Afro-American Studies Dissertations Collection

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/152

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Approaches to Black Power: African American Grassroots Political Struggle in Cleveland, Ohio, 1960-1966
(2013-09) Swiderski, David M.
Black communities located in cities across the country became sites of explosive political unrest during the mid-1960s. These uprisings coincided with a period of intensified political activity among African Americans nationally, and played a decisive role in expanding national concern with black political struggle from a singular focus on the Civil Rights movement led by black southerners to consider the "race problem" clearly present in the cities of the North and West. Moreover, unrest within urban black communities emerged at a time when alternate political analyses of the relationship between black people and the American state that challenged the goal of integration and presented different visions of black freedom and identity were gaining considerable traction. The most receptive audience for these radical and nationalist critiques was found among black students and cadres of militant, young black people living in cities who insisted on the right to self determination for black people, and advocated liberation through revolution and the application of black power to secure control over their communities as the most appropriate goal of black political struggle. The following study examines grassroots political organizations formed by black people in Cleveland, Ohio during the early 1960s in order to analyze the development of the tactics, strategies, and ideologies that became hallmarks of Black Power by the end of the decade. These developments are understood within the context of ongoing political struggle, and particular attention is paid to the machinations of the multifaceted system of racial oppression that shaped the conditions against which black Clevelanders fought. This struggle, initially aimed at securing unrestricted employment, housing, and educational opportunities for black people, and curtailing episodes of police brutality against them, culminated in five days of unrest during July 1966. The actions of city officials, especially the Mayor and members of the Cleveland Police Department, during the Hough uprising clarified the nature of black oppression in Cleveland, thereby illuminating the need for and uses of both the formal political power of the ballot, as well as the power of the bullet to defend black people and communities through the force of arms.
The Artistry and Activism of Shirley Graham Du Bois: A Twentieth Century African American Torchbearer
(2009-05) McFadden, Alesia Elaine
This dissertation traces the early origins of Shirley Graham Du Bois, a well known Negro achiever in the 1930s and 1940s, from the decades preceding her birth in 1896 up through the mid-twentieth century when she has reached mid life and achieved a number of successes. It attempts to reclaim from obscurity the significant cultural production that Shirley Graham contributed to American society. Her artistry and activism were manifested in many ways. As a very young woman she conducted, throughout the northern and eastern parts of the U. S., musical concerts extolling the beauty and significance of spirituals. While attending school at Oberlin College, she wrote a musical opera that was regarded during its time as the world's first race opera. In 1936 she assumed the role of Director for the Chicago Black Unit of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). After the FTP phased out, she attended Yale School of Drama to learn the craft of playwriting, and proceeded to write several plays that were staged and viewed by interracial audiences. As the country prepared for WWII, she was selected to head USO activities in Fort Huachuca, Arizona where the largest aggregation of Negro soldiers were stationed before being sent off to battle. She subsequently became a field secretary for the NAACP during this period of tumultuous change in the nation and the world. The early 1940s would see Graham reach the pinnacle of success during this phase of her life by writing biographies for a national children's audience. This success was short lived due to the political climate of red-baiting that became fashionable during the political reign of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Graham's progressive politics, communist affiliation and marriage to W. E. B. Du Bois placed her on the wrong side of the establishment. Each chapter develops the varying forms her activism took shape in each given situation. Following the example of fore-parents who were politically and socially engaged during their lifetimes, Graham follows suit. Her efforts reveal a woman who educated, inspired and empowered others while demonstrating the different ways one could use her abilities to confront racism.
