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Theses/Dissertations

2013

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Articles 1 - 27 of 27

Full-Text Articles in African History

Women And The Second Estate In 16th Century Zambezia: Gendered Powers, A 'Puppet' African Queen And Succession In Vakaranga Society, 1500–1700, George G. Levin Nov 2013

Women And The Second Estate In 16th Century Zambezia: Gendered Powers, A 'Puppet' African Queen And Succession In Vakaranga Society, 1500–1700, George G. Levin

Master's Theses

Women in vaKaranga society of the 15th to 17th centuries have been portrayed as oppressed by an "extremely patriarchal" system, but the reality, while still fitting the simple classification of a 'patriarchal' monarchy, indicates quite a bit more negotiation of gendered powers than women, as a class, experienced in the Mediterranean or East Asia. The vaKaranga were the architects of Great Zimbabwe, the capital of a growing state, colonizing their cousins of the Zambezi river, which their Kusi-Mashariki Bantu forefathers had traversed southward a millennium before. Civil war had (apparently) split one nation into two states, Mutapa (Monomotapa) and Khami …


Self-Presentation And Identity In The Roman Empire, Ca. 30 Bce To 225 Ce, Rhiannon Ysabel-Marie Orizaga Jul 2013

Self-Presentation And Identity In The Roman Empire, Ca. 30 Bce To 225 Ce, Rhiannon Ysabel-Marie Orizaga

Dissertations and Theses

The presentation of the body in early imperial Rome can be viewed as the manipulation of a semiotic language of dress, in which various hierarchies that both defined and limited human experience were entrenched. The study of Roman self-presentation illuminates the intersections of categories of identity, as well as the individual's desire and ability to resist essentializing views of Romanness (Romanitas), and to transform destiny through transforming identity. These categories of identity include gender; sexuality or sexual behavior; social status; economic status; ethnicity or place of origin; religion; and age. Applying the model of a matrix of identity deepens our …


Mobilizing Insurgent Pasts Toward Decolonial Futures, Patrick Crowley May 2013

Mobilizing Insurgent Pasts Toward Decolonial Futures, Patrick Crowley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project is an inquiry into modes of decolonial resistance that mobilize alternative relationships to the past against the modern/colonial writing of history from a Eurocentric perspective taken as universal. I contend that knowledges and memories rooted in non-Western cultural traditions have formed the epistemological basis for ongoing opposition to the hegemonic conception of history as the unfolding of global structural transformations on a single, homogenous timescale. I examine works by Frantz Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Zapatista videomakers that expressly reject a Eurocentric, monotopic perspective of history. My objective is to demonstrate the decolonial efforts of intellectuals and ordinary people …


Composing The African Atlantic: Sun Ra, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, And The Poetics Of African Diasporic Composition, James Gregory Carroll May 2013

Composing The African Atlantic: Sun Ra, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, And The Poetics Of African Diasporic Composition, James Gregory Carroll

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation undertakes a comparative analysis of the musical, written, and spoken production of Sun Ra and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti with respect to the larger African Atlantic intellectual environment, situating the two artists as both shapers of an Atlantic intellectual culture as well as artists who were, in turn, shaped by that culture. Through a reading of their creative work, the dissertation argues that, even given the obvious cultural, temporal, and temperamental differences between Sun Ra and Fela, both artists' orientations toward musical composition and performance share similar preoccupations with the recitation of cultural memory and the dialogic creation of historical …


Antonio Preciado And The Afro Presence In Ecuadorian Literature, Rebecca Gail Howes May 2013

Antonio Preciado And The Afro Presence In Ecuadorian Literature, Rebecca Gail Howes

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the literary trajectory of Antonio Preciado Bedoya (1941), a major Afroecuadorian writer, poet and diplomat whose work spans more than 50 years. Although relatively unknown outside of Ecuador, this dissertation will address that lack of recognition by studying his work in the more general context of the African Diaspora. It will reflect upon Preciado’s re-definition of Ecuadorian identity in the new millennium. Preciado is a poet who portrays the Afro presence as central to the national experience of ethnic diversity and the construction of a pluricultural Ecuador. He emphasizes that Afroecuadorians be recognized as an integral component …


"Thaai Thathaiyai Ngai Thaai": Narratives Of Rituals, Agency, And Resistance In The Klfa (Mau Mau) Struggle For Kenya's Independence, Henry Muoki Mbunga May 2013

"Thaai Thathaiyai Ngai Thaai": Narratives Of Rituals, Agency, And Resistance In The Klfa (Mau Mau) Struggle For Kenya's Independence, Henry Muoki Mbunga

