Browsing by Subject "African American studies"
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Item Open Access Abolitionist Futures: Black Cultural Imagination at the End of the World(2021) Kārkliņa, AnastasiaMy dissertation, Abolitionist Futures: Black Cultural Imagination at the End of the World, examines abolitionist imagination in the cultural production of black American writers, creatives, activists, and thinkers. From its inception in the nineteenth century, abolitionism has evolved from a social movement to abolish the institution of chattel slavery to a political tradition. Presently, abolition is as a critical method of understanding the genealogy of contemporary practices of racialized social management as an extension of racial subjugation that originated during the era of plantation slavery in the United States. Because the concept of abolition fundamentally grapples with the question of radical social transformation, it also raises a set of questions about the dual tension between hope and despair, optimism and pessimism, fugitivity and enclosure. At its core, abolition is about sustaining the capacity to imagine an otherwise, despite and in spite of violence, captivity, and coercion. With this in mind, this dissertation asks: what is the role of radical imagination in not only envisioning the destruction of existing social structures but in conjuring up and bringing forth abolitionist futures?
In the growing body of academic literature on the subject, abolition is most often considered from the perspective of political theory. In media, contemporary abolitionists are often portrayed as radical militants, who desire violence and destruction. These accounts of abolition do not sufficiently consider the creative impulse that is inherent to abolitionist thought. Black creative imagination, I argue, is fundamental to abolitionism as in itself a form of social critique that draws on speculative imagination to deconstruct reality. In this project, I turn to creative imagination expressed in the twentieth- and twenty-first century black-authored literary and artistic texts that envision the abolition of the social world by imagining alternative futures and speculating about new ways of being in the world. By engaging a range of aesthetic forms across several genres and mediums, I trace abolitionist thinking in black speculative fiction, contemporary multi-media art, and digital activist culture precisely in order to suggest the importance of taking seriously the imaginative potential of abolitionism.
The examples of imaginative cultural criticism, as it pertains to abolitionist thought, can be located in the science fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois and in the horror fiction of Jewelle Gomez, in the contemporary mixed-media art of Titus Kaphar and Harmonia Rosales, as well as in digital art produced by digital users on social media platforms. These creative works uncover the ways in which abolitionist imaginary makes an appearance in black cultural and intellectual production that is not immediately considered to be ‘political,’ let alone abolitionist. Nevertheless, as I suggest, it is precisely these obscure creative works of abolitionist imagination that can help understand the many contingencies of abolitionist thought in the present day and, more precisely, help answer the question of what it means to locate and engage in the practice of radical hope in the face of insurmountable violence in slavery’s afterlife.
Item Open Access “All We Had Was God and Each Other”: How the Transformational Leadership of Black Clergywomen Disrupts Male Dominance and Patriarchal Normativity in the Black Church(2022) Jennings, Kaiya MDespite the significant contributions made by African American women since the Black Church's founding, titles like pastor, bishop, and reverend for centuries have been freely awarded to men while being restricted to women. The leadership of black clergywomen in these roles traditionally held by men helps to challenge the stereotypes of what it means to be a leader. Black clergywomen's contributions to religious institutions like the Black Church are frequently only remembered through the prism of deconstruction. In an effort to not only deconstruct but also reconstruct the church into a more equitable organization, this study explores how the ministries of black clergywomen from the early 19th to the late 20th century undermine male domination and patriarchal normativity within Christianity. Using memoirs, interviews, sermons, and lectures, assumes that black clergywomen's transformative leadership is disruptive epistemologically, politically, and anthropologically. This study will demonstrate how different leadership avenues were altered or established as a result of the experiences of these African American preaching women by evaluating their lives and ministerial work. This essay intends to demonstrate how black clergywomen's ministries challenge orthodox beliefs, rituals, and theologies, opening up new avenues of leadership for themselves and others.
Item Open Access 'Any Name That Has Power': The Black Panthers of Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States, 1948-1977(2013) Angelo, AnneMarieThe US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers' anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971. This dissertation examines these two movements with reference to the US Black Panthers in order to place local, national, and global histories in dialogue.
