Browsing by Subject "Blackness"
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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 Minor Moves: Growth, Fugitivity, and Children's Physical Movement(2014) Curseen, Allison SamanthaFrom tendencies to reduce the Underground Railroad to the imperative "follow the north star" to the iconic images of Ruby Bridges' 1960 "step forward" on the stairs of William Frantz Elementary School, America prefers to picture freedom as an upwardly mobile development. This preoccupation with the subtractive and linear force of development makes it hard to hear the palpable steps of so many truant children marching in the Movement and renders illegible the nonlinear movements of minors in the Underground. Yet a black fugitive hugging a tree, a white boy walking alone in a field, or even pieces of a discarded raft floating downstream like remnants of child's play are constitutive gestures of the Underground's networks of care and escape. Responding to 19th-century Americanists and cultural studies scholars' important illumination of the child as central to national narratives of development and freedom, "Minor Moves" reads major literary narratives not for the child and development but for the fugitive trace of minor and growth.
In four chapters, I trace the physical gestures of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Pearl, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy, Harriet Wilson's Frado, and Mark Twain's Huck against the historical backdrop of the Fugitive Slave Act and the passing of the first compulsory education bills that made truancy illegal. I ask how, within a discourse of independence that fails to imagine any serious movements in the minor, we might understand the depictions of moving children as interrupting a U.S. preoccupation with normative development and recognize in them the emergence of an alternative imaginary. To attend to the movement of the minor is to attend to what the discursive order of a development-centered imaginary deems inconsequential and what its grammar can render only as mistakes. Engaging the insights of performance studies, I regard what these narratives depict as childish missteps (Topsy's spins, Frado's climbing the roof) as dances that trouble the narrative's discursive order. At the same time, drawing upon the observations of black studies and literary theory, I take note of the pressure these "minor moves" put on the literal grammar of the text (Stowe's run-on sentences and Hawthorne's shaky subject-verb agreements). I regard these ungrammatical moves as poetic ruptures from which emerges an alternative and prior force of the imaginary at work in these narratives--a force I call "growth."
Reading these "minor moves" holds open the possibility of thinking about a generative association between blackness and childishness, one that neither supports racist ideas of biological inferiority nor mandates in the name of political uplift the subsequent repudiation of childishness. I argue that recognizing the fugitive force of growth indicated in the interplay between the conceptual and grammatical disjunctures of these minor moves opens a deeper understanding of agency and dependency that exceeds notions of arrested development and social death. For once we interrupt the desire to picture development (which is to say the desire to picture), dependency is no longer a state (of social death or arrested development) of what does not belong, but rather it is what Édouard Glissant might have called a "departure" (from "be[ing] a single being"). Topsy's hard-to-see pick-pocketing and Pearl's running amok with brown men in the market are not moves out of dependency but indeed social turns (a dance) by way of dependency. Dependent, moving and ungrammatical, the growth evidenced in these childish ruptures enables different stories about slavery, freedom, and childishness--ones that do not necessitate a repudiation of childishness in the name of freedom, but recognize in such minor moves a fugitive way out.
Item Open Access Shukhi-ye Zesht o Tekrāri: Performing Blackness in Iranian Entertainment(2018-04-18) Mostafavi, ParmidaThere persists a lack of consistent critical engagement with issues of race, particularly Blackness, in Iranian spaces, despite the continuous presence of “race” in the Iranian experience. As such engagements with Blackness range from a denial of its existence in Iran to famous rapper Hichkas calling the beloved blackface figure, Hājji Firuz, as shukhi-ye zesht o tekrāri—an ugly and tired joke. This thesis explores what race means in non-Western contexts, specifically through audio-visual manifestations of race in cultural rituals and products. Siāh-bāzi, or “playing black,” blackface performances are a form of traditional theatre in which the blackface character serves as racialized comic relief. Much more common and well-known, Hājji Firuz is a perennial blackface character that announces the coming of spring and the spring New Year (Nowruz), whose racialization is also indispensable to his performances. Finally, in a more authentic portrayal of Black Iranian identity through the character of Bashu in Bahram Beyza’i’s celebrated film Bashu, the Little Stranger (1985), race nevertheless continues to be manifested physically through a visual Othering that becomes somewhat resolved through participation in the nation-state’s institutions and standard language, while at the same time revealing the racism in Iranian society and the failures of the nation-state. In examining representations of Blackness, whether as blackface performances or authentic portrayals, this thesis investigates broader questions of race, Othering, nationalism, and scholarship while questioning the wholesale application of English-language, Western-based theories to an Iranian context and rejecting essentialist analyses.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