Pan African Studies - Theses

The purpose of this project is to examine the role of rituals in the Mau Mau struggle for Kenya's independence. Traditionally, research on the Mau Mau has focused on the political and socio-economic aspects of Kenya's anti-colonial struggle. As a result, the place of spirituality and, in particular, the role of rituals in the Mau Mau struggle has largely been ignored in existing literature. Initially, when KLFA rituals were studied at the height of the Mau Mau struggle, the task was undertaken by colonial anthropologists and psychologists who were often unable to escape the snare of racist and Eurocentric prejudices …


Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein May 2013

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …


Cold War Battleground In Africa: American Foreign Policy And The Congo Crisis, January 1959 - January 1961, Souleyman Saleh Souleyman May 2013

Cold War Battleground In Africa: American Foreign Policy And The Congo Crisis, January 1959 - January 1961, Souleyman Saleh Souleyman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the late 1950s, the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union turned the Congo as one of the most volatile regions of the Third World. Because of Belgium's failure to effective decolonize the Congo, and because of the secession of two of the richest provinces of the Congo, the country would quickly fell into chaos and a civil war that would force its former colonial power to maintain its economic and military influence in the region. This neocolonial attitude induced Congo's Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, to request a military assistance from the Soviet Union. In …


An Omen Of Things To Come: Translated From The Original Text "L'Ombre Des Choses À Venir" By Kossi Efoui, Amber Vandivort May 2013

An Omen Of Things To Come: Translated From The Original Text "L'Ombre Des Choses À Venir" By Kossi Efoui, Amber Vandivort

Masters Theses

An Omen of Things to Come follows the story of a young man, recently entered into adulthood while he recounts the horrible histories, his own and those of his comrades and acquaintances, that have followed him through childhood, war, and the rediscovery of his father. He draws you into the story through first person narrative and allows you to walk alongside him and relive his past. His personal experiences open the readers eyes to the violence, disappearances and uncertainty that surround people in a time of war: in particular how these atrocities affect the lives of abandoned children and those …


What Should We Do With The Social Construct Of Race?, Jason A. Gordon Apr 2013

What Should We Do With The Social Construct Of Race?, Jason A. Gordon

Senior Theses and Projects

Today, race is something that many people still consider to be an essential component of their identities. Even though race has been proven to be nothing more than a social construct, it still is in many regards something that the people living in our society tend take for granted. In this paper, the concept of race will be critically examined and analyzed. The history of race will be closely followed and it will be discussed as to whether or not this social construct is something worth preserving.


Air Too Pure For Slavery And The Rights Of British Liberty: The Black Experience In London, 1772-1883, Tony A. Frazier Apr 2013

Air Too Pure For Slavery And The Rights Of British Liberty: The Black Experience In London, 1772-1883, Tony A. Frazier

Dissertations

This dissertation presents abundant evidence that people of African descent were very present and visible in eighteenth-century London society. In the eighteenth century, London was one of the largest cities in the world with a population that reached almost 700,000 in 1750 and over a million in 1800. In addition, Great Britain was the leading slave trafficking nation in the world. Therefore, it was no surprise that the debate concerning black freedom and liberty was center stage in one of the most important regions in Europe and the Atlantic world. This question, much like the development of slavery in eighteenth-century …


Matriarchy, The Colonial Situation, And The Women's War Of 1929 In Southeastern Nigeria, Samantha Mallory Kies Mar 2013

Matriarchy, The Colonial Situation, And The Women's War Of 1929 In Southeastern Nigeria, Samantha Mallory Kies

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the Igbo women of Southeastern Nigeria from the eve of colonial intrusion to the imposition of colonialism, the Women’s War of 1929, and its aftermath. By placing the Women’s War into the context of the stripping away of inherent rights guaranteed them by matriarchy following the imposition of patriarchy upon the society, this study provides a new explanation of the women’s involvement and lack of male participation in the war. Under traditional matriarchal umbrellas, through their networks and social groups and by the banding together of all women, the Igbo Women’s War of 1929 was the beginning …


Whiteness In Africa: Americo-Liberians And The Transformative Geographies Of Race, Robert P. Murray Jan 2013

Whiteness In Africa: Americo-Liberians And The Transformative Geographies Of Race, Robert P. Murray

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation examines the constructed racial identities of African American settlers in colonial Liberia as they traversed the Atlantic between the United States and West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. In one of the great testaments that race is a social construction, the West African neighbors and inhabitants of Liberia, who conceived of themselves as “black,” recognized the significant cultural differences between themselves and these newly-arrived Americans and racially categorized the newcomers as “white.” This project examines the ramifications for these African American settlers of becoming simultaneously white and black through their Atlantic mobility. This is …


Drawn Together, Drawn Apart: Black And White Baptists In Tidewater Virginia, 1800-1875, Nancy Alenda Hillman Jan 2013

