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Articles 1 - 19 of 19
Full-Text Articles in Africana Studies
Victim Or Villain: Female Resilience And Agency In The Face Of Trauma In Chimamanda Adichie’S, Purple Hibiscus (2003) And Tsitsi Dangarembga’S, Nervous Conditions (1988), Adaobi Juliet Chukwuma
Victim Or Villain: Female Resilience And Agency In The Face Of Trauma In Chimamanda Adichie’S, Purple Hibiscus (2003) And Tsitsi Dangarembga’S, Nervous Conditions (1988), Adaobi Juliet Chukwuma
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
As long as disparities persist in the way women are treated as compared to their male counterparts, the issue of gender will continue to call forth literary productions. For this reason, female writers are on a mission to dismantle the stereotypes that keep women confined to societal roles. Grounded in a feminist framework, this study focuses on the gender disparity theme in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. The aim is to examine how these writers represent the trauma of women living in an African patriarchal system. The traumatic experiences of the female characters in both texts …
Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston
Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …
The Impact Of Slavery And Colonialism On The Black Consciousness: Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, The Confessions Of Nat Turner, And Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Mariam Badawi
Theses and Dissertations
According to the German author, essayist, and empirical psychologist Karl Philipp Moritz, to be able to analyze someone psychologically, we have to be able to analyze ourselves as one would know oneself better than one would know anyone else. Therefore, he proposed the study of autobiographies to be able to delve into a writer's "innermost soul"; through their knowledge of themselves" (qtd. in Schlumbohm 32). Moreover, "the psychological effect that the ideology of white supremacy and European imperialism, in the form of slavery and colonialism, has had on Africa and her people has never been fully addressed and understood" (Nobles …
The Black Testament: A Portrait Of Female Genealogy In The African Diaspora, Raven Mcshan
The Black Testament: A Portrait Of Female Genealogy In The African Diaspora, Raven Mcshan
<strong> Theses and Dissertations </strong>
The Black Testament: A Portrait of Genealogy in the African Diaspora is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction and poetry. These pieces are based on my genealogical research into my family history. The collection traces from my discoveries in the present time back through my lived experiences, the lives of my relatives, and the lives of my ancestors. The subject of the work focuses on the women in my family and the various influences they have had in my life. The collection grapples with themes such as black womanhood, diasporic existence, and complex heritage. The traveling back of genealogical research …
Final Master's Portfolio, Oluwatobi Idowu
Final Master's Portfolio, Oluwatobi Idowu
Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects
In this portfolio, Oluwatobi Idowu engages with texts and cultural artifacts that explore the concept of power, identity, oppression, and imperialism as they relate to Africa, African American and Indigenous cultures in North America. He also explores late capitalism in relation to Mark Fisher's central ideas about capitalist realism, and its effect on young people in the 21st century.
Final Master's Portfolio, Consuela Jones
Final Master's Portfolio, Consuela Jones
Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects
This body of work focuses on illuminating the radical modes of womanhood centered in the featured texts.
The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem
The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem
Theses and Dissertations
The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …
Wilderness Is Not A Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used As A Form Of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History, Dorothy Irrera
Wilderness Is Not A Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used As A Form Of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History, Dorothy Irrera
English Honors Theses
This Capstone won Skidmore's Racial Justice Student Award. An analysis of literature, American history, and pop culture, Wilderness Is Not a Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used as a Form of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History uses a sociological lens to approach the inherent relationship between racism and wilderness.
