African American Studies Commons^™

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Keeping It Real: The Evolution Of The Black American Sitcom, Ebony E. Prescod

Capstones

The image of the black person has undergone many iterations in American popular culture. From the mammy of post antebellum America, to blaxploitation, to the black upper class -- what it next for the representation of black people in popular media, especially as it is now being helmed by black creatives. What does the black American of the 2020s look like? Now, what does it look like to be true to the black experience, today?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-KpHMb37_khYkOmlR6-gEPGEHLVZA4ND7HwNwhdz6ig/edit?usp=sharing

Motherland Drip: Examining Performativity In Southern Black Motherhood, Daisha Huiel

Master's Projects

This capstone project explores the possibilities of the societal standards of southern Black motherhood creating oppositional experiences for Black women and their claims to freedom and bodily autonomy. I am writing about the lived experiences of southern Black women, including myself, within their communities to explore anti-respectability themes in the lives and performances of southern women and female hip hop performers through the lens of intersectionality. This creative nonfiction1 and scholarship reflect my academic exploration into the ways foundational Black feminist theory and relevant texts connect to my individual lived experiences of motherhood and identity within the post-hip-hop generations. I …

This Is A Man’S World: The Lived Gendered Experiences Of Blues People., Anthony Christopher Brown

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

American Blues is known for playing a role in the foundation of the country’s music. The ingredient of the musical tradition has roots going back to West Africa and was brought to the United States through the of transatlantic slave trade. During the period of slavery, it formally developed with plantation work songs which later continued after emancipation with sharecropping until the early to mid-twentieth century. During the early twentieth century, W.C. Handy in Tutwiler, Mississippi, and musicians formally popularized Blues music were being recorded. The first Blues superstars were women such as Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey …

Adapting Black Culture: Without The Black Experience, Bakhita Solenyanu

English

No abstract provided.

Peeling Back The Wallpaper, Abby Cornelius

English

No abstract provided.

Volume 16 - Issue 1: La Créole - A Journal Of Creole History & Genealogy, Marcus Christian, Kevin Portz, Renee Donato Nelson, Pat Marant Schexnayder, Danielle Romero, Cheron Brylski, Joseph D. Theard Jr., Warren A. Bell Jr., Jeanne Ayler

La Créole - A Journal of Creole History & Genealogy

The Louisiana Creole Research Association, Inc., known as LA Creole, was founded on August 21, 2004 as a New Orleans-based, non-profit family research and educational organization. Its purpose is to assist Creoles of Color in researching their ancestry, to educate the general public about Creole history and culture, and to celebrate the contributions and legacy of a unique, sometimes forgotten people. La Créole, the Association’s journal is published annually.

Her Precious White Body/Her Tender Black Flesh: The Gothic Link To Black Women's (Mis)Treatment In Real Life And On The Page, Madisty R. Thomas

English Theses & Dissertations

As a work in progress, this thesis explores the interplay between historical and contemporary devaluation of and violence against Black women, materially and discursively, including visual mediums and written text. Specifically, I focus on the gothic novel to illuminate the impact race-based inventions such as chattel slavery and human exhibitions, as well as the generic tropes of the Gothic, have had on Black women’s representation and lived experience via a wide-ranging introduction and close examination of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Additionally, the conclusion attempts to suggest how Black women and girls might survive in this antiblack world, thus escape …

Genres Of Labor: Wageless Work And The Aesthetics Of Stagnation, Martin A. Jensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Genres of Labor identifies and explores a little-acknowledged fact about labor—that it appears to us in highly conventionalized forms that are subject to evaluation, appraisal, and interpretation. I call this appearance the “aesthetic” dimension of labor, and I show how it increasingly comes into view in the period since 1973, as a contracting economy pushes off work onto unwaged realms of human activity. In chapters on Andy Warhol’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), I demonstrate that literary texts participate in …