This study adopts a transnational framework that conceives of Black Power as a movement of global migrants. From 1948 to 1967, over two million people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean migrated to the UK and Israel. These migrants' overlapping experiences of displacement and class- and ethnic-based oppression led them to establish Black Panther groups in their new home countries in order to raise their political concerns under a collective banner. These people chose to become Black Panthers specifically because the US Black Panther Party offered a name and style that connected their global brothers and sisters to a range of grassroots strategies promoting interethnic solidarity and the collective advancement of black communities against the social structures that fostered racism. Through the examination of oral histories, photographs, letters, fliers, passport stamps, films, court cases, and surveillance files, this study focuses on how these global Panther activists represented themselves and their politics in the public sphere.
Both the British and Israeli Panther movements first organized in response to the city police's harassment of youth in their neighborhoods. Their respective critiques expanded from an opposition to police brutality to systemic goals of improving housing, education, welfare, and employment for blacks. Both of the nation-states in which these groups emerged relied upon the US for military stability and economic support during this period, such that the British and Israeli Panthers saw confrontations with their respective governments as acts of resistance to American Empire.
This dissertation, then, is at once a community study of two branches of a transnational social movement as well as a larger story. The broader narrative reveals how everyday people responded to the American Empire in the 1960s and 1970s, how the US Black Panthers translated black internationalist politics into urban neighborhoods, and how people outside the US constructed narratives about African-Americans as a way of making sense of racial formations at home. This work also demonstrates how foreign governments and media producers appropriated African-American history for a variety of in political purposes during this period. This examination enables a deeper understanding of the transnational black freedom struggle, as it centers the role that people of color outside the United States played in creating and sustaining Black Panther Movements that confronted American and British Empires from the grassroots.
Item Open Access At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz(2015) Mueller, DarrenAt the Vanguard of Vinyl investigates the jazz industry's adoption of the long-playing record (LP), 1948-1960. The technological advancements of the LP, along with the incipient use of magnetic tape recording, made it feasible to commercially issue recordings running beyond the three-minute restrictions of the 78-rpm record. LPs began to feature extended improvisations, musical mistakes, musicians' voices, and other moments of informal music making, revolutionizing the standard recording and production methods of the previous recording era. As the visual and sonic modes of representation shifted, so too did jazz's relationship to white mainstream culture, Western European musical aesthetics, US political structures, and streams of Afro-modernism. Jazz, as an African American social and musical practice, became a form of resistance against the violent structures of institutional racism within the United States in the 1950s.
Using the records of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cannonball Adderley, this study outlines the diverse approaches to record making that characterized the transitional years as the LP became the standard recording format. Through archival research, close listening, and detailed discographical analyses of the era's most influential record labels, I show how jazz practices and musical "mistakes" caught on record provided opportunities for recording experimentation. I examine choices made during the record production process, such as tape edits, microphone placement, overdubbing, and other sound processing effects, connecting such choices to the visual and tactile attributes of these discs. Drawing on scholarship that considers how sound reproduction technologies mediate constructions of race and ethnicity, I argue that the history of jazz in the 1950s is one of social engagement by means of and through technology. At the Vanguard of Vinyl is a cultural history of the jazz LP that underscores the ways in which record making is a vital process to music and its circulation.
Item Open Access Black Mosaic: Expanding Contours of Black Identity and Black Politics(2011) Watts, Candis S.The increasing ethnic diversity among Black people in the United States is growing at a near exponential rate due to the migration of Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, and African immigrants to the United States. This study is an endeavor to understand how this increasing diversity in ethnicity among Blacks in the U.S. will influence the boundaries of Black identity and Black politics. I ultimately aim to gain a sense of the processes by which Black immigrants come to embrace or reject a racial identity, the mechanisms by which African-Americans become more accepting of "cross-cutting" political issues, and the extent to which an intraracial coalition and a broader, more inclusive racial consciousness--a diasporic consciousness--might develop among Black immigrants and African Americans. This study utilizes survey data, in-depth interviews with African Americans and Black immigrants, and controlled experiments to examine the questions presented here. This study finds that African Americans and Black immigrants are accepting of a Black identity that is inclusive of ethnic diversity, largely due to shared racialized experiences. Moreover, this study concludes that while group consciousness influences the behaviors and attitudes of Black immigrants and African Americans in very similar ways, there are important differences between the groups that will need to be considered in future Black politics studies. Finally, this study finds that there are obstacles to raising a more inclusive racial consciousness because African Americans and Black immigrants do not see eye-to-eye on what issues should be be prioritized on a unified Black political agenda.
Item Open Access Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism(2013) Crawley, Ashon"Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism" considers are the aesthetic practices found in BlackPentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that began in Los Angeles, California in 1906 to argue that the aesthetic practices are the condition of possibility for a performative assessment and antiphonal criticism of normative theology and philosophy. Indeed, the history of these performances is an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the grain of liberal logics of subjectivity. By showing that theology and philosophy were abstractions of thought that produced the conceptual body as the target of racialization, the atheological-aphilosophical couplet indexes modes of intellectual practice that engulf and exceed such reductivism. BlackPentecostalism is a social, musical, intellectual form of new life, predicated upon the necessity of ongoing new beginnings. The religious practices I analyze produce a range of common sensual experiences: of "shouting" as dance; "testimony" and "tarry service" as song and praise noise; "whooping" (ecstatic, eclipsed breath) that occurs in praying and preaching; as well as, finally, "speaking in tongues." I ultimately argue that these aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.
During the antebellum era, both clergy and scholars alike levied incessant injunctions against loud singing and frenzied dancing in religion and popular culture. Calling for the relinquishment of these sensual spiritual experiences, I argue that these framing injunctions led to a condition where BlackPentecostal aesthetics, even in the much later institutional Black Studies, were and are thought as excessive performances. "Black Sacred Breath" investigates how discourses that emerged within the cauldron of spatiotemporal triangular trades in coffee, tea, sugar and human flesh of Transatlantic slavery necessitated a theology and philosophy of race, and consequently, the racializing of aesthetic practices. Over and against this discursive theology-philosophy were the performance practices of BlackPentecostalism, an atheology-aphilosophy. These sensual experiences were not merely performed through duress but were the instantiation and sign of love, of life. As love and life, these performative dances, songs, noises and tongues illustrate how enjoyment, desire and joy are important for the historicity - the theory of history found in these practices - that antiphonally speaks back against aversion, embarrassment and abandonment, against the debasement and denigration of blackness. Fundamentally, "Black Sacred Breath" is about the possibility for Black Study (as opposed to and differentiated from university institutional Black Studies), about the capacity for aesthetic practices typically deemed excessive can be constitutive, can provide new models for collective intellectual practice.
Item Open Access Bodily Trespass: An Ecology of the Fantastic in Twentieth-Century African American Literature(2011) Belilgne, MaledaBodily Trespass situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate the spatial constriction that informs black American subjectivity from the Middle Passage up through to the contemporary carceral state. The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial crisis that is corporeal and ontological. As a literary mode, in the Todorovian sense, the fantastic identifies the real as a production of the "unreal" and calls attention to ideological and institutional apparatuses that sustain the dominant order. Taking Pauline Hopkins' turn of the twentieth-century serial Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self as a point of departure, this project examines the fantastic as a discourse of Pan-Africanism during a period Farah Griffin describes as the "nadir" of post-emancipation black life. Hopkins reaches outside of U.S. borders suturing Ethiopia to America in order to fashion a new and "rival" black geography that challenges the eradication of black legal, civic, and social space.
