Arts and Humanities Commons^™

‘There Is No Gallery’: Race And The Politics Of Space At The Capitol Theatre, New York, Pardis Dabashi

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

This essay brings developments in Black film historiography and architecture studies to bear on the study of Northern picture palaces as the period of their prominence coincided with the Jim Crow era. Taking as my focus New York City’s Capitol Theatre – which opened in the immediate wake of the US race riots of 1919 and was the largest movie theater to date – I show how Northern middle-class film culture enforced racial segregation in the absence of legal protection. Southern movie theaters were able either to outlaw Black attendance or relegate their Black patronage to the gallery, a seating …

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

The Oppressed African American Female Voice In Zora Neale Hurston’S Their Eyes Were Watching God And “Sweat”, Kaitlyn Levine

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Zora Neale Hurston moved to New York from Alabama in 1925, where her work contributed to the growing trends of the Harlem Renaissance and had a major impact on African American culture. During Hurston’s lifetime, the voices of African American women were often suppressed by the intersecting forces of racism and sexism. Hurston’s literary work portrayed gender struggles in American society during the twentieth century and represented the oppressed voice of African American women.

“Boys Will Be Boys”: Antithetical Boyhood In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Madilyn Abbe

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper explores Claudia Rankine’s work Citizen: An American Lyric and how the text applies boyhood and manhood differently to white and black males. The text subverts these terms’ straightforward relationship with actual age, instead recognizing them as reverse age categorizations. While these contradictory applications minimize black men through infantilization and expedite the maturation of black children, these same converse categorizations excuse the violence of white men. Through this distinction, Citizen exposes childhood as a subjective categorization to benefit white power. To address the resulting self-fragmentation for African American males, I maintain that the text proffers storytelling as symbolic mothering …

Racial Spatial Relationships In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Thomas Jenson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine addresses topics from segregation to police brutality to indicate the extreme spatial relationships between racial groups. Her work reveals the geographic mechanisms that confine African Americans to certain locations as well as the coerce them to violently share space with their white counterparts. Drawing upon spatial theory, which exposes the structures of unjust geography, my analysis also considers language as an additional spatial force that harms the black community as much as more physical phenomena.

Book Review: Understanding Alice Walker, Cindy E. Garcia-Rivas

South Carolina Libraries

Cindy Garcia-Rivas reviews Understanding Alice Walker, written by Thadious M. Davis.

Reimagining Prince Hall: Race, Freemasonry, And Material Culture In Boston, 1775-1870, Sueanna Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation revisits the subject of early black freemasonry and draws upon a new wealth of archival material to recontextualize it through the lens of social history and print and material culture. This study explores the way that freemasonry operated in the daily lives of black masons and presents a new social history of the formation of Boston’s first black masonic lodge. Turning specifically to print and material culture, it traces the way that the earliest black masons engaged in the broader print and material culture of the society, thus promoting interracial engagement. This study also traces how the Prince …

Representation Matters: African American Female Readers’ Perceptions Of Young Adult Literature, Asia Harden

Honors Theses

In 2019, only 6% of U.S. children’s books published were written by black authors. This portion of the publishing industry, and particularly the category of young adult literature (YA) has room for improvement when it comes to African American representation. To identify how this lack of representation affects readers, this study was broken into two parts which resulted in obtaining the African American female YA author perspective, as well as African American female readers. J. Elle and Kristina Forest were interviewed in the first portion of the study, and three focus groups were conducted in the second study with 13 …

From Camp Meetings To Crusades: African American Religious Songs In Context, Konner B. Smith

Honors College Theses

The images found throughout African American religious songs are timeless, yet they reflect the realities of their particular historical and cultural contexts, explaining those circumstances from the view of the African American community. Despite the differences in sound, there is a strong sense of continuity between each era, as compositions from slave songs to rap use certain passages from scripture to emphasize the themes of freedom, hope, and perseverance. From the spiritual to the gospel to contemporary religious rap, both history and hope have been lifted up and transformed in the voices of oppressed and enduring African Americans.

Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Race Youth in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture argues for the centrality of black youth, both real and literary, to the trajectories of African American literature and its repudiation of white supremacy. Drawing on research into the rise of the adolescent and teenager as distinct social categories, I argue that age-based subjectivity should inform how we read race-based subjectivity. My first chapter explores how early twentieth-century black periodicals push back against white supremacist theories of human development in an explicit appeal to what I call “race youth,” the children and adolescents who would take up the mantle of racial uplift. …

Adding A Dimension: Illustrating Triple Consciousness Theory In The African American Literary Tradition, Asia Wesley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way gender expands and nuances W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness theory, which depicts the African American identity as a doubleness that is both American and Negro. Black feminist criticism’s nuanced formulation of DuBois’s formulation of Black identity allows the African American literary tradition to be seen through three lenses: an American, a Negro, and an African American’s gender identity. In order to further contemporize the pre-existing Black feminist criticism, I examine Hurston, Brooks, and Morrison in the three time periods that followed DuBois’s coining of double consciousness theory: (1) the Harlem Renaissance, (2) the Civil Rights Movement …

Green Thumbs: Cultivating Greenery And Personal Freedoms In Miné Okubo’S Citizen 13660 And Lorraine Hansberry’S A Raisin In The Sun, Akasha L. Khalsa

Conspectus Borealis

In her classic 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry explores the impacts of generations of violence, exploitation, and discrimination on an African American family in Chicago’s Southside. Throughout the play, a family house plant comes to symbolize the matriarch's hopes for her children, and her ability to nourish the plant reflects on her ability to fulfil her own modest dreams and provide for the dreams of her progeny. Similarly, we see plants fulfilling the same role in another tale of American racial injustice, namely Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, an illustrated personal account of the artist’s experience …

Monkey Houses Or Revolutionary Legislatures? Moderating The Binary Of Black Politicians In South Carolina, Anna L. Biesecker-Mast

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

Writing this paper was an extensive process. It began early in the Spring semester—in ASI 120. From the beginning of the semester the ASI 120 students knew we would be writing a historiography in the realm of Reconstruction. To hone down a more specific topic, we were assigned Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction. By reading his account of Reconstruction, I was able to select a topic: black politicians in South Carolina. Next, a research librarian visited my seminar and introduced us to the research process. From there, I was able to gather sources and begin my annotated …

How About Noah?, India Worthy

Honors Projects

How About Noah? tries to bridge the gap between old picture books and today’s society by showing children the intersectionality between Noah’s identities as an African American and a member of the LGBTQ+ community. There are very few books that show this concept especially containing a strong female lead. Most stories are always about a boy wanting to be a girl instead of a girl who identifies as a male.

Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices And Radical Adaptation In Multi-Ethnic American Literary And Visual Culture, Michael M. Means

Theses and Dissertations

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant …

The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In 1921 Langston Hughes penned, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes 1254). Weaving the profound pain of the African American experience with the symbolism of the primordial river, Hughes recognized the inherent power of water as a means of spiritual communication and religious significance. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the American pastoral as typified by white poets such as Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, the African American poets emerging from the Harlem Renaissance established a more nuanced pastoral landscape embedded within urban cultures, utilizing water in particular as …

African American High School Students’ Perceptions Of Their College Counseling Experience, Latonya M. Turner

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study looked at high school African American students’ perceptions of their college counseling experiences. Much research has been done to highlight the views and/or perceptions of various stakeholders regarding college counseling with respect to African American students (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000; Hossler & Stage, 1992; Ng, Wolf-Wendel, & Lomardi, 2014). A few examples of stakeholders are administrators, teachers, parents or guardians, and college-going organizations. However, little research exists on the views and or perceptions of college counseling from the student’s perspective (Howard, 2003). Knowing the perceptions of students provides a better understanding of how African American students in …

American Negro Minstrelsy: Good, Bad, Or Somewhere In-Between?, Emily R. Wellmann

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

I chose my topic for this project early in the semester and began researching it soon after that. I used eight sources for my research and wrote an annotated bibliography. This bibliography was a huge benefit to the first draft of my paper, which just included a description of the sources. That draft was peer reviewed and given notes by my professor. The final paper was turned in shortly after, including an additional introduction and conclusion. After receiving my grade from my professor I edited it before turning it in here.

The Literary Significance Of Herman Melville’S Benito Cereno: An Analytical Reflection On Benito Cereno As A Fictional Narrative, Dani Kaiser

4997 English: Capstone

In Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Captain Amasa Delano discovers a distressed slave ship in need of aid, only to later find out that his perception of the dire situation was completely incorrect. Melville’s novella is derived from Delano’s nonfiction account of the experience, titled Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). This paper focuses on three questions that demonstrate why Melville wrote a novella almost completely derived from a nonfiction account of the events aboard the ship. In order to understand why Melville’s novella is powerful, one must ask, as an overarching question why …

Who Can Afford To Improvise? James Baldwin And Black Music, The Lyric And The Listeners [Table Of Contents], Ed Pavlic

Literature

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life.

