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.
159 p., Metamorphic literatures is both the identification of a cohesive group of texts, as well as the assertion that these particular texts are part of a global literary movement. The literatures coming out of this movement fundamentally seek to (1) resist colonization and enslavement, (2) re-vision history and resurface figures of redress, and (3) reimagine gender, sexualities, and the queer diasporic body. The tropes of this new literary movement that are expanded upon in the following work will organize the language, characteristics, and outlines of this movement of contemporary diasporic writers.
217 p., A comparative study of late 20th-century migration narratives by African American and Afro-Caribbean women, such as Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Loida Maritza Pérez. Informed by critical race theory, postcolonial, and feminist approaches to literature, this dissertation intervenes in literary studies of the African diaspora by underscoring the cultural and political implications that class and national differences have on intra-racial relations among Blacks.
306 p., This project brings together adventure novels by white British authors, like Frederick Marryat, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and H. Rider Haggard, and African American and Afro-Caribbean texts by authors like Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, and Maxwell Philip, to argue that the sensational elements of the adventure genre that were so effective in developing British national identity were appropriated by African American and Afro-Caribbean authors to re-imagine national identity as a flexible and multi-ethnic concept.
233 p., Analyzes three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their respective muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. Maps the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto's As mulheres de Tijucopapo / The Women of Tijucopapo , Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker , and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
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.
370 p., Examines three general geographical areas in which people who originated in Africa were dispersed to the West during the Transatlantic Trade in Captured Africans. In Africa there was a process of inculcating cultural values while harnessing skills in an authentic education system called retreat schools. These schools were the original African lodges or secret societies that supported the communal system since they made people indigenous. Everyone in a village had an obligation to become initiated in order to learn the secrets of their society. Those individuals who were not indoctrinated were ostracized because they did not experience transformation and pledged an oath of loyalty. The purpose of this study is to investigate the elaborate infrastructure that was historically an integral part of early African institutional character, and aspects of its presentation among New World Africans.
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.
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.
