American Literature Commons^™

Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry's Jurisdiction And The Transformation Of Equal Rights, Talia Shalev

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Across various academic fields and from a range of political orientations, scholars note that a pervasive rights discourse shapes the imaginable horizons of identity, politics, and social life in the United States. Many critiques of rights since the 1970s highlight a particular conundrum of this rights culture: existing rights law and ubiquitous rights invocations fail to guarantee equal conditions for thriving across racialized and gendered axes of identity. Words Are Found Responsible: Poetry’s Jurisdiction and the Transformation of Equal Rights emphasizes and complicates elements of these critiques by reading poetry of the 1970s and 1980s in relation to shifting rights …

Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …

The Color Of Invisibility, Bryan A. Vanmeter

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an analysis of Ralph Ellison’s use of color terminology in his novel, Invisible Man. By taking an in depth look at the circumstances in which Ellison uses specific color terms, the reader can ascertain the author’s thoughts on various historical events, as well as the differences between characters in the novel such as Ras, Dr. Bledsoe, and Rinehart.

Secret Selves: Surveillance And Twentieth-Century African American Literature, Kelsey Kiser

English Theses and Dissertations

Black writers, thinkers, and artists found themselves on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s watch list for radicalism and sedition as early as 1919. Secret Selves explores how twentieth-century African American writers, namely Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Naylor responded to a surveillance state that monitored their lives and works for radicalism and sedition. By recrafting the African American künstlerroman—a genre that birthed the African American literary tradition—these writers embedded codes into their works that concealed personal details from Bureau agents and simultaneously articulated a new narrative: that to be black and to …

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

Imagining The Archive: Speculation As A Tool Of Archival Reconstruction, Marieclaire Graham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines a speculative methodological approach towards restoring silenced Black voices in the archive. First, I will discuss the reasons why this work is necessary, exploring the various patterns of muting, distortion, erasure, and disenfranchisement that Black communities experience within the United States in both physical and written forms. The use of speculation specifically addresses the dehumanization that has followed the Black experience in the United States from the earliest violent incarnation of slavery, and creating the foundation of this kind of silencing allows us to understand why speculation, as opposed to other methodological models for archive restoration, is …

North Of Ourselves: Identity And Place In Jim Wayne Miller’S Poetry, Micah Mccrotty

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry examines how human history and topography join to create place. His work often incorporates images of land and ecology; it deliberately questions the delineation between place and self. This thesis explores how Miller presents images of water to describe the relationship between inhabitants and their location, both with the positive image of the spring and the negative image of the flood. Additionally, this thesis examines how the Brier, Miller’s most prominent persona character, grieves his separation from home and ultimately finds healing and reunification of the self through his return to the hills. In his poetry, …

Two Poems: Stop Time Before; Forsaken Ones, Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This creative work features two poems: Stop Time Before; Forsaken Ones

Politicized Identity In Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl And The Fortunes, Savanna S. Batson

English Department Theses

This thesis explores the effects of politicized identities on the basis of particular aspects of an individual’s being, such as gender, ethnicity, or nationality in Peter Ho Davies’s novels The Welsh Girl (2007) and The Fortunes (2016). By carefully studying each of his protagonists within the context of the particular time and place in which they have come of age, and are now living, this thesis demonstrates how Davies engages with themes of identity, community, and alienation relative to the specific socio-cultural matrix that informs the politicization of identities at their time. It explores how Davies’s characters undergo the process …

Between The Living And The Dead, Laura Henriksen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout my studies at the Graduate Center, I have attempted to deepen my understanding of how some people, such as myself and my family, came to be white, and what that means, and how it can be undone. This question of whiteness has pushed me further back ontologically, or deeper down, to include how some people came to be human, and then even further, how some matter came to be living. In my thesis project I attempt to participate in dismantling one of the most fundamental binaries in binary thinking — the strict and uncomplicated division between the living and …

[Review Of The Book Looking For Lorraine: The Radiant And Radical Life Of Lorraine Hansberry, By I. Perry], Kaa Vonia Hinton

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Chicago, Illinois, native, Lorraine Hansberry wrote the highly acclaimed A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first play produced on Broadway by a Black woman. The play's title is inspired by one of poet Langston Hughes's poems, "Harlem," and focuses on a Black American family with dreams of buying a home in a white neighborhood in segregated Chicago. A Raisin in the Sun is taught widely in high schools and colleges in America, and most of us who are aware of Hansberry know about the critical success of her play, but do we know much more than that about …

“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …

Integration Of Local Poetic Voices: An Interview With Lawson Fusao Inada, Alma Rosa Alvarez, John Rafael Almaguer

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview with Lawson Fusoa Inada

The Persistence Of The Past Into The Future: Indigenous Futurism And Future Slave Narratives As Transformative Resistance In Nnedi Okorafor's The Book Of Phoenix, Ellen Eubanks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, a number of authors have written science fiction works that express the concerns and experiences of marginalized people groups, including those in postcolonial societies, Indigenous/First Nations peoples, and other racial minorities. These works provide counter narratives to that of much canonical science fiction, which developed from narrative forms that often explicitly and implicitly supported colonial ideologies, and still often includes these ideologies today. This thesis analyzes the way The Book of Phoenix (2015) by the NigerianAmerican speculative fiction author Nnedi Okorafor uses a combination of the forms of Indigenous futurism and what Isiah Lavender terms meta-slavery narratives …