Liberation at the End of a Pen: Writing Pan-African Politics of Cultural Struggle
(2009-05) Ratcliff, Anthony James
As a political, social, and cultural ideology, Pan-Africanism has been a complex movement attempting to ameliorate the dehumanizing effects of "the global Eurocentric colonial/modern capitalist model of power," which Anibal Quijano (2000) refers to as "the coloniality of power." The destructive forces of the coloniality of power--beginning with the transatlantic slave trade--that led to the dispersal and displacement of millions of Africans subsequently facilitated the creation of Pan-African political and cultural consciousness. Thus, this dissertation examines diverse articulations of Pan-African politics of cultural struggle as a response to racist and sexist oppression and economic exploitation of Afro-descendants. I am specifically interested in the formation of international politico-cultural movements, such as the Black Arts movement, Négritude, and the Pan-African Cultural Revolution and their ideological alignments to political liberation struggles for the emancipation of people of African descent. With varying degrees of revolutionary commitment, intellectuals in each of these movements utilized literary and cultural production to raise the political consciousness of Africans and Afro-descendants to combat forces that oppressed their communities. To demonstrate this, my dissertation historicizes and analyzes the numerous Pan-African festivals, congresses, and conferences, which occurred between 1965 and 1977, while interrogating the specific manifestations of "translocal" contacts and linkages between movement intellectuals. I chose to focus on these years because they roughly correspond with the historical time period known as the Black Arts movement in North America (1965-1975), which had a vibrant, yet understudied Pan-African worldview. Moreover, while Pan-Africanism gained considerable traction after World War II, it was particularly between 1966 and 1977 that intellectuals aligned with Négritude and Pan- African Marxism competed for ideological hegemony of the movement on the African continent and in the African Diaspora.
Composing the African Atlantic: Sun Ra, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, and the Poetics of African Diasporic Composition
(2013-05) Carroll, James Gregory
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 narratives which is called Composing the African Atlantic. In the dissertation the concept Composing the African Atlantic is proposed as a means of describing an African diasporic version of musical composition which includes many of the so-called extramusical elements of text and performance - audience participation and dialogue being key - as constitutive elements of composition such that, in their absence, the music is not fully realized. Stated in the active present tense (Composing), identified as culturally rooted (African), and formed within a broad and discursively contested space (Atlantic), Composing the African Atlantic describes the means by which composers such as Sun Ra and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti conceive of performance as an essential part of composition, enabling the musicians and audience to craft the true Text of the music through the activation of communal memory and the dialogic contestation of history. The result, in the case of both artists, is the creation of a singular compositional and performative style which maintains its connection to its core audience through the use of ritualized concert performance, the challenging of historical myths, and the performance of historical narratives which refute the Hegelian contention that Africa is "no historical part of the world." In the process, both artists assert that there is a common African cultural memory which exists throughout the African diaspora as a result, fundamentally, of the Atlantic slave trade, but which is also a living, contemporary, cosmopolitan dialectic of representation and re-presentation.
Africanizing the Territory: The History, Memory and Contemporary Imagination of Black Frontier Settlements in the Oklahoma Territory
(2010-09) Adams, Catherine Lynn
This dissertation articulates the ways in which black (e)migration to the territorial frontier challenges the master frontier narratives as well as African American migration narratives, and to capture how black frontier settlers and settlements are represented in three contemporary novels. I explore through the lens of cultural geography the racialized landscapes of the real and symbolic American South and the real, symbolic and imaginary black territorial frontier. Borrowing perspectives from cultural and critical race studies, I aim to show the theoretical and practical significance of contemporary literary representations of an almost forgotten historical past. Chapter I traces the sites of history, memory and imagination in migration and frontier narratives of enslaved and newly freed black people in the Oklahoma Territory. Chapter II addresses an oppositional narrative of masculinity in frontier narratives depicted in Standing at the Scratch Line by Guy Johnson. Chapter III examines how the black frontier landscape can be created and recreated across three generations who endure racial threats, violence and the razing of Greenwood during the Tulsa Riot of 1921 in Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Chapter IV scrutinizes the construction of black frontier subjects and exclusive black communities in Paradise by Toni Morrison. My dissertation seeks to add to and expand the literary studies of migration and frontier narratives, taking into account two popular novels alongside a more academically recognized novel. The selected novels mobilize very different resources, but collectively offer insights into black frontier identities and settlements as sites of a past, present and future African American collective consciousness.
