find themselves …

White Saviors, Brandon Hasbrouck

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

It is time for Washington and Lee University to drop both George Washington and Robert E. Lee from the University name. The predominantly White faculty at Washington and Lee recently announced that it will petition the Board of Trustees to remove Lee from the University name. This is the first time in Washington and Lee’s history that the faculty has drafted such a petition. It is worth exploring why the faculty has decided to make a collective statement on Lee now and why the faculty has not included a demand to drop Washington in their petition. The answer is simple—it …

"You Your Best Thing”: The Anti-Colonial Power Of The Mind In Black And Chicanx American Literature, Grace Keir

English Honors Theses

In the year 1987, two of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, Toni Morrison and Gloria Anzaldúa, published what many consider to be their respective magnum opuses: Morrison’s Beloved and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In these groundbreaking texts, Morrison and Anzaldúa boldly confront the complex legacies of American imperialism and slavery, examining the effect colonization has had on their respective communities, ancestors, and selves. In this essay, I argue that literature emerging from marginalized communities within the United States can and should be considered among global postcolonial texts; Morrison and Anzaldúa illustrate the ways …

“We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody”: Child Ghosts And The National Trauma Of Anti-Black Racism In American Literature, Megan Swartzfager

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the roles of haunting in the context of racial violence in three texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. In each of these texts, a parent is responsible for the death of a child. In the former two texts, both by Black authors, a Black parent kills a Black child in what they believe to be a protective act in the face of violence by white people. Wolf Whistle, however, written by a white author, is animated by the ghost of a character based on Emmett Till. …

Reconciling With Slavery In The United States: An Evolving Narrative, Jamie Phlegar

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This project addresses two strands of inquiry that spring from this issue of evolving race relations in the U.S. First, I examine how Americans talk about the history of slavery in the U.S. What rhetorical strategies are employed when slavery is discussed and/or debated in public history contexts and beyond? Second, I examine talk about the future of race relations in the context of the legacy of slavery. Specifically, I am interested in exploring what rhetorical strategies are employed when discussing the potential for reparations in mainstream arenas.

The Black Woman's Burden: A Discussion Of Race, Rape Culture, And Feminism, Rawabi Hamid

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

Current feminist and anti-rape movements in the United States seek to amplify the voices of women regarding sexual assault. Unfortunately, within this amplification, the voices of Black women are often excluded, which is a direct effect of historically ignoring the abuses of Black women and rarely ever bringing their abusers to justice. These injustices, often committed by white men and perpetuated by white women, create a destructive rhetoric in stereotyping Black women while also silencing them throughout modern movements, especially those of feminist and anti-rape causes. This essay will examine the consequences of three problematic aspects of US history and …

The Gothic Other: A Critique Of Race, Gender, Slavery, And Systemic Oppression Found In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, And Hannah Crafts, Kelly Franklin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three novels all communicating ideas about race, gender, and slavery under the conventions of Gothic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) show how patriarchy oppressed and haunted women while keeping slavery at the margins. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison, fictionalizes the account of a female slave who murdered her child to assert her power and reject slavery. However, Morrison rewrites and defies aspects of the Gothic mode by bringing the ghost of the murdered child back to life, and later showing steps the community can take to heal from their collective trauma. The …

The Unheard Stories Of Former San Antonio Slaves, David R. Harris

Methods of Historical Research: Spring 2020

While the end of slavery in America was a huge step to provide equality to all, the livelihood of former slaves after the Civil War took many different paths, some of those paths ended up in San Antonio, Texas.

The Life Of A Former Slave In Bexar County, Karina De Hoyos

Methods of Historical Research: Spring 2020

The Slave Narrative Collection from the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, housed at the Library of Congress, has over 2,300 first-person accounts and 500 black and white photographs of people who were born into slavery.Numerous historians have relied on these narratives to help them in their work to have a better understanding of slavery. Many people did not know how, or even where, to start their new lives, but they knew they needed to find a way to make a living, or ultimately seek work from their former masters. Despite numerous obstacles in their lives before and after the Civil War, …

Museum Educators' Processes For Creating Inclusive Curricula On American Slavery, Dawn Chitty

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

To close a gap in the literature, this study sought to develop a deeper understanding of the processes museum educators use to create inclusive curricula on American slavery. The research design was a qualitative, descriptive, multicase study using data collected from a purposefully selected sample of museum educators, along the Eastern Seaboard region of the United States, who had previously created inclusive curricula on slavery. Null's radical curriculum theory formed the conceptual framework for this study. Individual interviews of 11 museum educators were recorded, transcribed, and coded in two cycles, using in vivo and pattern coding methods. Additionally, examples of …

Black Resistance: Interpretive Agency Enacted Against Mutable Violence, Meera Kolluri

Scripps Senior Theses

Titled Black Resistance: Interpretive Agency Enacted Against Mutable Violence, my research discusses a reformed understanding of racial trauma and autonomy. I elaborate on the common reading of slavery in political thought and defend my argument with modern examples of resistance and theory. This text aims to shine light on assumptive narratives by classifying and redefining mutable violence against black America.

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo, Luis A. Vasquez La Roche

Theses and Dissertations

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo is a series of works--sculpture, installations, and performances--that explore themes of shame, failure, commodity, ephemerality, ritual, resilience, erasure, race, and death. The research and interest in these themes stem from a page of the Trinidad and Tobago Slave Registry. I use the research that surrounds this document to highlight different moments in history, in my personal life, and to imagine near futures.