Resonant Texts: The Politics Of Nineteenth-Century African American Music And Print Culture, Paul Fess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Resonant Texts: the Politics of Nineteenth-Century African American Music and Print Culture, investigates musical sound as a discursive tool African American writers and activists deployed to contest enslavement before the Civil War and claim citizenship after Emancipation. Traditionally, scholars have debated the degree to which nineteenth-century African American music constituted evidence of black culture and marked a persistent African orality that still abides within African American textual production. While these trends inform this project, my inquiry focuses on the ways that writers placed elements of musical sound—such as rhythm, melody, choral singing, and harmony—at the center of their …

The Communal "I": Exclusion And Belonging In American Autobiography, Melissa Coss Aquino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Communal “I” in American autobiography emerges as an aesthetic response to the pressure of using “the master’s tools” to write from a community on the margins to disclose identity in the conflicts of exclusion and belonging. In this case “the master’s tools” to refer to several distinct elements the communal “I” is tasked with navigating: the use of what we have come to identify as standard English, the form and function of European autobiography as a celebration of individual exceptionalism, and the contradictory pressures on these autobiographies to both elevate and protect the communities in question from further marginalization. …

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …

“The Only Way Out Is In”: Negotiating Identity Through Narrative In The House On Mango Street And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Brianna E. Taylor

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

While aimed at vastly different audiences, Sandra Cisneros’s beloved coming-of-age story The House on Mango Street and Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao both uniquely capture the complexities of navigating the hyphenated territory between their respective Mexican-American and Dominican-American identities. Cisneros engages readers with the simple yet profound narrative voice of Esperanza in a series of vignettes that subtly reveal a growing consciousness of her role as a young Mexican-American woman and her creative consciousness as an artist. Through the multifaceted narrative perspective of Yunior, Díaz skillfully weaves together “ghetto nerd” Oscar de …

Disarming “Nature” As A Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining Of Futurity And Environmental Ethics Through Memoir, Sam Lauer

Master’s Theses

In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.

Douglass’ Reply To A. C. C. Thompson’S ‘Letter From Frederick Douglass,’ As Reprinted In The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition Of Both Letters, With A Summary Of Maryland’S Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Kayla Hardy-Butler presents a famous letter by Frederick Douglass, as it was published in Ohio, with the letter that prompted it. This edition also includes a summary of Maryland slave statutes from the time to better explain the day-to-day experience of slavery debated in this correspondence.

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …

Slave Rebellion, Fugitive Literature, And The Force Of Law, Jeffrey Hole

First-Year Honors Program Research Seminars

From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the revolt aboard the ship Amistad in 1839, from Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831 to the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—on land and on sea, in U.S. territory and international spaces—slaves and abolitionist allies resisted the legal doctrines and martial enforcement of the slave system. In this presentation, we will explore how nineteenth-century literature imagined and depicted slave rebellion, particularly in the decade before the Civil War and in the aftermath of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. A component of the Great Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act strengthened a set …

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

A Girlhood Among Ghosts, An Experimental Project, Maple Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation” – Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace.

I do not believe I know devastation. I think to be devastated means one has to experience extreme pain, and live in the aftermath of trauma. I think of this in terms of war, famine, and immigration. A little self-reflection shows that in the twenty-something years of my life, I have not encountered any of the three things listed.

What I do recall, however, is the first time I picked up Maxine …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

Wayward Women, Macho Men: Linguistic Construction Of Gender Binaries In Yxta Maya Murray's Locas And Denise Chavez's Loving Pedro Infante, Stephanie Tangman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Language labels and defines in order to enhance meaning and communication, but through these labels and definitions speakers are also conditioned to associate certain connotations with words and, therefore, their referents. While often harmless, linguistic conditioning can at times create unsavory associations with these referents. One of these instances occurs in gendered labels and conceptions of male and female bodies and purpose. Both Yxta Maya Murray’s Locas and Denise Chavez’s Loving Pedro Infante can be read through a lens that applies linguistic conditioning with gender theory in order to examine the reinterpretation of female archetypes in the Chicana imagination. It …

The Power To Overcome: The Resistance And Resiliency Of Black Motherhood, Nathan Full

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Motherhood is not a monolithic experience. The intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class are integral facets that influence and control how one practices maternity, especially in a white hegemonic state. Further, control and choice serve as contributing factors, influencing the level of control women have over entering maternity and how a mother claims ties to her offspring. With these intersectional factors and control measures combined, motherhood is a complicated matter, one that influences how women practice maternity. The practice of motherhood is influenced by race, with black women experiencing a historical struggle in their relationships with motherhood. These difficulties …

Walking And Wandering: Reconstructing Diasporic Subjectivity In T. C. Huo's Land Of Smiles And Lê Thi Diem Thúy’S The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Brian G. Chen

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Diaspora has often been defined as the condition of dispersal and displacement in which its members express minimal connections with their host country and always look to return to their ancestral homelands. However, from the literary representations in T. C. Huo’s Land of Smiles and Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, it is clear that members of the Southeast Asian diaspora determine to set root in their host country and refuse to be treated as temporary guests. This determination is warranted by their desire to redefine the contentious idea of home beyond cultural ancestry …