Justice, Pandemics, And Museums In Cyberspace: Archaeology Museums’ Decolonization Projects During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samuel Besse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores three Archeology Museums (Historic St. Mary’s City, James Madison’s Montpelier, and the American Museum of Natural History), their attempts at addressing the colonial narratives that museums are built on, and how the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over George Floyd’s death affected these projects. I place a special effort on the online presence of these museums, as this is the main way visitors interacted with the museums during the pandemic. After discussing the origins of museum’s decolonization efforts and their efforts to make an online presence, I talk about the Covid-19 pandemic and the events around George Floyd’s …

‘Following The Line Of Least Resistance’: African American Women In Domestic Work, 1899–1940, Taylor Simsovic

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

This paper examines the challenges faced by African American women employed in domestic service between 1899 and 1940, with a focus on how race, class, and gender intersected to shape their experiences. Specifically, the study investigates how these women continued to perform reproductive labor as they migrated from the South to Northern states during the Great Migration. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, the analysis argues that Black women's persistent employment in undervalued labor within white American homes was driven by the mutually constitutive systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. These systems channeled Black women into …

"The Best Interests Of The Child:" Parental Claims In Nebraska Child Custody Cases, 1877–1924, Esme Krohn

Digital Legal Research Lab

Research poster titled "The Best Interests of the Child:" Parental Claims in Nebraska Child Custody Cases, 1877–1924; presented via the Digital Legal Research Lab NSF REU Site, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, August 2023.

Advisor: Katrina Jagodinsky

Leeland Jones And Claude Clapp: Case Studies Of Civil Rights In Western New York, Kaelynn Beckman

History Theses

The Civil Rights Movement, which occurred primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, aimed to acquire justice, equality, and an end to racism and discrimination against Black Americans. In an attempt to do so, Black activists staged protests, walkouts, and boycotts and turned to institutions of education and politics to usher in change. However, the historiography on the Civil Rights Movement focuses on the more prominent events and individuals of the time, for example, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The missing components of the historiography include the …

Habeas At Home And Heart: Progressive Era Cases Of Spousal Confinement To Nebraska's Psychiatric Households, Isabelle Childs

Digital Legal Research Lab

No abstract provided.

Defending The Call To Preach In Shirley Caesar’S Gospel Autobiography, Angela Nelson

Popular Culture Faculty Publications

Shirley Caesar, a celebrated, multiple award-winning gospel singer and preacher, used and retold stories about three transformative spiritual experiences to build a case for defending her call to preach. These ritualistic spiritual events included chronicling her conversion, spirit baptism, and call experiences. In this discussion, I examine the contexts of Caesar’s familial and religious backgrounds, Christian Protestant preaching culture and gender, Caesar’s “parable” and “prolegomenon” of purpose, and Caesar’s defense of her call to preach. I conclude by exploring the ways in which, as an “outsider within,” Caesar’s “defense case story” negotiated and dissented from theological narratives about the place …

Plotting The Plantationocene With The History Of Mary Prince, Shelby Johnson

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

In this essay, I consider how The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) extends vital affordances for assembling a literary history of ecological rupture, settler colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. These insights arise from my experiences teaching Prince in “Plotting the Plantationocene in Early Atlantic Literature” (Fall 2021), a course which took up what it means to orient to historical formations of climate change as co-emergent with plantation systems. I argue that my students explored how figures like Prince open politically vibrant pathways for being in the world otherwise to plantation modernity.

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 …

“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson

Criticism

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …

Black Best-Selling Books And Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project, Jacinta R. Saffold, Kinohi Nishikawa

Criticism

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of …

On The Black Book As Durational: Noah Purifoy’S Desert Library, Paul Benzon

Criticism

What happens to a library in the desert? How does it transform as a material object under these pressures, and what might these transformations tell us about its capacity for bearing and registering history? This article considers these questions in relation to the artist Noah Purifoy’s found-object installation Library of Congress, one of approximately thirty works that make up the ten-acre space of the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California. The museum consists of a wide range of found-object sculptures, all deeply enmeshed within the space of the desert. The museum, and indeed Purifoy’s …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

Aa Ms 29 African American Oral History Collection, Jill Piekut Roy, Lex Lecrone

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description

The Center for the Study of Lives was established in 1988 by Robert Atkinson, professor emeritus of human development, multicultural studies, and religious studies at University of Southern Maine. Collection includes recordings and documents related to oral histories conducted by Jill Cournoyer and other students of Joseph Conforti. Interviewees are Eugene Cummings, Rev. Margaret Lawson, Ronald S. Lynch, Leola Marshall, Dana Richardson, and Gerald E. Talbot. Also includes a speech by Eugene Jackson. Interviewees speak about their lives and histories as African Americans in the United States, particularly in Portland, Maine.

