African American Studies Commons^™

Marcia Lynn Hoard Williams, Kelli Johnson

Oral Histories – NPS AACR Civil Rights In Appalachia Grant

Kelli Johnson conducting an oral history interview with Marcia Williams.

This oral history is part of the National Park Service African American Civil Rights History and Appalachia Grant Program.

Color And Descriptors To See A Deeper Meaning In "Passing", Dani Szafran

Anthós

A small glimpse into the novel “Passing” by Nella Larsen. A fictional story of Irene Redfield, a black woman living in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and her unraveling life brought on by a chance meeting of an old friend. This is a look at the latent lesbian feelings as shown by the use of descriptive words to paint a picture of a desire that was forbidden during those times.

Skin Worlds: Black And Indigenous Science Fiction Theorizing Since The 1970s, Lou Cornum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation unfolds along two trajectories, the first following from an ascendant interest in minoritarian traditions in speculative and science fiction and the second following the reiterative conversations across Black and Indigenous Studies. Science fiction theorizing is introduced as a frame for thinking these two trajectories together, with science fiction texts by authors Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko and Samuel Delany providing a paraliterary mode of imagining the planetary from which to understand the interconnected processes of settler colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery. Science Fiction theorizing across these texts disrupts notions of linear progressive time, human/alien boundaries, …

Using Big Data To Facilitate A Lyrical Analysis Of Poetry And Rap, Remington Yve Giller

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

Poetry and rap are dissected using text mining techniques in order to determine overall trends in the words used by both. With this data, the way in which ideas and concepts are expressed can be compared and contrasted as a way of showing the legitimacy of rap as a form of literary expression. Other topics within the paper are: a background of the history of rap and the digital humanities, and an example of a close reading featuring a medieval poem and a rap by Eminem. This demonstrates how even in a traditional way of handling texts, both poetry and …

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …

“Did Emmett Till Die In Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers And Civil Rights Unionism In The Mid-1950s, Matthew Nichter

Faculty Publications

Emmett Till’s mangled face is seared into our collective memory, a tragic epitome of the brutal violence that upheld white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. But Till's murder was more than just a tragedy: it also inspired an outpouring of determined protest, in which labor unions played a prominent role. The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) campaigned energetically on behalf of Emmett Till, from the stockyards of Chicago to the sugar refineries of Louisiana. Packinghouse workers petitioned, marched, and rallied to demand justice; the UPWA organized the first mass meeting addressed by Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley; and an …

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

We Exist Series 1: Family - Quotes, Lance Gibbs Phd

Series 1: Family - Quotes

In this section, we have selected quotes that represent how Black residents in Maine view their family life. The quotes are taken from transcripts of the oral history project “Home Is Where I Make It”: African American Community and Activism in Greater Portland, Maine.” The interview subjects are all native to Maine or are longtime residents of Maine. The original intent of the “Home Is Where I Make It” project was to highlight Black residents’ history and struggle for community in southern Maine in both their formal organizational memberships and day-to-day activities. The interviews, however, unearthed a wealth …

Interracial Relations: History And Cultural Identity In The Invention Of Wings, Taylor Hopkins

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

The historical fiction novel The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd displays a notable relationship between feminist and racial ideals during the nineteenth century. The story is based on the historical figure, Sarah Grimké, an American abolitionist and advocate for women’s rights. Over the course of thirty-five years, the narration alternates between the two main characters: Sarah Grimké and Hetty Handful Grimké, a young slave on the Grimké plantation. The interactions between the two begin when Hetty is presented to Sarah as a personal waiting maid for Sarah’s eleventh birthday. As the story continues, the dynamics between the two …

In With A Runny Nose, Out In A Body Bag: Why Is It So Difficult For Black Women To Leave The Hospital Alive?, Chelsea Carter

Scholars Week

In the Black community, there is an unspoken understanding about Black people going to the doctor with a runny nose, and leaving in a body bag. A recent article published by The Oprah Magazine demonstrates that racism is rampant in the United States healthcare system, and it is taking the lives of Black women at an alarmingly disproportionate rate (Stallings, 2018). When seeking medical treatment, many Black women are at the mercy of doctors who possess an implicit bias against Black women. Simply put, implicit bias describes the phenomenon in which people behave and treat others based on negative preconceptions …

Who We Are: A Chronicle Of Racism In America, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America (2021), directed by Emily Kunstler.

Dancing Through Time: A Biographical Look On The Evolution Of Tap Dance, Jaimie Cranford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A uniquely American art form, tap dance has often been misrepresented and under-appreciated when positioned alongside other dance forms. This is largely due to the form’s racialized history, which builds upon contributions from African-American culture. Unlike other dance forms, which stem from white European traditions, tap dance evolved out of a necessity for cultural preservation as enslaved Africans adapted to life in America. As tap dance evolved, its association with slave culture led to it not being taken seriously; if anything, tap dancers were viewed simply as “entertainers” – certainly not as artists. Using a biographical lens, this work looks …

Us, Abundantly: From Africa To The Americas, Karisma Jay

Theses and Dissertations

"Us, AbunDantly," a Live theatrical dance performance and film, delves into the African Diaspora and its influences. An artistic and academic project built upon the amplification of Black excellence and Black pride, this paper contextualizes a work within the oral histories and contemporary dance studies of a powerfully ancestral community.

The Significance Of The Automobile In 20th C. American Short Fiction, Megan M. Flanery

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Midcentury American life featured a post-war economy that established a middle class in which disposable income and time for leisure were commonplace. In this socio-economic environment, consumerism flourished, ushering in the Golden Age of the automobile: from 1950 to 1960, Americans spent more time in their automobiles than ever before, and, by the end of the decade, the number of cars on the road had more than doubled. While much critical attention has been given to the role of the automobile in American novels, less has been given to its role in American short stories. The automobile has been featured …

"A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy Of The Black Speculative Imagination" Exhibition Catalog, Julian Chambliss, Phillip Cunningham

2020-2021 Afrofuturism Syllabus - Week 20 - "A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination" Exhibit

Exhibition catalog for "A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination," co-curated by Dr. Julian Chambliss and Dr. Phillip Cunningham as part of the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. The exhibit locates Afrofuturist thought in earlier eras of American history and focuses on how African American writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries used speculative/science fiction to imagine a better, freer, more equitable future for Black people.

“Beychella:” Beyoncé’S Homecoming To A Futuristic Queer Utopian, Jolie V. Brownell

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance and 2019 Homecoming film set the stage for a radical Black queer reimagining. Yet, how can Beyoncé—who is straight—be located within a queer critique? In this paper, I argue that through a radical and political expansion of queer, the creative deployment of dis/identification, and the unapologetic expression of the erotic, Beyoncé performs an embodiment of queer of color critique. These creative gestures within “Beychella” invite viewers into a queer futuristic utopian and provide new creative modes to politically inhabit, resist, and reimagine interlocking systems of oppression.

Keywords: Beyoncé, queer, dis/identification, erotic, QoCC, …

A Noble Duty: Ladies’ Aid Associations In Upstate South Carolina During The Civil War, Elizabeth Aranda, Carmen Harris

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

The contributions of women during the American Civil War have been typically examined within the broader picture of a nation or state-wide mobilization of citizens during a time of war. In this paper, I seek to show the mobilization of women during the Civil War from a regionalized perspective limited to the Upcountry of South Carolina and the effect their development of aid societies had on the war as well as on their place as white women in the Confederacy. Female-run aid societies began for the purpose of gathering supplies for soldiers. Within two years they had founded hospitals and …

"To Claim That Greatness For Themselves”: A History Of The Kentucky Horse Park, Emily Elizabeth Libecap

Theses and Dissertations--History

The Kentucky Horse Park describes itself as the world’s only equine theme park. However, the park is not entirely without historical precedent; instead, world’s fairs, amusement parks, and theme parks all form a century-long pedigree chart through which the park can trace its ancestors. The Kentucky Horse Park’s links to these predecessors deepen our understanding of how the park is a reflection of the world around it and the motivations for how and why it was built. From its inception in the late 1960s, to when it opened in 1978, through the present day, the Kentucky Horse Park was and …

Songs For High Voice: An Annotated Guide To African Romances, Op. 17 By Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Makeda Danielle Hampton

Theses and Dissertations--Music

African Romances, Op. 17, composed in 1897 by African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), is a collection of seven songs for high voice that is uniquely both African and American. The lyrics of this song cycle were first published in the book Majors and Minors, a collection of poems published in 1895 by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906).

An analysis of resources supports that academic discourse in Black vocal music has been underrepresented due to the absence of centralized information, such as published scores, recorded materials, catalogs, and guides for study and performance. While in depth research focusing on the art …

Henry Adams: An Education In Autobiography, Marcellus Richie

Dissertations and Theses

This essay will begin by breaking down Henry Adams’s starting sentence in his autobiography word by word, piece by piece – pondering its meanings and permutations in the context of subsequent chapters of this iconic memoir. The essay will then consider whether Adams’s Education should still be regarded as a classic of American autobiography or seen merely as an irrelevant and out-of-date artifact. In a nation radically transformed since Adams’s time, does the book still deserve its high flung reputation? In other words, which of the images cited above is most relevant to The Education: an image of optimistic youth …

The Space Between “Seen” And “Unseen:” Queer People And The 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance, Claudia R. Campanella

