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Full-Text Articles in American Literature
Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding And (Re)Imagining Street Lit And Culture, 1990-2007, Jacinta Saffold
Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding And (Re)Imagining Street Lit And Culture, 1990-2007, Jacinta Saffold
Doctoral Dissertations
“Stories Written on Concrete: Understanding and Re-imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007,” coalesces around stories of urbanity and coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the Hip Hop generation reflected on the social, economic, and cultural shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, they took up paper and pen to immortalize the conflicting duality of the gritty and glamorous experience of growing up on a concrete cityscape in America. I interrogate how street lit disrupts normative literary representations of black life in print. Specifically, I consider how urban fiction writes against the African American literary canon in …
The Black Maternal And Cultural Healing In Twentieth Century Black Women's Fiction, Paula Wingard White
The Black Maternal And Cultural Healing In Twentieth Century Black Women's Fiction, Paula Wingard White
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This work examines representations of maternal relationships between black women in five contemporary novels: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Sula by Toni Morrison, The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Louisiana by Erna Brodber. Rather than situating the origins of black feminist literary studies during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, I argue that Hurston’s work shapes contemporary black feminist literary studies. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nanny provides a mothering archetype that inspires a dominant theme and practice—the black maternal, within contemporary black …
Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs
Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs
Theses and Dissertations--English
“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of …