"It is a new kind of militancy": March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946
(2010-05) Lucander, David
This study of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) investigates the operations of the national office and examines its interactions with local branches, particularly in St. Louis. As the organization's president, A. Philip Randolph and members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) such as Benjamin McLaurin and T.D. McNeal are important figures in this story. African American women such as Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman ran MOWM's national office. Of particular importance to this study is Myers' tenure as executive secretary. Working out of Harlem, she corresponded with MOWM's twenty-six local chapters, spending considerable time espousing the rationale and ideology of Non-Violent Goodwill Direct Action, a trademark protest technique developed and implemented alongside Fellowship of Reconciliation members Bayard Rustin and James Farmer. As a nationally recognized African American protest organization fighting for a "Double V" against fascism and racism during the Second World War, MOWM accrued political capital by the agitation of its local affiliates. In some cases, like in Washington, D.C., volunteers lacked the ability to forge effective protests. In St. Louis, however, BSCP official T.D. McNeal led a MOWM branch that was among the nation's most active. David Grant, Thelma Maddox, Nita Blackwell, and Leyton Weston are some of the thousands joining McNeal over a three-year period to picket U.S. Cartridge and Carter Carburetor for violating the anti-discrimination clause in Executive Order 8802, lobby Southwestern Bell Telephone to expand employment opportunities for African Americans, stage a summer of sit-ins at lunch counters in the city's largest department stores, and lead a general push for a "Double V" against fascism and racism. This study of MOWM demonstrates that the structural dynamics of protest groups often include a discrepancy between policies laid out by the organization's national office and the activity of its local branches. While national officials from MOWM and National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People had an ambivalent relationship with each other, inter-organizational tension was locally muted as grassroots activists aligned themselves with whichever group appeared most effective. During the Second World War, this was often MOWM.
Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding and (Re)Imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007
(2017-05) Saffold, Jacinta
“Stories Written on Concrete: Understanding and Re-imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007,” coalesces around stories of urbanity and coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the Hip Hop generation reflected on the social, economic, and cultural shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, they took up paper and pen to immortalize the conflicting duality of the gritty and glamorous experience of growing up on a concrete cityscape in America. I interrogate how street lit disrupts normative literary representations of black life in print. Specifically, I consider how urban fiction writes against the African American literary canon in style, subject, and publication. In the process, my work has become a cultural site of hetero-normative resistance, as it calls for the widening of acceptable black narratives. Street lit novelists, some of whom were previously drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, gangsters, and incarcerated persons infuse their personal experiences with poverty, crime, and violence into their fantastical depictions of a shifting urban terrain. This project illuminates the other side of African American literature, provides another access point to Hip Hop cultural production, and helps to validate the kind of popular fiction that is often left out of academic discourses. The genre has existed and thrived on the margins of popular literature and the academy for thirty years. But now, street lit receives its due.
A Papered Freedom: Self-Purchase and Compensated Manumission in the Antebellum United States
(2017-05) Bernier, Julia
“A Papered Freedom” is a systematic study of how enslaved and self-emancipated African Americans engaged with compensated manumission to become legally free. To do this, I address fundamental issues related to compensated manumission within the United States from the founding era to the fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s. The project works to give voice to the concerns and problems that African Americans faced in their attempts to buy freedom by analyzing how they interacted with different kinds of networks, both social and economic, in the interest of liberation. By accruing different kinds of capital within these networks, African Americans who paid for freedom worked to reject the very economic and social thought that worked to keep them enslaved. The project also looks at how African Americans connected with the abolition movement worked to theorize compensated manumission and legal freedom within the broader movement.
