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2. "Their past in my blood": Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler's response to the Black aesthetic
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Freeman,Williamenia Miranda Walker (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Mississippi: The University of Southern Mississippi
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 195 p., Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women's sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic.
3. After the end of the world: Poetics, time and black experimental writing
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Reed,Anthony (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 263 p., A study of the poetics of experimental writing, focusing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Nathaniel Mackey, Suzan-Lori Parks and Kamau Brathwaite. Arguing that conceptions of time tend to be at the heart of political concerns throughout the sites of the African diaspora, this project challenges those notions of black writing that rest on the binary or oppression/resistance. Specifically concerned with poetry, Kamau Brathwaite and Nathaniel Mackey specifically confront and contravene the legacy of the lyric voice in both the presentation and topics of their work. Brathwaite invents a shifting system of fonts, margins and a capacious first-person singular/plural to articulate a time and a "we" of the Caribbean and the diaspora.
4. Authentic performances: The paradox of Black identity
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Callaway,Micheal Antonio (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Arizona: Arizona State University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 251 p., Argues that there is a difference between biological essentialism and racial authenticity. Essentialism is reactionary, whereas racial authenticity is thoughtful, constructed and aimed at countering common beliefs. Once authenticity is positioned as a means to an end and not an end itself, authenticity can be used as a way of reading social situations, questioning how authentic arguments are used in culture, and understanding why their use is sometimes necessary. Also, using authenticity as a way of reading social situations takes the focus off of the authentic representation of race and places attention on American society by examining how the authentic representation works in dialogue with other arguments about race. This study uses the Harlem Renaissance as a backdrop to view how Afro-Caribbeans inserted themselves into African American discourses on race. The dark skinned immigrants blended in visually, but were far removed from many of the formative racial experiences of their American peers. These people may have come to align with African Americans and fight white racism, but they were in fact taking up new identity positions and learning to perform forms of blackness on the fly. The works that are examined in the various chapters of this dissertation show Black writers as critical agents of change who work hard to balance their own personal needs with the needs of their race and position themselves within a racist society.
5. Beyond recovery: The uses of history in contemporary African American and Caribbean literature
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- McMorris,Kristy K. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- New York: New York University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 335 p., A central premise of this project is that individuals and communities perceive the significance of history differently depending on their historical conditions. Indeed, much of the emphasis on memory studies in the last two decades has been informed by an awareness of changing perspectives on the past. Thus, given its focus on black peoples in the United States and the Caribbean, this dissertation aims to illuminate an emergent historical consciousness in the African Diaspora in the late 20th century. This dissertation is divided into two sections. In Part I, "Ancestors: Exploring Historical Inheritances," I analyze Maryse Conde's Les derniers rois mages (1993) and Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1993) as they interrogate the concept of familial lineage and query the significance of the past imagined as an inheritance. Whereas Chamoiseau questions the ability of written history to represent memory and experience, Conde empties the idea of heritage of all significance as new relationships to the past come to the fore. In Part II, "New Birth: Exploring Discourses of Reproduction," I focus on Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975) and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) as they reveal the limitations of genealogical discourse. By creating their pasts and imagining their heritage, the characters in these texts challenge the primacy of lineage as they point toward other, more viable networks of community and belonging.
6. Haunting witnesses: Diasporic consciousness in African American and Caribbean writing
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Kellett,Brandi Bingham (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Florida: University of Miami
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 210 p., This project examines the ways in which several texts written in the late 20th century by African American and Caribbean writers appropriate history and witness trauma. Analyzes the writings of Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Paule Marshall, and Fred D'Aguiar as they offer distinct approaches to history and the resulting effects such reconstituted, discovered, or, in some cases, imagined histories can have on the affirmation of the self as a subject. Explores the values of the African diaspora cross-culturally as manifested in the representational practices of these writers.
7. 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.
8. To walk or fly?: The folk narration of community and identity in twentieth century black women's literature of the Americas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Tolbert,Tolonda Michele (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- New Jersey: Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 295 p., Focuses on the function of black vernacular myths and rituals in three primary women's texts of the Americas: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972) and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983). My project codifies how the black vernacular expressions of mythology and ritual are used to negotiate power between the individual and their community. The author traces how the women in these texts used resources of the black vernacular tradition as social and cultural collateral to empower themselves within an alternative system of values that simultaneously validates self and communal worth.