182 p., Grâce à une réflexion sur ma création poétique, cette thèse exploite; la poétique négro-africaine de l'exil & raquo; à travers cinq recueils de Césaire, Kayóya, Senghor et Tshitungu Kongolo. D'une part, mon recueil extériorise les joies et les peines du Burundi précolonial, colonial, postcolonial et d'un exilé francophone au Canada largement anglophone. Mes exigences esthétiques sont, premièrement, l'emploi des figures de style pour que mes poèmes soient des paroles plaisantes au coeur et à l'oreille. Deuxièmement, chaque poème véhicule une poly-isotopie. Troisièmement, pareil à mon identité hybride, mon recueil est un mariage de la poésie des vers courts français et des unités discursives burundaises. D'autre part, mon analyse critique examine la manière dont le poète exilé idéalise le pays perdu et suggère des réserves face au pays hôte qui lui impose une nouvelle identité. Ensuite, mon analyse révèle que l'écriture poétique est en elle-même un exil.
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.
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.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
237 p., A close reading of three works by female authors. Presents a trajectory, covering different epochs from post emancipation, independence, and the contemporary, of their portrayal of subalterns, the specific strategies they use to reveal their protagonists' resistance, growth and self-affirmation.
This dissertation examines the migratory experiences of the protagonists from four African diasporic novels: Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy (1999), Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta (1994), Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat (1994), and The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982). When analyzed comparatively these texts demonstrate that a completely integrated identity (that merges two cultures) is contingent upon a return to the protagonist's cultural roots either by the protagonist herself or someone who is closely aligned with her. The protagonist or her representative must travel to her ancestral homeland and in the process develop a value system that reflects the duality of her identity.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
191 p., Conceptualizes the idea of jolie-laide ("the beautiful ugly") as a fully elaborated sexual poetics by three women writers of the African diaspora: Gayl Jones (USA), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, Caribbean), and Jackie Kay (Scotland, UK). The introductory chapter situates the study in a critical and cultural context and defines key terms. The chapters that follow analyze the thematic preoccupations and narrative strategies of the three writers' respective novels ( Corregidora and Eva's Man, The Autobiography of My Mother , and Trumpet ) and historicize the novels' explicit and implicit ideologies. With their jolie-laide portrayals of gender, the body and sex and sexuality, these three writers fashion complex representations of black female sexual subjectivity and critique the biased images, exaggerations, distortions, and silences of earlier representations. Recognizing that jolie-laide can be used to problematize racial, gender, and sexual binaries, these novelists exploit the structural possibilities of a jolie-laide sexual poetics to address culturally taboo topics in explicit, graphic, and imaginative language and with inventive jolie-laide tropes. They challenge white supremacist stereotypes of black sexuality as well as the sanitized characterizations of black sex found within the literary traditions of black respectability.
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.