THE AFROETHNIC IMPULSE AND RENEWAL: AFRICAN AMERICAN TRANSCULTURATIONS IN AFRO-LATINO BILDUNG NARRATIVES, 1961 to 2013
(2017-05) Masiki, Trent
Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of Jes√∫s Col√≥n, Evelio Grillo, Piri Thomas, Carlos Moore, Veronica Chambers, Junot D√≠az, and Raquel Cepeda. I pay particular attention to how African American intertexts shape these writers' conceptions of Afro-Latino ethnic, racial, and national identity formation in the U.S. These writers, I argue, use African American narrative strategies and cultural tropes to assert and authenticate their identities as U.S. citizens and residents. Furthermore, I contend that these pan-African exchanges produce a pattern of acculturation that I call ethnoracial apprenticeship. The ethnoracial apprenticeship lens reveals certain Afro-Latino coming-of-age narratives to be unique, though not uniquely, African American texts. By studying these cases and moments of Afroethnic fusion, we can learn as much or more about the plasticity and diversity of ‚Äúblack identity‚Äù in the U.S. than we can by studying the African American experience alone. The African American intertexts in Afro-Latino bildung narratives require scholars to expand the canons of African American and Latino literature and redefine conventional notions of ‚Äúblack identity‚Äù in the Civil Rights, Black Arts, and post-Segregation eras.
MOVING AGAINST CLOTHESPINS:THE POLI(POE)TICS OF EMBODIMENT IN THE POETRY OF MIRIAM ALVES AND AUDRE LORDE
(2017-05) Santos de Araújo, Flávia
This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses the concept of “poli(poe)tics of embodiment”: a multi-layered artistic endeavor interwoven with the body politics Afro-diasporic women artists articulate and negotiate vis-à-vis the cultural, historical, and political communities in which they exist. A significant contribution of this study to the field of Afro-diasporic literary studies is, therefore, to historicize black women’s writings, examining their politics/poetics as interlaced threads of their literary production, as well as the writers’ trajectories as artists, intellectuals, and activists. In addition, this research aims at unraveling the socio-historical implications of Lorde’s and Alves’ literary representations in re-configuring essentialist, nationalist, and heteronormative perceptions of the black female body. The close reading of their poetry – supported by a discussion of their theoretical work, archival research, and interviews – pays attention to three dimensions of these artists’ poetic (re)constructions of the black female body: first, the black female “self” in re-imagined configurations against histories of fragmentation and violation; second, alternative iconographies of the black female sexuality against discourses of sexual/racial manipulation; and finally, the black female body as historical agent moving against narratives of objectification. This analysis suggests that Lorde’s and Alves’ writings promote multiple and polyphonic representations of the black female body within a historical continuum of black women artistic production across the diasporic space in the Americas.
Texts and Subtexts in Performing Blackness: Vernacular Masking in Key and Peele as a Lens for Viewing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Musical Comedy
(2017) Kuchle, Spencer
When Kegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s sketch-comedy show Key & Peele took Comedy Central by storm in 2012, the perceived need by the comedians to “adjust their blackness” to gain social recognition became a recurring theme. Throughout their comedic performances, language becomes a proxy for identity, and Key and Peele’s parodic employment of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and linguistic variation serves to challenge notions of black authenticity, while emphasizing the absurdity of racial essentialism. An embodiment of Jonathan Rossing’s concept of emancipatory racial humor, Key and Peele’s comedy creates nonthreatening spaces that facilitate the contestation of cultural authority by interrogating how social categories are constructed via linguistic practices, revealing the interconnectedness among the ontology of the black body, epistemic authority, and linguistic authenticity. This dissertation examines the adoption of identity tropes by Key and Peele through their use of AAVE in relation to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dialect musical comedy and the poet’s struggle to represent black subjectivity and folk culture without lapsing into minstrelsy. Particular attention is paid to how Dunbar responded to the political dynamic of subordination and resistance that defined linguistic conflict at the end of the nineteenth century and the inability of his critics to recognize the subversive and resistive nature of much of his work. Exploring the dialect comedy of Dunbar alongside Key and Peele in the context of controversies surrounding linguistic minstrelsy in mediatized performances of AAVE from Amos ‘n’ Andy to The Boondocks, I conclude that far from lapsing into minstrelsy, Dunbar’s dialect musical comedy catalyzed resistive ideologies, resulting in the emergence of a new black modernism. Like Key and Peele, Dunbar engages in meta-parody by placing himself in the performance, deliberately showcasing the richness and complexity of AAVE as a medium for conveying social commentary in which the audience comes to appreciate the intellect of the person telling the joke. The knowing and strategic inauthenticity in their performances invites audience interpretation of a deeper message, positioning Dunbar, along with Key and Peele, as tricksters who employ sophisticated vernacular masking to contest racial stereotypes, even as they enact them.
