Browsing by Author "Wallace, Maurice O"
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Item Open Access Coons, Queers, and "Human Curiosities": White Fantasies of Black Masculinity, 1840-1915(2010) Schneider, SuzanneForwarding a narrative that, in many ways, runs contrary to `official'/sanctioned accounts which designate the body of the black woman as the principal star of nineteenth-century racial science's empirical investigations and sexual exploitations, I propose instead a vision of our nation's 1800s that marks this era as the moment in American history in which Hottentot Venus turned Hot-to-trot-Penis. Remaining indebted to the works of Sander Gilman and his contemporaries, and paying special attention to the ways in which both the erotic vicissitudes and imperialist vagaries of the European empire effected a fairly fluid cross-Atlantic exchange during this time period, I locate the late 1840s and early 1850s as the seminal moment in which, through a collaboration of scientific, social, and popular texts the black male body specifically first becomes installed in this country, on the mainstages of both our early spectacular culture and the American psychic theater, as a `pornographic body': an indigenous site of sexual taboo upon and through which the dark fantasies of the Whites who had imported these bodies might be projected. Recognizing, in this mid-nineteenth century moment, what should be seen as a distinctive, while as yet unremarked, shift in both the discourse and displays offered by America's peculiar brand of ethnography as well as within our national arena--one which turns to and turns on the conception of the black male as sexual subject--my dissertation hopes to offer a better understanding of the compelling forces, both social and salacious, that might be said to account for this distinctly American, and distinctively perverse, representational refocusing.
Item Open Access Lost Bodies/Found Objects: Storyville and the Archival Imagination(2017) Sparks, Nikolas OscarIn “Lost Bodies/Found Objects: Storyville and the Archival Imagination,” I engage the numerous collections and scattered ephemera that chronicle the famed New Orleans vice district of Storyville to show the ways in which black life is overwhelmingly criminalized, homogenized, and silenced in narratives of the district. Storyville, the city’s smallest and last vice district, existed from 1897-1917 under the protection of city ordinances. The laws attempted to confine specific vices and individuals within the geographic limits of the district to protect the sanctity of the white family and maintain private property values in the city. As a result, the district strictly managed the lives of women working in the sex trade through policing and residential segregation. While all women were subject to these restrictions, black women were often barred from the relative comforts of the district’s brothels and forced to live and work out of shared shacks called “cribs.” Similarly, though to a much lesser degree, black men who worked in and frequented the district faced their own forms of segregation and racial violence. Turning to a largely obscured set of archival objects discovered through primary research—housing records, biometric technologies such as Bertillon cards, travel literature, and Blue Book guides—I read how discourses of waywardness, domesticity, race, and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century converge to illuminate the vexed social life of Storyville. I argue that when read alongside popular histories, literary interpretations of the district, and discourses on black social life at the turn of the twentieth century, the records of the district challenge the archival narratives imposed upon them and expand historical approaches to the archives of Storyville.
Item Open Access Spectacles of American Liberalism: Narratives of Racial Im/posture(2009) Gaines, Alisha MarieThis project traces the seemingly improbable intersections between performances of blackness and the development and traces of an American liberalism defined by Gunnar Myrdal's overwhelmingly influential, sociological text, An American Dilemma. I argue that when Myrdal determined in his 1944 study on the "Negro problem" that the messy inconsistencies between how the United States articulated its laudable egalitarianism and the violent histories of oppression defining the lives of African Americans was a matter resting in the "hearts and minds of white America" rather than entrenched structural inequalities, he enabled a radicalized version of sentimentality that would structure how liberalism attempted to rectify this racial paradox right into the 21st century - to walk in someone else's skin rather than their shoes. While American liberalism is a notoriously contested and slippery set of ideologies, the texts I study provide a performative logic of American liberalism that deconstructs and historicizes its own ideological impulses around notions of racial difference.
The project situates the discursive legacies of Myrdal's study alongside a series of spectacularized narratives of what I call "racial im/posture" - adventures in racial impersonation authorized by American liberalism and reliant on the logics of both blackface minstrelsy and racial passing. I consider these narratives of racial im/posture in the literary genres of memoir, autobiography, fiction, and speculative fiction, along with the legal brief, the film, and the photograph. Although I read these seemingly disparate texts from my own epistemological disciplining of literary studies, the methodology employed here is an interdisciplinary one indebted to performance and visual studies, race and queer theory, as well as new Southern studies. The project intervenes in the conventional thinking around racial masquerade by reframing the temporality of what has largely been considered an issue of the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as by considering these texts through the anxieties, ironies, and contentions of the discursive legacies of American liberalism. In five chapters that satellite around the ideological apparatuses of our sociopolitical and cultural landscape including social and literary fictions, the law, and transnational capital, I think through issues of authenticity, belonging, community, appropriation, and performance.
Item Open Access Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius(2018) Durham, I. AugustusThis dissertation draws on Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) to track melancholy and genius in black letters, culture, and history from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment; it contends that melancholy is a catalyst for genius, and that genius is a signifier of the maternal.
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Sigmund Freud prefigures an array of discourses in black studies. One mode of interrogation occurs with relation to his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”. Some African American literature, such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy, invokes this work indirectly, just as theoretical texts, like Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, have direct engagement. Nevertheless, Freud’s attendance to mourning and melancholia is pertinent. He surmises that when the love object dies, mourning does the reparative work of suturing the ego back together after its splitting and impoverishment; melancholia, by contrast, is the “pathological disposition” which occasions such disrepair and instantiates itself through the psychic loss of the love object. In turn, melancholy carries the possibility of devolving into mania such that the one experiencing the psychic loss desires to inflict harm on, while simultaneously becoming, the love object; theorists generally assign this category to the mother. Furthermore, I assert that Freud’s diagnosis of mania reifies long-held and reductive designations when applied to blackness and maternity. My intervention stages a correlation and counterpoint to the above theorizations.
Through dissertation chapters in which an overarching thematic juxtaposes itself with each subject of inquiry, I contend that instead of melancholy catalyzing mania—a rendering of the “pathological” for the people in which the dissertation has its investments—, the affect fosters performances of excellence, given the shorthand “genius”. As a form of expression and interpretation in black thought writ large, genius emerges as a response to and in excess of one’s melancholy. This productivity concretizes that genius, not mania, is an affective vestige that is at once reducible and irreducible to the mother; and allows me to journey on a search for her, in myriad iterations, to discover a subject found as opposed to an object lost
Item Open Access "We Can Learn To Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism(2010) Gumbs, Alexis Pauline"We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 addresses the questions of mothering and survival from a queer, diasporic literary perspective, arguing that the literary practices of Black feminists Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith enable a counternarrative to a neoliberal logic that criminalizes Black mothering and the survival of Black people outside and after their utility to capital. Treating Audre Lorde and June Jordan as primary theorists of mothering and survival, and Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith as key literary historical figures in the queer manifestation of Black feminist modes of literary production, this dissertation uses previously unavailable archival material, and queer of color critique and critical Black diasporic theoretical approaches to create an intergenerative reading practice. An intergenerative reading practice interrupts the social reproduction of meaning and value across time, and places untimely literary moments and products in poetic relationship to each other in order to reveal the possibility of another meaning of life. Ultimately this dissertation functions as a sample narrative towards the alternate meaning of life that the poetic breaks of Black feminist literary production in the queer spaces of counter-cultural markets, classrooms, autonomous publishing collectives make possible, concluding that mothering is indeed a reflexive and queer way of reading the present in the service of a substantively different future in which our outlawed love survives.