The route …

The Influence Of Literacy On The Lives Of Twentieth Century Southern Female Minority Figures, Laura Leighann Dicks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The American South has long been a region associated with myth and fantasy; in popular culture especially, the region is consistently tied to skewed notions of the antebellum South that include images of large plantation homes, women in hoop skirts, and magnolia trees that manifest in television and film representations such as Gone With the Wind (1939). Juxtaposed with these idealized, mythic images is the hillbilly trope, reinforced by radio shows such as Lum and Abner, and films such as Scatterbrain (1940). Out of this idea comes the southern illiteracy stereotype, which suggests that southerners are collectively unconcerned with education …

Going Hard, Going Easy, Going Home: Death And Dying In 20th Century African American Literature, Chayah Amayala Stoneberg-Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation answers the question: How can art represent the essential human experience of death, particularly when the creative context is one of extreme violence? And, what can be learned about the risks and rewards of the living's relationship with the dead by way of these artistic representations? Further, how do these aesthetic renderings of death construct the ethics of life for survivors? In the case of African America, discussion of, and responses to, these questions have been primarily explored in novelist and creative writing. This dissertation examines these novelistic treatments of death-tropes, or thanatropes in eight novels written by …

Transnational Balladeering: "Scots, Wha Hae Wi' Wallace Bled" In 1820s Afro-New York, Marvin Mcallister

Studies in Scottish Literature

No abstract provided.

Blue Skin, Yellow Flesh, Candace Wiley

All Theses

ABSTRACT
Set in November 2009 in the United States South, Blue Skin, Yellow Flesh will eventually cover eleven days and will be separated into two parts—before and after Thecla's funeral. It begins the Tuesday after Thecla dies and ends the day after Thanksgiving. The major conflict involves Thecla's death, how it affects her family, and how the family deals with the concept of family. Other important conflicts are Tam and Lynn's marriage, JoJo's sexual orientation, Lynn's affect on her children, and Julius's trek toward death. This novel excerpt consists of seven chapters, submitted in partial fulfillment of Clemson University's Master …

Our Greatest Want: An Examination Of The Rhetorical Tendencies Employed By African American Female Abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), Lauren Deborah Nye

English

You are standing at the doorway of a church in Philadelphia. Looking in, you see a mass of heads, all turned toward the podium, waiting for someone to get behind that podium. Then you see her. She is an attractive African American with “a fair figure, long, lustrous hair, and facial features pleasant to behold” (Logan 49). You overhear one person comment that she looks like “a bronze muse” (Logan 31). A reporter will later write that she has “a strong face, with a shadowed glow upon it, indicative of thoughtful fervor, and of a nature most femininely sensitive, but …

Transcultural Transformation: African American And Native American Relations, Barbara S. Tracy

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The intersected lives of African Americans and Native Americans result not only in Black Indians, but also in a shared culture that is evidenced by music, call and response, and story. These intersected lives create a dynamic of shared and diverging pathways that speak to each other. It is a crossroads of both anguish and joy that comes together and apart again like the tradition of call and response. There is a syncopation of two cultures becoming greater than their parts, a representation of losses that are reclaimed by a greater degree. In the tradition of call and response, by …

Of Fathers And Sons: Generational Conflicts And Literary Lineage--The Case Of Ernest Hemingway And Ernest Gaines, Wolfgang Lepschy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Focusing on the depiction of the father-son relationship and the generational conflicts in their works, as well as the metaphorical literary father-son relationship between the two authors, this dissertation offers an intertextual reading of the works of Ernest Hemingway and Ernest J. Gaines. Part One examines Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories that feature the young hero’s growing disillusionment with and eventual rejection of his home and family. Parodying conventional stereotypes about Native American ways of life, Hemingway deconstructs prevailing notions of race by aligning Nick’s father with the wilderness and the Indians. Gaines’s earliest short stories focus on a reunion of …

Who Owns The Whip?: Chesnutt, Tourgee, And Reconstruction Justice, Bill Hardwig

Bill Hardwig

Who Owns the Whip?: Chesnutt, Tourgée, and Reconstruction Justice Author(s): Bill Hardwig Source: African American Review, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 5-20 Published by: St. Louis University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903361

The Concept Of God In The Poetry Of The American Negro, Mary H. Jones Sr.

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

Many authors have written much about the Negro and religion. Those who know the black man in American readily concede that he is by nature a lover of God, and that this great innate belief manifests itself in his daily life. Books of deep and light reading- some written in prose, others in verse- have been produced by American Negro men and women. Many of their works have mirrored forth the concept of God in the mind of the Afro-American; but this concept has not remained the same- this great faith is at present suffering decay.

The Development Of Race Pride In American Negro Poetry, Sister Mary Boniface Adams

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

The study of the development of race pride in the poetry of American Negro seeks to trace the though of the Negro from his entry into America to the present, including the important periods of history which affected this development and his reaction to them.