"Survival Kits on Wax": The Politics, Poetics, and Productions of Gil Scott-Heron, 1970-1978
(2014) Geesling, Donald
For over four decades, from 1970 until his death in 2011, poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron served as an architect of artistic protest and a conduit of social consciousness. Often referred to as “The Godfather of Rap,” Scott-Heron was a formidable presence in postwar African American music and literature. This dissertation demonstrates Scott-Heron’s significance to the praxis of black cultural politics in the postwar era with a particular focus on his productions and social activism during the 1970s. It examines the ways in which his poems and songs gave voice to historical events and intellectual currents that, in part, defined the black experience during that momentous decade. What is more, it positions Scott-Heron in the matrix of twentieth-century African American history and literary production, mapping his variegated connections to the Jim Crow South, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement, HBCU student protests, the Nixon Administration, anti-apartheid activism, blues poetry and music, transnational political struggles, anti-nuclear activism, Pan-Africanism, and popular culture writ-large. Aimed at raising consciousness and effecting change, Scott-Heron specialized in producing songs and poems that slyly exposed the contradictions of American democracy in regard to the historical experiences of African Americans. Much like the works of the West African griots with whom he identified, his narratives serve multiple purposes. On one hand, Scott-Heron’s recordings were designed to inform his audience about contemporary issues or impending events that might impact their daily lives. However, at the same time, these works were intentionally designed to archive, and more importantly, frame the history and cultural politics of his time. Scott-Heron, much like the Black Arts Movement as a whole, fundamentally undermined commonly held distinctions between the popular and the political, the artist and the activist, and the performer and the people. Accordingly, this dissertation analyzes Scott-Heron’s compositions as “aural histories” that documented key events, issues, and debates that reverberated throughout black America in the postwar era.
"Daring propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising in the Poetry and Drama of the Black Power Era, 1965-1976
(2016-09) Davis, Markeysha D
This dissertation is a literary and intellectual history of the contributions of black American theorists, poets, and dramatists in the 1960s and 1970s towards the establishment of black critical consciousness in order to lay grounds for black people to experience a fuller existence as human beings through black-centered creations and presentations. Through the following chapters, I establish the framework and evolution of black psyche-liberation theories—spanning Du Bois’s theory of double-conscious through the contributions of black artist-theorists like Baraka, Neal, and Woodie King, Jr., followed by examinations at length of the theories of black liberation in praxis by the poets and dramatists of African descent writing in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Many artists I examine—including, yet not limited to, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Ed Bullins—were affiliated with the well-known Black Arts Movement, which focused on a revolutionary, black-centered commentary on American society through the arts with a goal of black liberation and veneration of an African past, the African-American present, the restoration of black masculinity, and the future of the people as a nation. However, other artists of this period, including black female poets Audre Lorde and Toni Cade Bambara and, later, playwright Ntozake Shange, presented further discussions of the intersections of identity and consciousness not only as black women but as members of the gay/lesbian and feminist struggles for equal rights in America, issues which add a layer of reflection to the calls of Black Arts arbiters for critical consciousness and demands a more complicated and multifaceted examination of what it means to be human and liberated as a black person in America.