Dissertations and Theses

In November 1926, a group of Black artists, writers, and activists created the first and only edition of Fire!!, edited by novelist Wallace Thurman. Fire!! was created by a younger generation of New Negroes and “devoted to the younger Negro artists” who dissented from the mainstream ideas of the New Negro Movement and used the magazine to spread their own views on the 1915-1945 New Negro Renaissance. Fire!! and other texts speaking to this dissent against a Black intellectual middle class image of the movement will be studied in reference to showcasing the multi-faceted elements of the movement touching …

The Transcorporeal South: Bodies And Ecologies In Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, Tiffany Morgan Messick

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation proposes that transcorporeality offers an alternative to Cartesian dualistic modes of embodiment in Walker Percy’s, The Moviegoer, Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright’s, Native Son, and Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Opposing the division between mind and body as theorized by René Descartes, transcorporeality advances the body’s porosity, maintaining that the individual is enmeshed within the material world and that this entanglement consubstantiates consciousness. Examining the works of Descartes, focusing especially on the ways that Cartesian ideas have been applied in Southern culture, I contend that a Cartesian definition of subjectivity, …

Influencing Capitalist Attitudes To Drive More Capital Towards Social Good, Leah Michelle Burton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to better understand how to influence capitalist attitudes and drive more capital towards social good. This is why we must explore the prospect of emancipating the capitalists from capitalism. This study identifies capitalism as a form of oppression that is contributing to a newly developed ethics of capital, a term introduced in this study. Emancipatory action research and general systems theory were employed as the primary approaches to engaging a group of venture capitalists and finance professionals in activities and dialogues. Value2 is the theory of action I use to influence the attitudes of …

Teachers Of Color's Perception On Identity And Academic Success: A Reflective Narrative, Lynette Suliana Sikahema Finau

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Research and scholarship in multicultural education has consistently affirmed that as a result of the long standing racial academic achievement gap and the current teaching force not reflecting the changing demographics of students in the United States, students of color continue to be deprived from having teachers who look like them and who may bring similar life, social, and cultural experiences that can increase the value they place on academics. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of teachers of color and how they perceive their identity as significant and meaningful to their profession and its …

In/Visible, Raymond Thompson Jr

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

My MFA thesis and supporting exhibition focus on challenging the United States’ photographic archive that often left out African-American people. The work, through the use of appropriation and alternative photographic processes, disrupts America’s historical visual archive and notions that surround the white gaze. Through the unsettling of this visual space, new speculative narratives can be created to help imagine new futures. This work is the beginning of a process of mourning histories I have never known and reclaiming a place for myself and my family in the American landscape that is free of racial trauma.

Race Youth In Twentieth-Century American Literature And Culture, Claire E. Lenviel

Theses and Dissertations--English

Race Youth in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture argues for the centrality of black youth, both real and literary, to the trajectories of African American literature and its repudiation of white supremacy. Drawing on research into the rise of the adolescent and teenager as distinct social categories, I argue that age-based subjectivity should inform how we read race-based subjectivity. My first chapter explores how early twentieth-century black periodicals push back against white supremacist theories of human development in an explicit appeal to what I call “race youth,” the children and adolescents who would take up the mantle of racial uplift. …

Wilderness Of Freedom: Slave Narratives, Captivity Narratives, And Genre Transformation In Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Hannah Gautsch

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a modiste well-versed in the social expectations of the domestic world, Elizabeth Keckley crafted an autobiography that would appeal to this wide variety of audiences. Throughout the 1850s, women across the nation negotiated the terms of True Womanhood and identified activism as a space where women could engage with national concerns. At the same time, literary production in the US was increasing exponentially, creating room for literature to be used as a means of social change. Contemporary scholars have devoted much attention to the ways Keckley’s Behind the Scenes combines elements of multiple genres to assure its long-term survival …

Sonic Femininity: The Ronettes' Transgressive Gender Performance, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

Iconic sixties girl group the Ronettes are frequently (and justly) celebrated for anchoring the Wall of Sound and inspiring the Beatles, but in their own right, they transgressed social, gendered expectations in revolutionary ways. Framed by a notion I call the sonic feminine, a recuperative theoretical space for the revolutionarily transgressive work of female and femme artists, I argue that the Ronettes, and lead singer Ronnie Spector in particular, enacted a kind of cultural rebellion: they crafted their images to made-up heights that tease the boundaries of drag across the spaces of the stage, the recording studio, the bathroom, and …

African American Literary Traditions In Justina Ireland’S Young Adult Novels Dread Nation And Deathless Divide, Gabrielle Sleeper

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Justina Ireland’s young adult novels Dread Nation (2017) and Deathless Divide (2020) tell the story of a Black girl by the name of Jane living in the aftermath of the Civil War, around 1880.

“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …