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Title: " ... To do credit to my nation, wherever I go" : West Indian and Cape Verdean immigrants in Southeastern New England, 1890-1940
Creator: Edwards, Janelle Marlena
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This work is a community study that centers the experiences of black immigrants as an overlapping diaspora in multi-ethnic and transnational African-American history. It argues that, through the operationalization of their familial networks, ethnic organizations, and neighborhood enclaves, black immigrants in New England depart from traditional histories of assimilation and acculturation. Though much scholarship has been dedicated to the politically charged organizations and black immigrant...
Show moreThis work is a community study that centers the experiences of black immigrants as an overlapping diaspora in multi-ethnic and transnational African-American history. It argues that, through the operationalization of their familial networks, ethnic organizations, and neighborhood enclaves, black immigrants in New England depart from traditional histories of assimilation and acculturation. Though much scholarship has been dedicated to the politically charged organizations and black immigrant participation in New York, this microhistory of Southeastern New England's port cities -- Providence and New Bedford--demonstrates the commonplace, quotidian lives of West Indians and Cape Verdeans as neighbors, friends, and relatives who experienced and adapted to their diaspora condition differently. While West Indians altered their community landscape and eventually assimilated into the African-American community, Cape Verdeans retained a Cape Verdean ethnic identity, bolstered by their transnational shipping fleet and the constant flow of people, goods, and ideas from the homeland.
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Title: The regiments : cultural histories of Zulu masculinities and gender formation in South Africa, 1816-2018
Creator: Timbs, Elizabeth H.
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This dissertation reconstructs aspects of the history of Zulu martial heritage through the prism of the amabutho (regiments, age-grades) in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, from the era of Shaka Zulu (ca. 1816) to the present. Based on archival research and oral history interviews, this study argues that despite being outlawed by the British colonial regime in 1879, Zulu chiefs continued to form amabutho, but for different purposes. Regiments became youth structures for commercial labor...
Show more"This dissertation reconstructs aspects of the history of Zulu martial heritage through the prism of the amabutho (regiments, age-grades) in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, from the era of Shaka Zulu (ca. 1816) to the present. Based on archival research and oral history interviews, this study argues that despite being outlawed by the British colonial regime in 1879, Zulu chiefs continued to form amabutho, but for different purposes. Regiments became youth structures for commercial labor recruitment and British military conscription; they enabled indigenous leaders to access martial discourse and metaphors for political mobilization; expressed cultural forms of resistance to state racism; and nurtured the sustenance of Zulu identities in a changing South Africa. Exploring the amabutho's links to the Zulu monarchy also helps to shed light on the evolving role and status of the Zulu Royal House. While both the white-run Natal and Union governments feared the influence that Shaka's successors held among Zulu-speaking Africans, the authorities also relied on Paramount Chief Solomon to recruit black volunteers from Natal and Zululand for World War I. In the apartheid era (1948-1994), the invocation of the Zulu nation's warrior legacy endured. As migrant laborers, Zulu men recreated their martial identities and manifestations of the amabutho became more abstract, emerging in society, culture, and politics in unexpected ways. As the struggle against apartheid intensified, the continued relevance of this martial heritage mobilized Zulu communities, bringing them in conflict with first the African National Congress and later the United Democratic Front. In the post-apartheid period (1994-present), the rhetoric, symbolism, and practices of Zulu regiments continues to resonate and evolve. In the case of "high politics," Zulu political leaders turn to martial metaphors to engender support, while, on the ground, local authorities throughout the province struggle to maintain the traditions that give these metaphors meaning. The historiographical significance of this dissertation is threefold. First, it extends earlier studies to consider Zulu martial masculinity over two centuries. Second, it uncovers how amabutho shaped, and have been shaped by, white anxieties about Zulu men's "violent potential" as well as a need for cheap labor. Third, this dissertation reconsiders the shifting role of chiefs and kings in South Africa since 1800."--Pages ii-iii.
