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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. 'It will be social': Black women writers and the postwar era 1945--1960
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Caldwell,Katrina Myers (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Illinois: University of Illinois at Chicago
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 268 p., This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women's fiction during the postwar era (1945-60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers' political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists.
4. Flight as improvisational solo in jazz and blues fiction
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Kosse,Jeffrey P. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Lincoln, Nebraska: The University of Nebraska
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 204 p., This dissertation examines the roles played by jazz and blues in African American fiction of the post-World War II era. The author contends that scholars of jazz and blues fiction generally discuss the authors' treatment of the music in terms of how it shows up, is alluded to, or is played; however, few address performative elements that are central to much African American literature. Their performances, whether as narratives or geosocial movements, often draw upon forms of flight as defining actions that send them into new territories and necessitate acts of improvisation. Forms of flight manifest themselves as improvised solos in numerous ways, including in this dissertation the path of Ellison's narrator going north and ultimately underground in Invisible Man , brothers leaving their Harlem pasts and coming together while on ever-divergent paths in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," Milkman Dead discovering the secret of literal flight by improvising through a journey to his familial past in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon , or the members of Macon Street's "flesh-and-blood triangle" choosing the expatriate route of Paris instead of America in Paule Marshall's The Fisher King.
5. 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.
6. Making dead and barren: Black women writers on the Civil Rights Movement and the problem of the American dream
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Bolton,Philathia R. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Indiana: Purdue University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- Examines death and barrenness images prevalent in literature produced by black women during the 1970s and 1980s, taking for study the novels Bluest Eye (1970), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Corregidora (1975), and Mama Day (1988). Argues that images in these narratives represent contemporary manifestations of social death that directly relate to what belief in the American dream, and that these images symbolize the ways in which decisions made had a deadening effect on black communities, primarily experienced as a loss of social sensibility and vitality of relationships.
7. The Mother's Mark: Matrilineal inscription, corporeality, and identity formation in mother-daughter relationships in black women's literature
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Birdsong,Destiny O. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Tennessee: Vanderbilt University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 216 p.
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.
9. Women's work: Nationalism and contemporary African American women's novels
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Thorsson,Courtney (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- New York, NY: Columbia University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 318 p., In the late 20th century, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise cultural nationalism. The author devotes a chapter to each author. Organizing, formally on the page and thematically in the story, heals the fractured single and communal bodies in Bambara's 1980 novel The Salt Eaters. On the islands of Tatem and Carriacou, Marshall's Avey Johnson dances a cultural nation dependent on diasporic connections in Praisesong for the Widow (1983). Naylor's Willow Springs proves fertile island ground in Mama Day (1988) for women's work to map nation, unearth an archive, and mother the next generation. Shange's recipe-laden novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) and later cookbook if I can Cook/you Know God can (1998) posit cooking as theory and practice of community. In Morrison's Paradise (1997), women write and paint records of their individual and collective histories. This group of writers uses Africa, the Sea Islands, the Caribbean, the American South, the kitchen, the dance floor, and the garden as spaces that help define a distinctly African American collectivity practiced in highly local, concrete work for fashioning self and community. In these practices, cultural nationalism comes to rely not on the imagined and far away, but on the lived and local.