In the postwar years, the production of imaginative space extends to the task of recording and refuting the racial discourse that articulates urbanity. Chester Himes' The Real Cool Killers, Ann Petry's The Street, and Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha depict racially encoded urban geographies as corporeally informed psychosocial "interfaces." These novels identify cartographic locution as a strategy for spatial occupation and psychic rehabilitation. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Ralph Ellison's "The King of the Bingo Game locate in the sonic a blueprint for refashioning the space of the modern metropolis according to a logic of interiority. Baldwin and Ellison identify the fantastic as a discourse of aurality that alters the texture of space by channeling what I call "scalar consciousness," a heightened awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial production. Meditations on belonging, displays of corporeal violence, discourses of Africanity, and the identification of the aural as a pathway for liberation illustrate, in all these works, the black fantastic's rootedness in spatial production, subject formation, and resistance to a dehumanizing social order.
Item Open Access Building a New Aesthetic for the Black Church Funeral: “Hello Black Church, I Am the Green Funeral”(2022) Collins, SequolaThe care of creation is the responsibility of all Christians. Consequently, the Black Church has a role to play and must attend to its responsibilities seriously. In this thesis, I take a comprehensive look into rituals of the Black Church related to death—funerals, memorials, and burial practices—and how the church can take ownership and be more responsible in the care of creation. For instance, the Black Church could benefit from a new aesthetic of beauty related to funeral processing. Currently, the Black Church funeral concept of aesthetics is tightly coupled with visuals and preservation of the corpse—shiny gold coffins and embalming. As a chaplain, director of bereavement, and minister of the Gospel, I focus on the Black Church’s relative silence and insufficient attention given to how our practices around death go against the foundational principle of covenant relationship and therefore distort our perceptions of Christian beauty. This thesis engages aesthetics and ecological commitments that lead to introducing practices of ministry that honor God and contribute to the care and sustainability of the earth.
Item Open Access Can a Hindu be Black?: A Study of Black Americans and Hinduism(2021) Metivier, KrishniNearly half a century ago, acclaimed jazz musician Alice Coltrane (1937-2007), marital partner of saxophonist John Coltrane, began disseminating Hindu (Vedanta) teachings and jazz-inflected bhajans (songs of praise) in her predominately Black, though multiracial, spiritual community in Southern California. Despite all her accomplishments–becoming the first African American guru, authoring two revelatory sacred texts, composing fifteen devotional albums (many on major record labels), and founding and directing a Vedantic center and quasi-monastic community for over thirty years–the highly acclaimed Alice Coltrane is overlooked by scholars of religion, especially of Asian religions. Similarly, Cleveland-born, Princeton graduate Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950-2005)–who initiated hundreds of disciples across North America, Africa and Eastern Europe into a Hindu religious tradition (Gaudiya Vaishnavism), authored nineteen books, and acted as a consultant to several world leaders–has also passed away hardly noticed. Since at least the 1960s, Black Americans have made lifelong religious commitments to Vedantic teachings and South Asian religious practices such as performing kirtans and bhajans. Despite this, their presence and contributions remain virtually invisible to scholars. My dissertation seeks to disclose Black Americans’ presence and influence in Hinduism since the 1960s as well as raise an urgent ethical and theoretical question for the study of religion: Can a Hindu be Black?
Through intellectual and aesthetic artifacts, literary publications, and twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Black Americans across several U.S. Hindu communities, my doctoral research illustrates Black Americans’ participation in Hinduism since the 1960s through the charismatic leaders Alice “Swamini Turiyasangitananda” Coltrane, John “Bhakti Tirtha Swami” Favors, Clarissa “Krsnanandini Devi Dasi” Jones, and a successive generation of Black practitioners. Thus, my study answers the above question affirmatively; yet, building on recent scholarship on the racialization of religion and genealogies of religion, my study also provokes an indispensable examination of race, ethnicity, and geography in academic constructions of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism,’ assessing how theory and discourse have, at times, foreclosed the possibility of a Black Hindu.
Item Unknown "Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century(2013) Terrazas Williams, Danielle L"Capitalizing Subjects: Free African-Descended Women of Means in Xalapa, Veracruz during the Long Seventeenth Century" explores the socioeconomic worlds of free women of means. I find that they owned slaves, engaged in cross-caste relations, managed their estates, maintained profitable social networks with other regional elites, and attempted to secure the economic futures of their children. Through an examination of notarial, ecclesiastical, and viceregal sources, I highlight the significant role this group played in the local economy and social landscape. My work demonstrates that free women of African descent engaged in specific types of economic endeavors that spoke to their investments in particular kinds of capital (economic, social, and cultural) that allowed them greater visibility and social legitimacy than previously documented. This dissertation, further, challenges a historiography that has over-emphasized the roles of race and gender in determining the lives of all people of African descent in colonial Latin America.
