« Previous |
1 - 10 of 26
|
Next »
Number of results to display per page
Search Results
2. "Reggae got Blues": The blues aesthetic in African American literature as a lens for the reggae aesthetic in Anglophone Caribbean literature
- 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.
3. "The Haitian turn": Haiti, the Black Atlantic, and black transnational consciousness
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Joseph,Celucien L. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Texas: The University of Texas at Dallas
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 480 p., This dissertation examines the role of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti's national history in the construction of Black Internationalism and Black Atlantic intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The author argues for the centrality of Haiti in the genesis of Black internationalism, contending that revolutionary Haiti played a major place in Black Atlantic thought and culture in the time covered. Suggests viewing the dynamics between the Harlem Renaissance, Haitian Indigenism, and Negrtude and key writers and intellectuals in terms of interpenetration, interindepedence, and mutual reciprocity and collaboration.
4. "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.
5. '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.
6. A house built on faith: Religious rhetoric as narrative strategy in black writing
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- White,Artress Bethany (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Kentucky: University of Kentucky
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 164 p., Traces the journey of blacks from the Middle Passage through urban migration northward in black fiction. Argues that the historical use of religious rhetoric is transcended in black writing of the 20th century in order to recast black victimization during slavery, counter the progress of turn-of-the-century white supremacy, and chronicle the rise of economic racism which created the 20th century black ghetto. The religious doctrines discussed in this study include Puritan missionizing and heretical purges in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem , the social work of the Catholic church in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South , and the cultural intensity of the Pentecostal/Apostolic church in Go Tell It on the Mountain.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Conjuring freedom: Reconstructions and revisions of neo-slave narratives
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Montgomery,Christine Lupo (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- California: University of California, Santa Cruz
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 391 p., Argues for a revisionist periodization of neo-slave literature as well as a reorientation away from a US-based literary history that has been dominated by the mode of realism and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography, history, and aesthetics of the Caribbean. The canon of slave narratives was first dominated by the assumption both of narrative as the major and sometimes only genre of slave writing and of a linear temporality emplotting the journey from slavery to an attenuated freedom. In contrast, most twentieth-century neo-slave narratives rethink the genre from the twin standpoints of temporality and narratology: how both the "neo" and "narrative" descriptors have produced an entrenched and unnecessarily restrictive view of this evolving archive.
10. Fantasies of maternal unity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African diasporic women's fiction and science fiction
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Lillvis, Kristen (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Kansas: University of Kansas
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 241 p., Explores the power children realize in the past, present, and future from their real or imagined connections to their absent mothers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African diasporic women's fiction, science fiction, and film. Much of the existing scholarship on the diasporic mother focuses on her place in history, yet texts by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas, Nisi Shawl, and Julie Dash suggest through their depictions of the lasting links children create with their mothers that the power of the diasporic mother and, by proxy, the black family and community extends into the future.
- « Previous
- Next »
- 1
- 2
- 3