Drawn Together, Drawn Apart: Black And White Baptists In Tidewater Virginia, 1800-1875, Nancy Alenda Hillman

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

A detailed study of local Baptist communities in Tidewater Virginia, "Drawn Together, Drawn Apart" explores the interactions of black and white evangelicals both under slavery and following emancipation. Significant bonds of fellowship between black and white Baptists persisted throughout the antebellum years. The majority of black Baptists continued to engage in baptismal, worship, and disciplinary gatherings with their white neighbors. Baptists of both races participated in the national culture of reform through their commitment to temperance, mission work, and other forms of "benevolence.".;At the same time, a pattern of black religious autonomy was developing. as Christian paternalists, white Baptist leaders …


The United States And The Congo, 1960-1965: Containment, Minerals And Strategic Location, Erik M. Davis Jan 2013

The United States And The Congo, 1960-1965: Containment, Minerals And Strategic Location, Erik M. Davis

Theses and Dissertations--History

The Congo Crisis of the early 1960s served as a satellite conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Scholars have argued about U.S. motivations and interests involved in the Congo Crisis. The major division between scholars is between those who contend the United States acted for national security reasons and those scholars who argue the United States desired to establish a neocolonial regime to protect economic interests pertaining to vast Congolese mineral wealth. The argument of this thesis is that the United States policy in the Congo between 1960 and 1965 focused on installing …


Soldiers And Savants: An Enlightened Despot Discovers Egypt, Dana Kappel Jan 2013

Soldiers And Savants: An Enlightened Despot Discovers Egypt, Dana Kappel

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Ontological Blackness: A N Investigation Of 18th Century Burial Practices Among Captive Africans On The Island Of Barbados, Brittany Leigh Brown Jan 2013

Ontological Blackness: A N Investigation Of 18th Century Burial Practices Among Captive Africans On The Island Of Barbados, Brittany Leigh Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


Dooley's Ferry: The Archaeology Of A Civilian Community In Wartime, Carl Gilbert Drexler Jan 2013

Dooley's Ferry: The Archaeology Of A Civilian Community In Wartime, Carl Gilbert Drexler

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Warfare and conflict are familiar topics to anthropologists, but it is only recently that anthropological archaeologists moved to create a discrete specialization, known as Conflict Archaeology. Practitioners now actively pursue research in a number of different areas, such as battlefields, fortifications, and troop encampments. These advances throw into sharp relief areas that need greater focus. This dissertation addresses one of these shortcomings by focusing on the home front by studying Dooley's Ferry, a hamlet that once lay on the banks of the Red River, in southwest Arkansas. Before the American Civil War, it was a node in the commodity chains …


A Union Of Church And State: The Freedmen's Bureau And The Education Of African Americans In Virginia From 1865--1871, Aaron Jason Butler Jan 2013

A Union Of Church And State: The Freedmen's Bureau And The Education Of African Americans In Virginia From 1865--1871, Aaron Jason Butler

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In 2003, the Virginia Department of Education authorized a committee of 11 teachers to write a report detailing Virginia's public education history. The committee drafted a document that provided a chronological account of the major developments in public education in Virginia from 1607 to 2003. The document provided minimal coverage of the history of Virginia's African American population, specifically during the Antebellum (1830s-1860s) and Reconstruction (1865-1871) eras. The history of public education for Virginia's African American population, 1865-1870, was completely omitted from the document. The post-Civil-War era was a critical time period in both United States and Virginia educational history …


No Longer Lost At Sea: Black Community Building In The Virginia Tidewater, 1865 To The Post-1954 Era, Hollis E. Pruitt Jan 2013

No Longer Lost At Sea: Black Community Building In The Virginia Tidewater, 1865 To The Post-1954 Era, Hollis E. Pruitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

...the early people of Gloucester County were English gentlemen and ladies... Many of these fine old families continued wealthy for generations, until about seventy years ago, when a terrible war, known as the War between the States,... deprived them and their present day descendents of their property and wealth, as well as their Negro slaves who were freed at the time of this war.(Gray 66).;All across the post-Civil War South, the newly freed African Diaspora struggled to find ways to maintain their families and to develop communities. Having been systematically denied education, property ownership, political participation and participation in both …


Gathering Places, Cultivating Spaces: An Archaeology Of A Chesapeake Neighborhood Through Enslavement And Emancipation, 1775--1905, Jon Jason Boroughs Jan 2013

Gathering Places, Cultivating Spaces: An Archaeology Of A Chesapeake Neighborhood Through Enslavement And Emancipation, 1775--1905, Jon Jason Boroughs

