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2. Canon and corpus: The making of American poetry
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Upton,Corbett Earl (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Oregon: University of Oregon
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 223 p., Argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" the author means extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry.
3. Defining Jamaican fiction: marronage and the discourse of survival
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Lalla,Barbara (Author)
- Format:
- Book, Whole
- Publication Date:
- 1996
- Published:
- Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 224 p., Marronage - the process of flight by slaves from servitude to establish their own hegemonies in inhospitable or wild territories - had its beginnings in the early 1500s in Hispaniola, the first European settlement in the New World. As fictional personae the maroons continue to weave in and out of oral and literary tales as central and ancient characters of Jamaica's heritage. Identifies the place of Jamaican fiction in the larger regional literature and focuses on its essential themes and strategies of discourse for conveying these themes.
4. Race Fundamentalism: Caribbean Theater and the Challenge to Black Diaspora
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Chetty,Raj (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- Washington: University of Washington
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 223 p., This dissertation engages with radical Caribbean theater as a crucial literary archive that is nonetheless underexplored as an expression of political culture and thought. The theoretical grounding of the chapters emerges from the analytically generative thrust of a comment by C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins: "to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental." While the phrase asserts that race cannot be neglected, it also cautions against ensconcing race as fundamental analytical priority, suggesting a powerfully fluid conceptualization of radical political culture. Argues that radical theater projects in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic share this fluid conceptualization of radical politics with the Trinidadian James's own stage versions of the Haitian Revolution.
5. Reinventing epistolarity: Contemporary Africana women's fiction, citizenship, and human rights
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Walker,Carrie J. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Nebraska: The University of Nebraska - Lincoln
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 232 p., Calls attention to the renewed popularity of the epistolary novel among Africana contemporary women writers. This work investigates why, since the late nineteen-seventies, there has been a resurgence of this classic form among women writers across the Black Atlantic. The adoption of this genre among women writers in post-colonial contexts is especially significant because the classic epistolary novel was a medium that often endorsed notions of female submission and imperialist ambition. At the same time, the epistolary tradition connotes a revolutionary history. With this idea in mind, the author argues that an examination of how contemporary women revise the epistolary novel offers a crucial perspective regarding the struggles of women throughout various geographic locations and social strata in relation to nation, citizenship, and selfhood. This project focuses on how Sindiwe Magona, Nozipo Maraire, and Paulette Ramsay "reinvent epistolarity," using the epistolary genre to make interventions in the public sphere by depicting Africana women's experiences of education, marriage, inheritance, and health.
6. Rhythmic literacy: Poetry, reading and public voices in black Atlantic poetics
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Neigh,Janet (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Pennsylvania: Temple University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
7. Sharp bones: (Re)imagining the heroic in 20th century Black fiction
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Prater,Tzarina Tavielle (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- 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.
8. The Aesthetics of Revolutionary Nationalism: Narratives of Social Movement in Ethnic American Literature
- 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.
9. The Wondrous Body of Mary Seacole: Mobility, Subjectivity and Display in a Transatlantic Life
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- McMonagle,Alison Elizabeth (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- District of Columbia: The George Washington University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 216 p., Explores the fashioning of Mary Seacole's public image as seen in Seacole's narrative, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, and the periodical press in the British mainland and the Jamaican colony. Contextualizes the precise historical moments Seacole details in her narrative as well as those moments during which Seacole achieves her greatest celebrity: the South American Republic of New Granada in the early 1850s; the Crimean War and its aftermath (1853-1860); Seacole's death (1881); the death of Seacole's sister Louisa Grant (1905); and Seacole's modern rise to fame in Jamaica and in the United Kingdom (c1990 to the present day). Through this contextualization the author argues that the fashioning of Seacole's public image reflects notions of race, nation, gender and colonial power throughout British history.
10. Towards a transnational black feminist discourse: Women writing against states of imperialism, 1975--1989
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Harrison,Rashida L. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 212 p., This dissertation project aims to contribute to the current scholarship on transnational black feminisms. The project adds to the refining of nuanced theoretical approaches to specific experiences of black women. The author engages in close readings of four black women writers, Michelle Cliff, Joan Riley, Gayl Jones and Audre Lorde, as well as writings from two Black British collectives, the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Decent (OWAAD), and the Outwrite collective, distributers of Outwrite a Women's Newspaper. The readings result in several tropes within black women's discourse of this period, which include belonging and unbelonging, visitation and dismemberment, and living affectivity. The writings and conscious articulations are critical for locating transnational black feminist discourse as a distinct area of theoretical inquiry.