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    Start Over Format Dissertation/Thesis Subject Term Aesthetics

    1. "Reggae got Blues": The blues aesthetic in African American literature as a lens for the reggae aesthetic in Anglophone Caribbean literature

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    Collection:
    Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
    Contributers:
    Washington,Lynn (Author)
    Format:
    Dissertation/Thesis
    Publication Date:
    2013
    Published:
    Maryland: Morgan State University
    Location:
    African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Journal Title:
    ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
    Notes:
    193 p., Kwame Dawes coined the term "reggae aesthetic" to explain the paradigm shift in 1960s-70s Caribbean literature that also dovetailed the rise of reggae music in Jamaica. By exploring the impact of popular music on the social developments in late 1960s and early 1970s Jamaica, Dawes offered a new method of Caribbean literary analysis reminiscent of the extant blues tradition in African American literature--similar to the way that reggae music borrows from the blues--and in so doing, highlighted the artistic and cultural influences that link people of color across the "Black Atlantic." This dissertation builds on Dawes's theory by exploring the history and function of music as an aesthetic form and narrative trope in literature of the Black Atlantic. Blues and reggae in contemporary fiction manifest the oral tradition in African storytelling.

    2. The Aesthetics of Revolutionary Nationalism: Narratives of Social Movement in Ethnic American Literature

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    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.