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This study is a community-level analysis of an African American plantation neighborhood grounded in archaeological excavations at the Quarterpath Site (44WB0124), an antebellum quartering complex and post-Emancipation tenant residence occupied circa 1840s-1905 in lower James City County, Virginia. It asserts that the Quarterpath domestic quarter was a gathering place, a locus of social interaction in a vibrant and long established Chesapeake plantation neighborhood complex.;By the antebellum period, as marriage "abroad," or off-plantation, became the most common form of long term social union within plantation communities, enslaved social and kin ties in the Chesapeake region were typically geographically dispersed, enjoining multiple …


An Allegory For Life: An 18th Century African-Influenced Cemetery Landscape, Nassau, Bahamas, Grace S. Turner Jan 2013

An Allegory For Life: An 18th Century African-Influenced Cemetery Landscape, Nassau, Bahamas, Grace S. Turner

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

I use W.E.B. Du Bois' reference to the worlds 'within and without the veil' as the narrative setting for presenting the case of an African-Bahamian urban cemetery in use from the early eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. I argue that people of African descent lived what Du Bois termed a 'double consciousness.' Thus, the ways in which they shaped and changed this cemetery landscape reflect the complexities of their lives. Since the material expressions of this cemetery landscape represent the cultural perspectives of the affiliated communities so changes in its maintenance constitute archaeologically visible evidence of this process. …


Derogatory To The Rights Of Free-Born Subjects: Racialization And The Identity Of The Williamsburg Area's Free Black Population From 1723-1830, Rebecca Anne Schumann Jan 2013

Derogatory To The Rights Of Free-Born Subjects: Racialization And The Identity Of The Williamsburg Area's Free Black Population From 1723-1830, Rebecca Anne Schumann

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


Community Building After Emancipation: An Anthropological Study Of Charles' Corner, Virginia, 1862-1922, Shannon Sheila Mahoney Jan 2013

Community Building After Emancipation: An Anthropological Study Of Charles' Corner, Virginia, 1862-1922, Shannon Sheila Mahoney

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The half-century marked by the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I was a critical period of cultural, social, and economic transition for African Americans in the southern United States. During the late nineteenth century, while African Americans were rebuilding communities and networks disrupted by enslavement and the ensuing Civil War, several settlements developed between Williamsburg and Yorktown on Virginia's lower peninsula. One of the settlements, Charles' Corner, is an optimal case study for understanding the gradual process of community building during a particularly challenging period of African American history dominated by systemic racism and …


Re-Framing The Slaughter: Remembering The Rwandan Genocide, Jordan C. Broutman Jan 2013

Re-Framing The Slaughter: Remembering The Rwandan Genocide, Jordan C. Broutman

Senior Independent Study Theses

This project looks at both official and silenced discourse pertaining to Rwandan genocide remembrance. I look specifically at discourse at museums, memorials, memoir, and film. I argue that the Rwandan state exists in the midst of a political conflict that has produced dual memories of victimization. While the genocidal violence inflicted on Tutsi should be commemorated as uniquely cruel and inhumane, many Hutu experienced similar acts of genocide in the 1972 Burundian genocide and in eastern Congo at the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The Rwandan state faces the challenge of rebuilding in a context in which both sides …


A Nation In Name, A 'State' In Exile : The Frelimo Proto-State, Youth, Gender, And The Liberation Of Mozambique 1962-1975, Michael Gerald Panzer Jan 2013

A Nation In Name, A 'State' In Exile : The Frelimo Proto-State, Youth, Gender, And The Liberation Of Mozambique 1962-1975, Michael Gerald Panzer

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation analyzes the early political development of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) during the 1960s. The thesis offers several new theoretical perspectives on the evolution of FRELIMO as a liberation front. While operating from military bases, settlement camps, and urban settings in Tanzania, FRELIMO functioned as a proto-state with authority derived from a contingent sovereignty. At the beginning of the anti-colonial war against Portugal in September 1964, FRELIMO was able to help organize and oversee the lives of thousands of Mozambican refugees who fled into Tanzania to escape the escalating violence. Many of these refugees became FRELIMO's revolutionary constituents …


"The Most Deadly Spot On The Face Of The Earth": The United States And Antimodern Images Of "Darkest Africa" 1880-1910, Melinda Stump Jan 2013

"The Most Deadly Spot On The Face Of The Earth": The United States And Antimodern Images Of "Darkest Africa" 1880-1910, Melinda Stump

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries in the United States, images of Africa and Africans were prevalent throughout society. Africans were described as primitive or child-like and were contrasted with the so-called high civilization of middle-class Anglo-Saxons. This thesis will look at these images and attempt to complicate the current historiography on United States images of Africa. Furthering Jackson Lears’s theories of antimodernism in Progressive Era United States, I argue that the images produced of Africa and Africans were attempts at regeneration and intense experiences. Due to the huge progress made due to the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization …