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2. Rhythmic literacy: Poetry, reading and public voices in black Atlantic poetics
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Neigh,Janet (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Pennsylvania: Temple University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 205 p., Analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems.
3. Sharp bones: (Re)imagining the heroic in 20th century Black fiction
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Prater,Tzarina Tavielle (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 319 p., Argues that despite the inherent racist implications of classical and modern formulations of the heroic, the hero remains a site of struggle and resistance for writers of and in the African Diaspora. This project considers a genealogy of writers beginning with Ralph Ellison whose novel, Invisible Man and short story, "Flying Home," engage with classic and then contemporary forms of the heroic and seek to carve out a space for the African American heroic. Considers novels and short stories produced by the next generation of writers, specifically the work of Charles Johnson and Toni Cade Bambara, who inherit Ellison's legacy of engagement with aesthetic and political implications of social and popular cultural movements and history. Argues that these writers come to very different conclusions as to the efficacy of the "hero." Concludes the dissertation with the work of Michelle Cliff and Patricia Powell, whose work take us to the Anglo Caribbean and enables me to think through the movement of this figure through conduits of colonial and global capital and the resiliency of contemporary struggles, political and aesthetic, with this figure as a site of resistance and revolution.
4. The Aesthetics of Revolutionary Nationalism: Narratives of Social Movement in Ethnic American Literature
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Ragain,Nathan Dale (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Virginia: University of Virginia
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 238 p., Focuses on a strand of fiction and performance whose ambitious aesthetic aims both work within radical ethnic movements and exceed the identitarian strictures associated with these movements. Black Arts/Black Power, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the multiethnic Third World Strike were profoundly transnational and cross-racial in their theory and practice. Shows how writers working within and after these movements developed experimental forms and figures that navigate between particular ethnic identities and a universalizable collective political subject. Drawing on a long-standing body of work that has shown the inseparability of politics and aesthetic form, I place revolutionary nationalist aesthetics in dialogue with a recent theoretical tradition that has reimagined universalist politics. Traces collaborations between Henry Dumas and Sun Ra, whose play with ontological categories does not easily fit Black Arts's strongly racialized context, through the fraught relationship between Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and AIM's political theater, to more recent retrospective accounts of nationalist movements by Karen Tei Yamashita and Jamaican novelist and anthropologist Erna Brodber.