Date Range:

1985-1996

Size of Collection:

0.25 Linear …

Emancipatory And Retributive Labor: Conflicting Representations Of Enslaved Labor In Us And Caribbean Literature, 1830–1855, Michael Druffel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emancipatory and Retributive Labor follows the development of a concept that I call emancipatory labor as it appeared in the US and Caribbean during the period 1830 to 1855. Emancipatory labor is a subversive tactic in which enslaved people in the United States and Caribbean redefined a portion of their labor in capitalist terms. Re-theorizing a portion of enslaved labor stakes a claim to agency and humanity according to Western, humanistic logic. Examples of the types of labor being redefined include selling commodities, hiring time, and working “extras” for wages. I use enslaved person Lunsford Lane’s 1842 narrative as a …

'I Don’T Fit That Stereotype': Participant Photography And The Visual (Re)Positioning Of Black Men, Quaylan Allen

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This paper examines how Black men use a participant photography project as a tool for meaning making during the current political and social context of anti-Black racism, Black activism, and intersectional politics. Using a critical visual methodology in the analysis of the images, this paper will examine how Black men make meaning of current social issues through the types of images they produced, how they make meaning of the types of audiences they are speaking to through the project, and how these meanings are reflected through their repositioning practices in the visual project. Specific attention is paid to how they …

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

Dance/Movement Therapy Used As An Intervention To Heal Racial Trauma Within The Black Community: A Literature Review, Jennifer Noboise

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

The history of dance within the black community has served an important role while living through a racist and discriminatory society. Dance has been used to express anger, grief, and joy during hardships and moments of rejoicing from the black experience. African American people have endured years of trauma and abuse from oppressive systems. Research has been conducted to demonstrate that dance/movement therapy has been effective in treating those who have experienced a form of trauma since the trauma is stored in the body. Examining trauma symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and substance use, the research found these symptoms diminished …

Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez

English Language and Literature ETDs

There is a war for recognition happening on the Hollywood battlefield. Traditionally, in every war there is an enemy and an alley; in this study, the enemy is systemic racism, and the alley is Black culture. That is, this dissertation seeks to detail the past, present, and future implications of this battle for truth, inclusion, and recognition in American pop culture. This discussion examines how various multi-media forms like literature, film, television, and comic books work as tools to combat racism in American society. More importantly, the theories presented in this text are all linked to actual tactics of military …

Post-Racism As Ideology: Character Construction And Placement, & Narrative Structure In Dear White People, Mphatso Kaufulu

Dissertations

My project looks at post-racism as ideology. Through my chosen text – the Netflix streamed television series called Dear White People – I examine the ways in which post-racism is persists through representational abstractions which reformulate race as largely sets of interpersonal and intercultural, person-to-person social problems rather that a more general condition rooted in institutional or structural social, political and economic arrangements which organize society and produce its cultural dispensation.

To do this, I applied some of Stuart Hall’s ideas – on identity, ideology and commodification – and Bonilla-Silva – specifically in the area of obfuscations or abstractions of …

Analyzing The Relationship Between Aid Agencies And The Union Army In Civil War Arkansas From 1862 To 1865, Kimberly Green

ATU Theses and Dissertations 2021 - Present

This thesis examines the administration of Arkansas’s contraband camps. The Union Army originally failed Black refugees in their quest for freedom as it was unprepared for the large number of African Americans seeking protection and guidance from the army. Arkansas historians have analyzed the effect the war had on the state as a whole and the operation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, but none of these works detail the various agencies that worked with federal authorities. This thesis follows the Western Sanitary Commission and the American Missionary Association as they assisted the federal government by providing supplies and forming partnerships with …

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.