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The Uncanny Genius of the African Child: The Ongoing Critique Against the Human in Black Literature and Culture

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Abstract
This dissertation engages key conversations in critical Black studies that foreground questions about antiblackness, the category of the human, and the afterlives of slavery. I argue that the Black child is one of the most important symbolic constructs of modernity. As such, the Black child makes the Enlightenment concepts of Man and the Human coherent and stable. My dissertation traces how Black cultural producers, from the invention of childhood in the nineteenth century to the present, have utilized the figure of the Black child to critique the category of the Human. I show how novels by Harriet Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica Kincaid, along with visual art by Jean- Michel Basquiat, have not sought inclusion in definitions of what it means to be human but have rather encouraged the mischievousness of the figure of the Black child with careless disregard for age, adulthood, and ultimately, the Human as an achievement. They do so to suggest other modes of being in an antiblack world. Through the lenses of Afropessimism, black feminism, and literary studies, I chronicle how the projects of family, manhood, womanhood, childhood, the human and the state rely on an ongoing reforming of antiblackness and new world slavery.
Type
Dissertation (Open Access)
Date
2024-09
Publisher
License
Attribution 4.0 International
Attribution 4.0 International
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Embargo Lift Date
2029-09-01
Publisher Version
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