African American Studies Commons^™

Colonized Loyalty: Asian American Anti-Blackness And Complicity, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt

Faculty Publications

In this essay, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstad argues that solidarity between and within communities of color remains our only chance to fight against the brutal and insidious forces of racism, white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Exposing Racism Part I: Environmental Racism, Megan L. Benka-Coker, Office Of Multicultural Engagement

Office of Multicultural Engagement Events

This is the first in a four-part series on Exposing Racism sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Engagement. Health Sciences Prof. Megan Benka-Coker '09 discusses how environmental racism occurs through rules, regulations, and policies that target Black communities.

African American Women In The Domestic Service Industry During Reconstruction. An Intersectional Analysis, Kathryn Small

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

African American Women in the Domestic Service Industry during Reconstruction. An Intersectional Analysis.

My paper focuses on the experiences of African American women, within the workplace, during Reconstruction. Whilst the Civil War resulted in the emancipation of the African American population, the day-to-day attainment of freedom posed a very different reality, most notably in respect of limited opportunities for economic advancement. All working women of this time were subjected to discrimination. However, black women were especially discriminated against due to their race. Most markedly, this can be seen in the fact that work opportunities available to black women were restricted …

Understand North Omaha's Past To Chart The Best Course For The Future, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

As a native of Omaha with years of accumulated wisdom as to the plight of my beloved race, I have a responsibility to speak up during these tumultuous times. I do not have the right, however, to speak for my community. I am observing a tremendous surge of activism and conversation among black Omahans, from our elected officials and organizational leaders to our lay leaders and, most importantly, our young leaders.

Ua94/6/1 My Story: Wku Women's Basketball's Sherry Porter, Sherry Porter

Student/Alumni Personal Papers

My Story is a series of first-person feature articles written by WKU student-athletes. The student-athletes will be telling their own stories in their own words. This article written by women’s basketball senior Sherry Porter. Porter reflects on the state of current events going on nationwide.

African American Genealogy Workshop Poster, Kelli Johnson

Ephemera

African American Genealogy Workshop Poster

The Pandemic Of Racism Has Endured And Grown. It's Time To Listen., Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

Noted African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois more than a century ago wrote of the “peculiar indifference” to the magnitude of human suffering brought about by racial disparities in health outcomes.

Freed Faces, Our Past Americans: Collaborations To Create, Digitize And Describe The “Former Slaves In Freedom” Collection, Gayle Porter

Collaborative Librarianship

The Chicago State University (CSU) Archives collaborated with the International Society of Sons and Daughters of Slave Ancestry (ISDSA), a Chicago-based lineage society, to digitize, describe, and make accessible online a collection of 359 private historic photographs of formerly enslaved African Americans, and 90+ brief family histories, submitted by descendants. This case study describes the benefits, processes, and challenges of this unique, unfinished collaborative project. The study also describes: 1. Creative, flexible approaches to collaborative digital projects by an academic institution and a community organization; 2. Balancing cataloging/metadata standards while respecting a curator’s goals for the collection.

User Guide To The Mds Collection Of African American History In Huntington, West Virginia, Kelli Johnson

User Guides

Various people have worked over the years to collect stories and artifacts about Black history in Huntington, WV. This site seeks to gather that information in one place and make it available for all.

Ua94/6/1 My Story: Wku Track & Field's Adarian Gray, Adarian Gray

Student/Alumni Personal Papers

My Story is a series of first-person feature articles written by WKU student-athletes. The student-athletes will be telling their own stories in their own words. This article written by track & field senior thrower Adarian Gray, who has represented both WKU softball and track & field during her career on the Hill.

Ua3/10/2 We Are One Wku, Wku President's Office - Caboni

WKU Administration Documents

Email from WKU president Timothy Caboni to WKU Alumni and friends. An identical email was sent to the WKU Community.

Una Isla, Dos Literaturas: Contrapunteo De La Literatura De La Isla Y La Diáspora Dominicanas (1965–2018), Jose L. Peralta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Una isla, dos literaturas.