Race Patriots: Black Poets, Transnational Identity, and Diasporic Versification in the United States Before the New Negro
(2015-09) Hendrickson, Jason T
This dissertation explores the contributions of black poets in the United States before the New Negro / Harlem Renaissance Movement. Specifically, it focuses on their role in creating and maintaining a tradition of regional transnationalism in their verses that celebrates their African ancestry. I contend that these poets are best understood as “race patriots”; that is, they at once sought inclusion within the nation-state in the form of full citizenship, yet recognized allegiances beyond the nation-state on account of race through a recognition of shared African ancestry across borders. Their verses point to a shared kinship – be it through common condition, culture, or politics – present within black literary thought, and thus within black communities, long before the New Negro. By extension, I advocate for a reimagining of the significance of nineteenth and eighteenth century poets within African American literature. The dissertation challenges the accusation that black poetry in the United States was wholly assimilative or parroting, instead positing the strategic mimicry of neoclassicism and romanticism as subversive and in direct conversation (and contention) with racist Enlightenment discourses. The dissertation considers a range of poets of varying repute: George Moses Horton, Phillis Wheatley, James Madison Bell, Joshua McCarter Simpson, George Boyer Vashon, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Monroe Whitfield, T. Thomas Fortune, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, George Clinton Rowe, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poets considered challenge traditional notions of patriotism and allegiance by championing rights for those of like ancestry within and across national boundaries. In turn, the study is indicative of how a patriotic nationalism can coexist with a Pan-African sensibility through a sustained critique of (global) white hegemony. The study explores how these poets evince their race patriotism through a variety of means, including Ethiopianism, salvation-liberation ideology, and usage of tribute poems to honor figures, events, and places within the diaspora (e.g. Haiti, Jamaican Emancipation, Joseph Cinqué, Vincent Ogé). Through their content, I argue that the poets engage in a project of historical reclamation and history building that demonstrates their awareness of their distinct identities within and beyond the nation-state.
Sweat the Technique: Visible-izing Praxis Through Mimicry in Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"
(2015-09) Zelaya, Karla V
“On Being Brought from Africa to America” was written in 1768, seven years after a seven or eight-year-old Phillis Wheatley arrived to British North America. Phillis Wheatley was about fifteen-years-old when she wrote the most reviled poem in Black literature. Charged with thinking white and writing white, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” would condemn Phillis Wheatley as an imitator of the white gaze. Although accused of straightening her tongue, Phillis Wheatley did not imitate the white gaze in “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” She mimicked it. To imitate means to do something the same way. To mimic means to resemble. Resemblance lives in the liminal space between sameness and difference. This study sought to investigate what that in-between space of resemblance afforded Wheatley in terms of movement and self-actualization as an enslaved Black poet. As an inaugural text in dissemblance, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” showcased how mimicry, not imitation, could be used to undo the very Anglo- European literary practices and discourses that sought to keep Black writers at bay. This dissertation seeks to investigate how Phillis Wheatley used mimicry in “On Being Brought from Africa to America” as a subversive vehicle to say without saying. Using resemblance to hide difference, Wheatley, through mimicry, turned a sign of conquest and domination (English as representative of European imperialism) into a sign of resistance.
"The Imagination and Construction of the Black Criminal in American Literature, 1741-1910"
(2015-09) Campbell, Emahunn
My dissertation examines the origins of the perception of black people as criminally predisposed by arguing that during eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, crime committed by black people was used as a major trope in legal, literary, and scientific discourses, deeming them inherently criminal. Furthermore, I contend that enslaved and free black people often used criminal acts, including murder, theft, and literacy, as avenues toward freedom. However, their resistance was used as a justification for slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. By examining a diverse set of materials such as confessional literature, plantation management literature, (social) scientific studies, and literary works, I demonstrate how historical and cultural representations of crime became racialized. I begin by analyzing the New York Slave Conspiracy of 1741 and reading the legal testimonies produced by the event as literature. These testimonies contributed to the production of late eighteenth-century confessional narratives, in which there was a disproportionate representation of those from African descent. From here, I examine different institutions of confinement and mechanisms of torture used on enslaved and free black people, arguing that what emerges from their brutalization and confinement is the circulation of ideas about black people as subjects having a propensity for transgressive behavior. After investigating literary works by William Wells Brown and Mark Twain, among others, I conclude with an analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois’s unpublished short stories. Written in the genres of crime and detective fiction during the first decade of the twentieth century, I argue that these little-known stories use, yet subvert ideas about criminality as inherent among black people and can be read against his sociological studies on urban crime in the same period. By focusing on literature and culture as ways of understanding perceptions and constructions of racial groups, my dissertation intervenes in legal studies scholarship and scholarship on the history of crime in America. More broadly, it builds upon the larger field of African American Studies by challenging the binary of agency and oppression through examining literary representations of contentious relationships between slaveholders and the enslaved. Through various literatures of the colonial, early national, antebellum, and post-Reconstruction periods, what is at stake in my project is how the criminalization of black people predates Reconstruction and convict leasing. In its attempts to reveal connections between criminality, race, and the judicial system in our contemporary moment, my work is especially timely in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and many others.