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Title: "Fan the flames" : the theories and activism of Chicana/o communists between 1968-1990
Creator: Bonilla, Eddie
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines the debates around Chicana/o nationalism, nationhood, and self-determination by using archival documents and oral histories to study the ideologies and actions of the August 29th Movement (ATM) and the League of Revolutionary Struggle that interpreted the Marxist canon based on their unique experiences as Chicana/os in the U.S to organize against oppression. I explore how these groups used a hybrid of nationalist ideologies with those around class to contribute to...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the debates around Chicana/o nationalism, nationhood, and self-determination by using archival documents and oral histories to study the ideologies and actions of the August 29th Movement (ATM) and the League of Revolutionary Struggle that interpreted the Marxist canon based on their unique experiences as Chicana/os in the U.S to organize against oppression. I explore how these groups used a hybrid of nationalist ideologies with those around class to contribute to both the intellectual tradition of Latina/o activism while diversifying our understanding of activists who utilized the Marxist canon. The activists in these organizations complicate the dominant narratives of identity politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to further enrich the legacy of the Chicana/o movement as one that was ideologically diverse, international, cross-racial, and cross-ethnic. The multi-and cross-racial framework in this research highlights the intersection of race, class, and gender by activists seeking equal citizenship and an end to U.S. capitalism and imperialism. This project is an intellectual, social, and institutional history of Chicana/o communists between the 1960s and 1990.The every-day lives of communist activists fighting for better citizenship and democratic rights during the global Cold War are at the center of this study. These groups and activists identified as some combination of Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, or Stalinists at a time when political surveillance was rampant and being affiliated with communism was seen as being anti-American. I explore how the organizations responded to this surveillance and how they continued to operate across various spheres of activism including in the labor sector, on college campuses, and in electoral politics by using a United Front approach.I show how the groups mobilized among lower stratum workers in the auto industry, cannery factories, and among hotel and restaurant workers because the point of production is where they believed they could be most effective. They also organized students on college campuses by participating in the fights for establishing and protecting Chicana/o and Ethnic studies, as well as affirmative action. These groups such as the League which was the result of the merger between Chicana/o, African American, and Asian American communists were critical because they created linkages between these various spheres of activism that at times were not speaking to one another in order to fight a restricting U.S. capitalist society during the 1970s and 1980s that was switching to neoliberal policies. I argue that this strategy allowed for the organizations to be effective in building support for the struggles they took up in the name of fighting for better democratic, social, and human rights.
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Title: Cripples all! or, the mark of slavery : disability and race in antebellum America, 1820--1860
Creator: Barclay, Jenifer L.
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "A study in intersectionality inspired by the 'new' disability history, "Cripples All!" takes disability, race, and gender as its analytical framework and responds to the conspicuous absence of enslaved people with disabilities in historical narratives. Despite scholars' avowed commitment to giving voice to those enslaved, persons with disabilities remain objectified or ignored and the complexities of their lives passed over. Employing a social model of disability, this study intervenes into...
Show more"A study in intersectionality inspired by the 'new' disability history, "Cripples All!" takes disability, race, and gender as its analytical framework and responds to the conspicuous absence of enslaved people with disabilities in historical narratives. Despite scholars' avowed commitment to giving voice to those enslaved, persons with disabilities remain objectified or ignored and the complexities of their lives passed over. Employing a social model of disability, this study intervenes into this lacuna and considers the many facets of their lives that extended far beyond slaveholder assessments of their "soundness." From this perspective, the rich diversity of their distinct experiences in slave families, communities, and culture emerge. Precisely because slaveholders deemed them "worthless," bondpeople who lived with disabilities occupied a marginalized but ironically enabling social space within which they provided invaluable labor and some small modicum of stability to their vulnerable communities. They often shared close ties with their nondisabled counterparts and sometimes banded together with others who were likewise disabled. Isolation and exclusion, however, sometimes resulted from stigmatization or in consequence of developments in slaveholders' lives"--From abstract.
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Title: Replanting the seeds of home : slavery, King Jaja, and Igbo connections in the Niger Delta, 1821-1891
Creator: Davey, Joseph Miles
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: My dissertation argues that past examinations of West African slave systems have over-emphasized the importance of social, linguistic and cultural marginalization, highlighted by a lack of access to the enslaving society's kinship networks, as the defining factors of slavery in West Africa. By centering the narrative of renown nineteenth century slave-turned-king, Jaja of Opobo, my work argues that, as abolition took effect in the Atlantic world, Igbo slaves amassing in Niger Delta trading...