A Form Of Our Own: An Examination Of Black Sonnet-Samplers, Lavonna D. Wright
A Form Of Our Own: An Examination Of Black Sonnet-Samplers, Lavonna D. Wright
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This study responds to the need for understanding and terminology regarding Black poets’ engagement with the sonnet form. Referring to sampling strategies in Hip-Hop to analyze Black sonnets, this study disputes limiting ideas about sonnets as ineffective mediums to portray Black narratives and honors strategies maintained in Hip-Hop culture that define Black narrative expression, resistance to assimilation, and social reflection. Black sonnets are an ever-evolving vehicle of resistance to elitist ideas about traditional forms, Black aesthetics, and the ways that poetic strategies can be defined. This study names past and present Black sonneteers’ adherence to, remixing in, and rejection of …
Black Boys, Native Sons, Rufus Scotts, And Sulas: An Exploration Of Literary Dissent, Shirley Merino
Black Boys, Native Sons, Rufus Scotts, And Sulas: An Exploration Of Literary Dissent, Shirley Merino
Senior Projects Spring 2021
The responsibility of creating writing that is palatable in order to please every audience but the Black audience is often placed on the shoulders of Black authors. As phrased by Richard Wright in his “Blueprint for Negro Writing” the risk of focusing one’s writing entirely on the Black experience, left Black authors with the risk of being “consigned to oblivion.” Writing that captures the joys, the struggles, and the history of being Black in America, is often overlooked and ignored by white audiences and publishers, as it is often perceived as being unappealing and unpleasant. However, authors like Wright, James …
Mitigating Black Claustrophobia: Space, Trauma, And Healing Modalities In The Postcolonial Narrative., Saleema Mustafa Campbell
Mitigating Black Claustrophobia: Space, Trauma, And Healing Modalities In The Postcolonial Narrative., Saleema Mustafa Campbell
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation examines the space or spaces of blackness and the black body in the United States. This nation was shaped by the institution of slavery, and its greatest legacy is the trauma that still resonates in social structures and spaces complicating the lived experiences of many. The various responses to these traumas are documented in literary form by authors who serve as cultural witnesses. The narratives featured in this research project, collectively and individually, offer a voice to the traumatic plight of individuals in the U.S. who struggle to contemplate and rectify the traumas of this nation’s past. This …
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
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 …
Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows
Kofifi/Covfefe: How The Costumes Of "Sophiatown" Bring 1950s South Africa To Western Massachusetts In 2020, Emma Hollows
Masters Theses
This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Emma Hollows to produce a realist production of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s musical Sophiatown at the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts in May 2020. Sophiatown follows a household forcibly removed from their homes by the Native Resettlement Act of 1954 amid apartheid in South Africa. The paper discusses her attempts as a costume designer to strike a balance between replicating history and making artistic changes for theatre, while always striving to create believable characters.
Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan
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
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 …
Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova
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 …
Dmt And “The Man Box:” Provoking Change And Encouraging Authentic Living, An Arts-Based Project, Steven Reynolds
Dmt And “The Man Box:” Provoking Change And Encouraging Authentic Living, An Arts-Based Project, Steven Reynolds
Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses
This thesis explores the mind-body experience through an arts-based research approach to examine, and redefine the emotional capacity and usefulness of males through societal determinants that limits and hinders men from living their authentic selves. Through the lens of a metaphoric “Man Box” 112 men participated in a workshop recreating their personal narratives of socialization through, style of dress, coping mechanisms, belief systems and who they should be as men through society's standards. In the “Man Box,” male bonding, and emotional feelings are discouraged, while the objectification of women, material property and physical/emotional strength are encouraged. This research investigates the …
In A Child's Place: Centering Black Girlhood In Black Feminisms Through The Bildungsroman, Taylor L. Bailey
In A Child's Place: Centering Black Girlhood In Black Feminisms Through The Bildungsroman, Taylor L. Bailey
Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses
This thesis examines the effects of misogynoir— a specific form of oppression Black women experience due to the intersection of being deemed inferior in both race and gender— on the development of Black girlhood. In Black feminist theory and criticism, though, the language used often subordinates Black girls and does not ascribe adequate import to their experiences. Using the Black girl bildungsroman, specifically The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, as a way to survey the effects of misogynoir and the significance of homosocial, intraracial bonding, I argue that Black feminisms should center Black girlhood …
How To Hold The Sky, Summer Grace Flemister
How To Hold The Sky, Summer Grace Flemister
Senior Projects Spring 2019
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies and Languages and Literature of Bard College.