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Full-Text Articles in Africana Studies

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica May 2024

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.


“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey Dec 2020

“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …


Representations Of Hustling Women: The Figure Of The Black Sex Worker In Ann Petry’S The Street And Louise Meriwether’S Daddy Was A Number Runner, Deborah L. Uzurin Sep 2020

Representations Of Hustling Women: The Figure Of The Black Sex Worker In Ann Petry’S The Street And Louise Meriwether’S Daddy Was A Number Runner, Deborah L. Uzurin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis provides a close reading of Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970) by analyzing how these two black women authors wrote about sex work and black women sex workers in their novels. Black women writers in the mid-twentieth century were reluctant to write about black women’s sexuality as a result of discourses of racial uplift that rejected the white supremacist stereotype of the hypersexual black woman. While not the focus of their novels, the inclusion of sex workers in their fictional narratives provide a complicated representation of a particular form of …


Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan Jun 2020

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …


Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy Jun 2020

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …


The Personal Is Historical: Slavery, Black Power And Resistance In Octavia Butler’S Kindred, Megan Behrent Oct 2019

The Personal Is Historical: Slavery, Black Power And Resistance In Octavia Butler’S Kindred, Megan Behrent

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Harlem And Abroad: Notes To An International 'Renaissance', Joshua I. Cohen Sep 2019

Harlem And Abroad: Notes To An International 'Renaissance', Joshua I. Cohen

Publications and Research

Like other intractable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement’s visual artists sometimes exceeded their expected parameters, and thus their anticipated representativeness of a locality. Their images, in other words, did not automatically disclose Harlem-bound or even US-bound concerns. Now familiar through continual reproduction in exhibition catalogues, scholarly monographs and literary compendia, certain artworks from the period – such as Archibald J. Motley’s Blues (1929; Figure 1) and Aaron Douglas’s Congo (c. 1928; Figure 2) – subverted any definition of the Harlem Renaissance that would hinge on a narrowly delimited urban geography or national imaginary. Motley, who painted ‘Blues’ during …


Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova Sep 2019

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …


Muddling The Middle: Cynical Representations Of Ethnic Relations In V.S. And Shiva Naipaul, Kevin Frank Apr 2019

Muddling The Middle: Cynical Representations Of Ethnic Relations In V.S. And Shiva Naipaul, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay from the collection, Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Synergies, Kevin Frank argues that coming from a creolized society, unlike their father, Seepersad, V.S. and Shiva Naipaul's representations of "race" and ethnicity in their works is cynical, favoring one side in the Indo- and Afro-Caribbean racial antagonism, mainly because of their anxiety about "Black Power."


Negrocity: An Interview With Greg Tate, Camille Goodison Jul 2012

Negrocity: An Interview With Greg Tate, Camille Goodison

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.