Creating the Ideal Mexican: 20th and 21st Century Racial and National Identity Discourses in Oaxaca
(2015-09) Carroll, Savannah N.
This investigation intends to uncover past and contemporary socioeconomic significance of being a racial other in Oaxaca, Mexico and its relevance in shaping Mexican national identity. The project has two purposes: first, to analyze activities and observations of cultural missionaries in Oaxaca during the 1920s and 1930s, and second to relate these findings to historical and present implications of blackness in an Afro-Mexican community. Cultural missionaries were appointed by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) to create schools throughout Mexico, focusing on the modernization of marginalized communities through formal and social education. This initiative was intended to resolve socioeconomic disparities and incorporate sectors of the population into the national framework that had been excluded prior to the Mexican Revolution in 1910. While these efforts were predominantly implemented in indigenous communities located in the northern part of Oaxaca, observations from cultural missionaries related to social and educational conditions reveal ongoing disparities between what it means to be indigenous versus mestizo. The exclusion of moreno, or Afro-descended people from this state sponsored initiative indicates that blackness along with indigenity is otherized, with the primary difference being that Afro-descended Mexicans lack visibility. To gain a better perspective of the historical and present significance of blackness, my project moves from the general to the specific to include José Maria Morelos, Oaxaca, an Afro-descended community that is isolated, has no tourist attractions or services, dirt roads, and little access to socioeconomic resources. Morelos was established by blacks who escaped slavery and lived independently in their own community. People in the town strongly identify with this history and its relation to their present condition. After speaking with local activists, it became apparent that rights that were supposed to be gained from the Mexican Revolution, such as land rights and public education, did not happen in Morelos, which adversely affects people’s prospects for socioeconomic advancement.
The Physical Uplift of the Race: The Emergence of the African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900-1930
(2015-05) Guillory, J. Anthony
My dissertation, “The Physical Uplift of the Race: The Emergence of the African American Physical Culture Movement, 1900—1930,” situates the early twentieth century of African American physical culture within a historical narrative that shaped philosophical viewpoints of African American urban community development. Previous inquiries of related topics attempt to describe a physical culture movement that was somehow separate and apart from the larger historical narrative of African people in the United States. My work does not continue in that vein. My objective is to illustrate how the black physical culture movement was primarily a reaction to African Americans’ new geo-political realities and communal aspirations as they began to establish communities outside of the rural South. In part one of my dissertation I interrogate the relationship between the African-American physical culture movement and black social scientists’ investigations social issues that plagued the increasingly urbanizing black population at the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that black social reformers adopted aspects of the physical culture movement to remedy issues related to poor health, inadequate childcare, inadequate education, and youthful mischief. I conclude this section by arguing that, despite their early achievements in spreading movement aims, on the eve of Depression era, black physical culture proponents began to compete with the spoils of their own success. This last point has great implications for modern African American student-athletes and the communities who support them. In part two I analyze the black playground movement as a manifestation of “race adjustment” as depicted within the pages of Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper. My first argument is that from 1909 to 1925, the Afro-American, which began as one of the most important black periodicals, became increasingly disillusioned with the idea of reaching an accommodation with the larger white population. This is evidenced by its evolving definition of the term race adjustment and the newspaper’s subsequent advocacy for race progress. My second argument is that the Afro, which had been known as an overtly political instrument for black self-determination, adopted as one of its principal campaigns the construction of playgrounds for reasons related to race advancement. I conclude by arguing that the struggle to erect playgrounds in black Baltimore unfolded in ways that differed greatly from the effort to establish playgrounds for white and European immigrant youth. My epilogue outlines some areas for future research.