Item Unknown Collateral Damage: Race, Gender, and the Post-Combat Transition(2014) Ray, Victor ErikResearch on the military has historically focused on the potentially de-stratifying effects of service, including reductions of racial inequality and social mobility. Taking a life course approach, this prior research tends to claim that the military is a positive turning point in the lives of disadvantaged men. Scholars point to the educational benefits of the GI Bill, racial integration, and health care to claim that military service, especially during peacetime, is largely beneficial to service members. While it is certainly the case that the military has provided some historical benefits to marginalized groups, recent research has given us strong reasons to question how beneficial military service is to stigmatized groups. Significant racial and gender inequalities remain, and in some cases, are deepening. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with veterans this dissertation examines how the organizational habitus of the military, despite organizational proclamations of meritocracy, may contribute to inequality. Focusing on the unintended consequences of military polices surrounding mental health problems, discrimination, and family relations, I create a synthesis of organizational and critical race theories to show how military policies may compound problems for soldiers and veterans. Focusing on the contradictions between stated organizational policies and actual practice, I show how the organizational arrangements of the military normalize overt expressions of racial and gender based discrimination, creating a sometimes-hostile environment for women and minorities and leaving them little recourse for recrimination. When policies protecting the stigmatized undermine the power and prerogatives of commanders or conflict with the militaries mission, it is not the powerful that suffer. Further, I show how military policies promoting family, such as extra pay for married soldiers, are at odds with the multiple deployments and high mental health incidences of this generations wars. Although the military relies on women on the "home front," as a basis of support, the exigencies of service undermine relationship stability.
I argue that traditional findings on the de-stratifying effects of service are partially a product of an analytical frame that neglects internal organizational dynamics.
Item Unknown Configuring Modernities: New Negro Womanhood in the Nation's Capital, 1890-1940(2010) Lindsey, Treva BlaineDuring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cadre of black women merged the ideals of the "New Woman" and the "New Negro" to configure New Negro Womanhood. For these women, the combining of these two figurations encapsulated the complexity and strivings of black women attempting to achieve racial and gender equality and authorial control of their bodies and aspirations. New Negro women challenged racial and gender inequality and exclusion from participating in contemporaneous political and cultural currents. New Negro women are meaningful in understanding how ideas about black women's political, economic, social and cultural agency challenged New Negro's ideological focus on black men and New Woman's ideological focus on white women. At the core of the New Negro woman ethos was a transformation in how black women thought about the possibility of moving into the public sphere. Black women etched out the parameters of individual and collective aspirations and desires within a modern world in which they were treated as second-class citizens.
My dissertation explores New Negro womanhood in Washington, D.C. The nation's capital functioned as a preeminent site for the realization of African American possibility. The District of Columbia also offered unique opportunities for African American political, civic, social and cultural involvement. More specifically, the city was a fruitful site for the development of African American women's leadership, entrepreneurship and creativity. I use black beauty culture, performance activism, women's suffrage activism, higher education, and black leisure spaces in Washington to examine how black women grappled with and configured ideas about black modernity. Each of these areas provided a distinct context in which African American women in Washington transgressed boundaries of both racial and gender hierarchies and aspired to greater visibility, mobility, and legibility within the modern world. African American women in Washington embraced New Negro Womanhood as a conduit to black modernity.
