Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

Cross Crossings Cautiously: Uses Of African American Vernacular English In American Literature, Emily Crnkovich

English Honors Projects

This project uses sociolinguistics to theorize the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in literature across three time periods: the Antebellum era, the post-bellum/Reconstruction era, and the Harlem Renaissance. Different dialects of English encode different power structures, and in order to interrogate those power structures I track how white and black authors represent the language of African American characters on the page and how audiences interpret that language. I find that African American authors tend to embrace the variability and diversity of natural language better than their white counterparts, whose use of literary dialect often falls into essentialist clichés.

Black Dreams: Sight And Sound In African American Life Stories, Karintha Lowe

English Honors Projects

This project examines the work of Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Langston Hughes, in conjunction with the work of literary and psychoanalytic theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, and Laura Mulvey. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s conception of the “American Dream” as emphasizing a linear, progressive understanding of time and space, I argue that Douglass, Hurston, Petry, and Hughes all reshape this narrative of upward mobility to include the experiences of marginalized communities. By analyzing how each author used multiple genres, including autobiography, parody, song, and poetry, to form a single narrative, I contend that these life stories …

(Re)Constructing The Hybrid: Negotiating Transcultural South Asian Women's Subjectivity, Zoya Haroon

English Honors Projects

My project explores the transcultural South Asian woman as postcolonial hybrid subject. I do so by comparing two novels by transnational South Asian feminist authors (Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee and Anita and Me by Meera Syal) and using ethnographic work to complement my literary analysis of hybridity with the lived experience of South Asian women at Macalester. I contextualize my project within postcolonial and women of color feminist theory. Ultimately, I seek to contribute to the existing literature on transcultural South Asian women’s subjectivity and to place their experience alongside that of other women of color.

Honors project in English …