The (Dis)Ability of Color; or, That Middle World: Toward A New Understanding of 19th and 20th Century Passing Narratives
(2015-05) Charles, Julia S.
This dissertation mines the intersection of racial performance and the history of the so-called “tragic mulatto” figure in American fiction. I propose that while many white writers depicted the “mulatto” character as inherently flawed because of some tainted “black blood,” many black writers’ depictions of mixed-race characters imagine solutions to the race problem. Many black writers critiqued some of America’s most egregious sins by demonstrating linkages between major shifts in American history and the mixed-race figure. Landmark legislation such as, Fugitive Slave Act 1850 and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) are often plotlines in African American passing literature, thus demonstrating the failure of America to acknowledge its wrongdoings against people of color. While this project surveys passing narratives collectively, it pays careful consideration to those novelists whose presentations of the mixed-race figure challenge previously conceived notions of the “tragic mulatto” figure. I investigate how the writers each illuminate elements of the history of slavery and its aftermath in order to remark on black disenfranchisement at the turn of the century. Ultimately, however, I argue for the importance of the mixed-race figure as a potent symbol for imagined resolution between the larger narrative of American freedom and enslavement of blacks in the United States. I examine several works of African American racial passing literature: William Wells Brown’s The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), the first published play by an African American writer. It explores the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860), tells the true story of the mixed-race Ellen Craft and her husband who escaped to freedom through various racial performances. Nella Larsen sets her novella Passing (1929) in Harlem in the 1920s. The story centers on two childhood friends reunited, but each dealing with their mixed-race ancestry in different ways. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928) and The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931) and Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and “A Matter of Principle” (1900). endeavors to depict a better class of blacks through her examination of the fair-skinned bourgeois-striver Angela Murray. Each of these stories address American legacies of racism and representation beginning with the Civil War. I investigate how these authors use the mixed-race figure (mostly) following the Civil War to mark the continuing impact that its legacy has had on black Americans through the New Negro Harlem Renaissance, but also to gesture to the mythic moment of freedom symbolized by successfully crossing the so-called color line. In addition to cataloguing an era of migration, the African American passing narrative represents the moment in which we shift from only seeing characters in terms of monoracial identities. These writers suggest that new performative modes of racial affiliation are necessary to achieve freedom. Reminding us that characters of mixed status practiced race in ways that enabled them to build shared identity despite an often disparate cultural heritage, these works suggest that identities like blackness are always constituted through performance. I argue that racial passing facilitated the “performance” of whiteness together with, an acknowledgment of what is accepted as blackness.
Imaging Her Selves: Black Women Artists, Resistance, Image and Representation, 1938-1956
(2015-05) Caldwell, Heather Zahra
This dissertation focuses specifically on dancer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), pianist Hazel Scott (1920-1981), cartoonist Jackie Ormes (1911-1985), singer Lena Horne (1917-2010), and graphic artist, painter, and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012). It explores the artistic, performative, and political resistance deployed by these five African-American women activists, artists, and performers in the period between 1937 and 1957. The principal form of resistance employed by these women was cultural resistance. Using a mixture of archival research, first person interview, biography, as well as other primary and secondary sources, I explore how these women constructed personas, representations, and media images of African-American women to challenge the racialized, reductive constructions found in mainstream white media and fine art outlets. They simultaneously engaged in “off the page” and “off the stage” political activism during eras that were pivotal within the African-American fight for freedom and equality. The primary purpose of the dissertation then is to unveil this multi-terrain struggle over Black female agency, equality, image, and representation waged by highly visible African-American artists and performers positioned in popular culture and fine art during this period. I argue that this battle is a fundamental component and sits within the larger long struggle for African-American freedom and equality.

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