Item Unknown 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 Unknown Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial(2013) Bradley, Rizvana"Corporeal Resurfacings: Faustin Linyekula, Nick Cave and Thornton Dial," examines art and performance works by three contemporary black artists. My dissertation is opened by the analytic of black female flesh provided by Hortense Spillers in her monumental essay, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Drawing on Spillers, I argue that it is not the black female body but the material persistence and force of that body, expressed through the flesh, that needs to be theorized and resituated directly with respect to current discourses that take up black ontology, black subjectivity and black aesthetics. I expand Spillers' conclusions to an analysis of how the materiality of this flesh continues to structure, organize and inflect contemporary aesthetic interventions and performances of blackness in the present. The five chapters that comprise the dissertation map a specific set of problems that emerge from a tangled web of gender, race and performance. I argue that black female flesh, forged through desire and violence, objection and subjectivity, becomes the ground for and the space through which black masculinity is fashioned and articulated as open, variable, and contested within artistic practices.
Examining the work of these artists, I identify a set of practices that channel this neglected black flesh as a site of aesthetic reclamation and recovery. Focusing on the art of collage and assemblage and its techniques of cutting, pasting, quoting and tearing I demonstrate how black identity is always assembled identity. Moreover, I demonstrate how artistic assemblage makes visible the dense and immeasurable compressions of race, gender and sexuality that have accumulated over time. I argue that these practices offer us unique opportunities to inhabit this flesh. The dissertation expands upon connections between visibility, solidarity, materiality and femininity, bringing them to light for a critical discussion of the unique expressions and co-productions of blackness and sexuality in the fields of visual art and performance. I draw upon thinkers who help me think about the material status of black female flesh and its reproductive value. The project aligns itself with current black scholarly work that treats not simply black subjectivity but blackness itself as central to an understanding of a history of devaluation that subtends the historical construction of modern subjectivity. I theorize how the degraded materiality of blackness, linked to the violent rupturing of black flesh, indexes a deeper history of devaluation that becomes the very condition for and means of qualifying and substantiating our definitions of subjectivity and personhood. I conclude by tracing an aesthetic community or aesthetic sociality grounded in the recovered, lost materiality of Spillers' ungendered black female flesh, a community that I argue, may be glimpsed through particular instantiations of the flesh in art and performance.
Item Unknown Cyclical Navigations: In the In Between (exploring Black memory through embodied storytelling)(2022) Edwards, LeeCyclical Navigations: In the In Between is a creative process-based interdisciplinaryinstallation and paper that conceptualizes storytelling as a practice of embodied memory recollection. This work focuses on viewing storytelling and land acknowledgement as necessary tools in the navigation of cyclical temporalities in the present, or what I have termed the In Between. Through the employment of ethnography, dance-based somatic practice Lettering, and oral interviews, I posit that first-person narratives work to combat the violence(s) of erasure and racial ventriloquism that occur when archiving Black life. By using a methodology of care, this project considers what is possible if Black history and thus, Black quotidian stories are treated and shared with care.
Item Unknown Diasporic Reasoning: The Idea of Africa and the Production of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America(2012) Bigsby, Shea WilliamThis dissertation explores the significance of Africa (both as a literal geographic space and as an imagined or symbolic space) in 19th century American intellectual and literary culture. I argue that when nineteenth-century intellectuals grappled with the institution of slavery, the significance of slave revolt, and the extent of black intellectual capacities, they dealt not only with a set of domestic social and political concerns, but also with a wider epistemological crisis surrounding the very idea of Africa and Africanness. The paradoxical legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, which produced unthinkable dislocation and suffering even as it created new diasporic networks of black affiliation built around a common African origin, forced a reexamination of conventional thinking about history, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, education, and civilization.