Contrapunteo de la literatura de la isla y la diáspora dominicanas (1965-2018)

by

Jose Luis Peralta Genao

Advisor: Carlos Riobó

The literary works written by Dominican Diaspora as well as the ones written in the island have been dealing with a very complicated phenomena grown as the result of Dominican massive emigration of twenty century, namely the definition of dominicaness (dominicanidad). In the search of a broader notion of this concept the idea of being Dominican gets build and transforms in different Dominican literary spaces. By searching national discursive elements that construct that Dominican identities in …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

Stealin' The Meetin': Black Education History & The Black Panthers' Oakland Community School, Robert P. Robinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation frames the Black Panthers' Oakland Community School (OCS) as a convergence of Black self-determination/Black Power, Black education history, and curriculum studies. Drawing from widely-cited archives, rarely-cited archives, oral history, periodicals, and secondary source material, the proposed study extends the OCS narrative by tracing its curricular trajectory and highlighting the voices of students, parents, and staff. It considers how the school’s history provides examples of educational practices—such as restorative justice and culturally relevant pedagogy—that would not become named or popularized in mainstream education until much later, asserting that histories of this sort can inform educational endeavors in the present. …

Am I A Systemic Iniquity Interrupter? Understanding The Influence Of Critical Race Educating Through The Narratives Of Alternative Ed. Black Educators, Ayanna Gore

College of Education Theses and Dissertations

This research aims to illuminate the Critical Influence Black educators from an alternative education certifying program (which will be labeled with the fictional name Lead On throughout this research) through their personal narratives on the successes, struggles, and benefits of teaching Black students. Using CRT methodology (tenant 1 & 2: counter-storytelling and the permanence of racism) to hear and analyze the narratives of Black educators experience around working to have a Critical Influence on their students. Taking an Emic approach, three in-depth story-telling sessions were conducted for each participant. All participants are alum of the alternative certifying education program and …

Black Girls Matter: The Impact Of Historical Representation On Contemporary Education, Carolyn Strong

Dissertations

A long history of misogynoir and negative stereotypes about Black
girls and women can be found throughout the literature and popular
culture of the United States. These stereotypes inform the lived
experience of Black girls and women, and in particular interfere with
African American girls’ ability to thrive in a school environment. An
autoethnographic research approach shows that various strategies, in
particular, Black girl-centric spaces, have proven to be helpful in
supporting Black girls who have to negotiate varying degrees of
hostility in general environments. These could be applied more broadly
to improve Black girls’ mental, psychological, physical, and
educational …

“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how audiences engage with U.S. Latinx media representations through the practice of critical media literacy. I interrogate how media consumers construct critical media literacy through interacting with U.S. Latinx figures on digital media platforms, particularly on the social-media app, Twitter, and the user-generated video content platform, YouTube. Throughout this thesis, I argue that users on these platforms who engage with U.S. Latinx pop culture figures, like Jennifer Lopez and Belcalis Almanzar (Cardi B), read, digest, and comprehend a variety of multimedia images, texts, or videos, and that this engagement becomes an accessible form of critical media literacy, …

The International Rise Of Afro-Brazilian Modernism In The Age Of African Decolonization And Black Power, Abigail Lapin Dardashti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two competing artistic representations of Brazilian blackness emerged from 1966 to 1988. The first began in 1966 when the Brazilian government positioned itself as a leading diplomatic partner for newly independent African nations by showcasing black Brazilian art in West Africa. Through exhibitions, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry aimed to highlight the country’s presumed homogeneous identity and absence of racism. The second definition arose through the work of artists inspired by U.S. social rights activism, who founded Brazil’s civil rights movement in 1975. Brazilian artist-activists combined symbolism from U.S. Black Power, African liberation movements, and Afro-Brazilian culture to denounce racism in …

Afro-Americano: The Transracialization Of The African-American Spanish Speaker, John M. Flanagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Transracialization is not a biological term connoting the change of one’s skin tone to become a member of a different race. Its definition has its roots in racialization—the ideological process that describes how one assembles ideas about groups based on their race and decides, for example, what a ‘Black’ person is and how ‘Black’ people speak. Thus, transracialization is a linguistic term that describes the political and sociocultural act of recontextualizing one’s phenotype with the use of language, and in so doing, upending the observers’ stereotypical expectations of who one is (Alim 2016). This dissertation deals with how Spanish influences …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