Diasporic Reasoning traces the impact of the idea of Africa on specific American intellectual outlets, including popular historiography, the novel, and the university. I contend that in each of these cases, the engagement with the idea of Africa enriches the possibilities of thought and leads to a fruitful reframing or refinement of established ideas, genres, and institutions. I begin with an exploration of the different historiographic uses of "representative men" in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men and William Wells Brown's The Black Man (Chapter One). I argue that Brown's contribution to the genre of collective biography complicates the apparent "universalism" of Emerson's earlier text, and forces us to rethink the categories of the universal and the particular. In Chapter Two, I continue to examine the impact of the African diaspora upon historical consciousness by arguing that the encounter with the specter of slave insurrection produces cognitive (and in turn, formal) ruptures in two historical novels, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno and George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes. Chapter Three focuses not on a literary genre, but on the circulation of knowledge through the institution of the modern university. Building from a comparative reading of the educational philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward Wilmot Blyden, I argue that Blyden's provocative conception of an "African university" draws out and extends upon the implications of Emerson's thinking on education. Finally, in the Epilogue, I look at the syncretic uses of "Ethiopianism" in Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood, J. A. Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound, and W. E. B. Du Bois' Darkwater in order to explore the new paths that Pan-African and diasporic thought would take in the twentieth century. I argue that these works reflect the degree to which an evolving anthropological understanding of the idea of "culture" and the specific political contexts of anti-colonial struggles across the African continent would complicate the kinds of intertextual possibility available in the nineteenth century. This dissertation thus traces the often-surprising intellectual interrelations of America and the African diaspora, and in so doing, opens up a more nuanced approach to the study of nineteenth-century literary and intellectual culture.
Item Open Access Disruption and DisFunktion: Locating a Funk Sensorium in Twentieth Century African American Literature(2011) Wasserman, CaseyThis dissertation examines the way in which funk music, in the context of twentieth century African American literature, operates as a means of stimulating the sensorium. Funk, narrowly defined as a musical form, once carried negative connotations. Whether understood as depression, a genre of popular music, an odor, or as a euphemism for sex, the genre is concerned with attitude and visible emotions. Much work has been done in the field of African American literature regarding jazz and blues, and studies of hip-hop are gaining traction. Funk, however, has not fulfilled its potential for investigating its affect of musical performance or its connection to narratives. This project is an examination of the aesthetics of this musical form, which will generate more nuanced readings of musical and literary narratives of the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of sound and its sensorial variants. I examine the function of music in a literary text as opposed to how it is described.
Funk operates as a link between the jazz- and blues-inspired poetry and novels of the early twentieth century on the one hand and the emergence of "urban," "street," or "hip-hop" narratives on the other. Its artistic intervention in social relationships brings the aesthetic and political into conversation. I argue against the binary differentiating "serious" and "popular" musical forms; funk bridges the gap between these two designations in an important context, which creates a sonic and social space to examine the idea of difference both in terms of the general and the specific. A misconception of "sameness" is the site of theoretical and ontological difference or disruption.
Funk's ability to disrupt resides in its paradoxical nature. Rhythmically, the musical genre departs from soul of the 1960s and is fundamental to the development of hip-hop in the late-1970s and early 1980s. Though rooted in distinct rhythmic patterns, Funk seeks to dismantle conceptions of rhythmic expectation and production common in popular music by pushing back against previously popular forms. Prior to Funk's popularity, most musical forms ranging from jazz to rock and roll emphasized the second and fourth beats in a measure. Funk compositions typically emphasize the first and third beats, which changes the momentum of the music. Though it is a genre geared towards dance and therefore rooted in the body and movement, Funk gravitates towards transcending the physical limits of the body by addressing discourses of sensorial perception. Funk (both as a musical genre and an aesthetic) is something of sensory ensemble--each sense a part of the whole, complex experience. The five senses are brought together in an all-out attack on what hegemony comes to represent. Each chapter presents a different mode of assault on the body's ability to process the sensorium. I demonstrate the way Funk disrupts through a fusion of ethnomusicology, socio-cultural analysis, and literary criticism in the act of reading, hearing, watching, smelling, and tasting musical performances, cultural events, and works of literature.