Black Skin, White Gaze: The Presence And Function Of The Linchpin Character In Biopics About Black American Protagonists, Nicole N. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout its existence the American film industry has--through the stories it has chosen to tell as well as discriminatory practices such as whitewashing and the erasure of non-White people--enshrined whiteness as the default American racial identity. In multiracial films, Hollywood productions have historically employed racialized character tropes to further emphasize hegemonic American whiteness. This practice continues to the present day with the introduction of the linchpin, a White character who appears in films with majority non-White casts. Although billed and presented as a supporting character, the linchpin’s centrality to a film’s narrative or emotional arc elevates them to main character …

Dear Black Child: A Discussion On The Formation Of Identity For African Diasporic Adolescents In The U.S., Sokhnagade B. Ndiaye

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this capstone project, I am using art, photography, and music to depict the experiences of African diasporic youth in the United States. I will explore the white supremacist systems that contribute to the anxiety that comes with being a black child in America. In this project, I plan to discuss the ways in which African diasporic adolescents develop their identity and consciousness and the ways in which living in American society helps and/or hinders the development of this identity and consciousness. I argue that living in the United States forces black youth to form double and triple consciousnesses, which …

Ua94/6/1 My Story: Wku Basketball's Kenny Cooper, Kenny Cooper

Student/Alumni Personal Papers

My Story is a series of first-person feature articles written by WKU student-athletes. The student-athletes will be telling their own stories in their own words. This article written by basketball senior guard Kenny Cooper, who redshirted as a transfer in 2019-20 but will play his final college season this upcoming year.

Screening For Iron-Deficiency Anemia In The Pediatric Population (Ages 1-17) In Gonaïves, Haiti, Cara Rose Fratianni

Doctor of Nursing Practice Final Manuscripts

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this pilot project is to screen for iron-deficiency anemia in pediatric patients (ages 1-17) in a primary school in Gonaïves, Haiti. Patients with anemia will be treated with oral supplemental iron for a period of four weeks according to WHO guidelines (WHO, 2011). All students will be treated empirically for helminths per WHO guidelines, unless treated elsewhere in the last six months (WHO, 2017). Nutritional status will also be assessed using MUAC according to WHO guidelines (2017).

Background Summary: Malnutrition contributes significantly to the problem of iron-deficiency anemia, with one in four children exhibiting stunting …

Two Black Utopias Of The United States: Self Determination And Survival, Makaveli Gresham

University Honors Theses

In line with Charles Davis III's assertion in regards to the formation of black space and it’s spectral qualities representing the "material conditions of black survival", two black utopian projects: Soul City, North Carolina and the unrealized work of Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) in New York City are analyzed to explicate to what extent that the United States built environment is compatible with "black survival". These two case studies are used to inform an understanding of the anti-black nature of Modernism and the cultural relationship between the construction of "whiteness" and "blackness" in the United States. This relationship …

Black Expressions Of Dillard University: How One Historically Black College Pioneered African American Arts, Makenzee Brown

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The proposed public history project, Within These Walls (WTW), will be one component of a larger exhibit produced by Dillard University’s, Library Archives and Special Collections entitled The Star Burns Bright: History of Dillard’s Theatrical and Musical Arts, Faculty and Students. WTW will focus on Dillard’s historic African American faculty, students and alumni who became prominent painters, musicians, writers, actors and directors among them Adella Gautier, Randolph Edmonds, Ted Shine Frederick Hall, Theodore Gilliam, and Brenda Osbey. This exhibit will also highlight the many art programs, across genres, offered at the university between 1935 and 1970. This exhibit will demonstrate …

Ua94/6/1 My Story: Wku Football's Malik Staples, Malik Staples

Student/Alumni Personal Papers

My Story is a series of first-person feature articles written by WKU student-athletes. The student-athletes will be telling their own stories in their own words. This article written by football graduate senior Malik Staples, who – along with his teammates – has navigated through a different type of Spring Ball over the past two months.

Blacklisted But Not Defeated: Jack Foner Returned To Academe After 30 Years And Made Colby A Leader In African-American Studies, Gerry Boyle

Colby Magazine

Colby hired Jack Foner and in a single stroke, a then nearly all-white liberal arts college in Maine became home to one of the first African-American Studies programs in the country.

Brilliant: A Gifted Leader And Academic, Marnay Avant Is Ready To Inspire As A Professor Of Color, Mareisa Weil

Colby Magazine

"I think it is important to be a professor, especially a professor of color, because you get to inspire and shape the minds of so many people." -Marnay Avant '18