Item Open Access Due to her tender age: Black girls and childhood on trial in South Carolina, 1885-1920(2014) Greenlee, CynthiaDrawing on local criminal court records in western and central South Carolina, this dissertation follows the legal experiences of black girls in South Carolina courts between 1885 and 1920, a time span that includes the aftermath of Reconstruction and the foundational years of Jim Crow. While scholars continue to debate the degree to which black children were included in evolving conversations about childhood and child protection, this dissertation argues that black girls were critical to turn-of-the century debates about all children's roles in society. Far from invisible in the courts and jails of their time, black girls found themselves in the crosshairs of varying forms of power --including intraracial community surveillance, burgeoning local government, Progressive reform initiatives and military policy -- particularly when it came to matters of sexuality and reproduction. Their presence in South Carolina courts established boundaries between early childhood, adolescence and womanhood and pushed legal stakeholders to consider the legal implication of age, race, and gender in criminal proceedings. Age had a complicated effect on black girls' legal encounters; very young black girls were often able to claim youth and escape harsher punishments, while courts often used judicial discretion to levy heavier sentences to adolescents and violent girl offenders. While courts helped to separate early childhood from the middle years, they also provided a space for African-American children and family to engage a legal system that was moving rapidly toward disenfranchising blacks.
Item Embargo Electability Politics: How and Why Black Americans Vote in Primary Elections(2022) Smith, Jasmine CarreraHow do Black Americans make vote choice decisions in primary elections? This dissertation project answers this question by arguing that Black Americans are highly strategic voters and vote for the candidate that is perceived to be the most electable. I advance the argument that Black voters support candidates in Democratic primary elections that are most likely to beat the Republican candidate in the general election, and that the way in which Black Americans engage in electability politics is unique. Through a series of observational and experimental tests, I show that Black voters rely on considerations about electability to guide vote choice in primary elections. In chapter two I lay out the theoretical framework guiding this project, electability politics, relying on rational choice theory to make the claim that Black voters are strategic. I detail how Black American decision making in primary elections is unique, why Black voters strategically rely on electability to guide their vote choice, when Black voters use this decision-making strategy, and the trade-offs that Black voters make when using this strategy. In chapter three I detail how Black voters determine which candidate is the most electable and find that Black voters turn to ideology, endorsements, and polling to determine who is the most electable. In chapter four, using existing observational data, I show that Black Americans have used this electability politics strategy in Democratic primary contests from the 1980s to the present day. Chapters five and six use experimental methods to show the trade-offs that Black voters make between electability and different types of representation that the literature contends are Black voters’ primary preferences at the voting booth. In chapter five, I argue that Black voters put preferences for electability over descriptive representation. In chapter six, I examine the trade-off that Black Americans make between voting for a candidate that can win the general election and using policy preferences to guide vote choice, arguing that Black Americans prefer electable candidates. Finally, in chapter seven, I discuss the implications of my project, think about how this framework can apply to different groups, and offer future directions for this line of inquiry. While previous literature has only thought about the ways in which Black Americans engage in interparty elections, placing a strong focus on race’s role, and at times, policy’s role in Black politics, this dissertation offers new insights into how and why Black Americans decide between candidates in intraparty elections.
Item Open Access Exit the Matrix, Enter the System: Capitalizing on Black Culture to Create and Sustain Community Institutions in Post-Katrina New Orleans(2013) Nzinga, FariAfter the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Fall of 2005, millions of dollars of Northern philanthropic aid have poured into the Gulf Coast, as have volunteers, rebuilding professionals, and NGO workers. Subsequently, New Orleans has witnessed an explosion of NGOs and Social Enterprises, all intent on rebuilding the city and "doing good" for its residents. However, it was not simply the opening of the economic floodgates that has drawn so many outsiders to the city, it was also the threat to New Orleans' mythic exceptionalism as the so-called "Creole Capital," which has spurred so many willing foot soldiers to action. Drawing on ethnographic material gleaned from participant observation, interviews, and some archival research, this dissertation attempts to demystify the social and cultural forces shaping New Orleans' ongoing process of rebuilding and recovery. Special attention is paid to the role of the arts and of aesthetics as political tools, and forms of capital available to Black actors. Illuminating the political and economic contexts within which the work of community building takes place reveals both the possibilities and the limitations which face Black New Orleanians, embedded in this dynamic landscape. Attending to external forces as well as internal relationships, it becomes clear that Black artist-activists see institution-building as a way to 1) build upon some of the only forms of capital available to Black New Orleanians - that is, social and cultural capital; 2) organize Black communities and begin to exercise some forms of Black Power; and 3) to sustain local social movements.