Show moreMy dissertation argues that past examinations of West African slave systems have over-emphasized the importance of social, linguistic and cultural marginalization, highlighted by a lack of access to the enslaving society's kinship networks, as the defining factors of slavery in West Africa. By centering the narrative of renown nineteenth century slave-turned-king, Jaja of Opobo, my work argues that, as abolition took effect in the Atlantic world, Igbo slaves amassing in Niger Delta trading state of Bonny were increasingly able to maintain elements of their natal identities and, in cases like Jaja's, were able to reconnect with their natal kinship network in the Igbo interior. Furthermore, my dissertation argues that the slavery-to-kinship continuum model, first put forth by Miers and Kopytoff in 1977, is inherently flawed, inasmuch as it only accounts for the ability of the enslaved to be absorbed into the kinship networks of the slave-holding society, ignoring completely their ability to reconnect with their natal kinship groups in this increasingly turbulent period of West Africa's history.
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Title: "'I'm gone be 'Black on both sides'" : examining the literacy practices and legacy learning within a sustaining urban debate community
Creator: Jones Stanbrough, Raven
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This study explored the lived experiences of Black student-debaters and debate supporters in ACTION Debate (AD), an afterschool debate program dedicated to offering and providing debate opportunities and instruction to high school students in a major Midwestern city." -- Abstract.

Title: Historical considerations in African American philosophy : the intellectual career of Gilbert Haven Jones
Creator: Munro, Robert
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines the intellectual career of the early African American philosopher, Gilbert Haven Jones. Jones was the first African American scholar to receive a PhD in philosophy in Germany (University of Jena in 1909). In order to thoroughly analyze the life and work of Jones, this dissertation advocates a framework that combines a historical and philosophical methodology. My use of this framework is a response to the lack of historical considerations undertaken by contemporary...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the intellectual career of the early African American philosopher, Gilbert Haven Jones. Jones was the first African American scholar to receive a PhD in philosophy in Germany (University of Jena in 1909). In order to thoroughly analyze the life and work of Jones, this dissertation advocates a framework that combines a historical and philosophical methodology. My use of this framework is a response to the lack of historical considerations undertaken by contemporary African American philosophers. The dissertation examines Jones' works including an undergraduate essay written at Wilberforce University, his dissertation, and his published book, Education in Theory and Practice. Philosophically, I analyze Jones' work through the lens of personalism, as he was one of the first contributors to the field from both a mainstream and African American context. This project also, for the first time, contributes and analyzes the first English translation of Jones' doctoral dissertation.
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Title: Revisiting our history : Black-Asian tropes in African American literature and culture 1980s to the present
Creator: Braddox, Tonya S.
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation establishes a space to explore Black-Asian tropes in African American literature written since the 1980s. I examine African American literary works that feature Black-Asian relations, encounters, and alliances. I argue that a distinct kind of discourse is occurring when African American literature feature Black-Asian tropes; it is a discussion that decenters and has the potential to disrupt common debates of Black-White readings of American literature, in general. I start my...
Show moreThis dissertation establishes a space to explore Black-Asian tropes in African American literature written since the 1980s. I examine African American literary works that feature Black-Asian relations, encounters, and alliances. I argue that a distinct kind of discourse is occurring when African American literature feature Black-Asian tropes; it is a discussion that decenters and has the potential to disrupt common debates of Black-White readings of American literature, in general. I start my analysis with the 1980s because I am interested in AfroAsian motifs in Contemporary African American literature. In 1984, Velina Hasu Houston’s drama, American Dreams, was performed on a off-Broadway stage by the Negro Ensemble Company, and featured an African American-Japanese couple coming home to the husband’s non-receptive relatives in Harlem, New York. In 1988, Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites was published and depicted a Black-Chinese half-human, half-alien being trying to understand his alterity. In 1993, Ishmael Reed’s Japanese By Spring was published and illustrated how an African American college professor attempts to politically align himself with a Japanese college president in the hopes of obtaining tenure at a predominantly White college. In the 2000s, Jacqueline A. Sue’s Cornbread and Dim Sum: A Heart Glow Romance (2004) and Angela Weaver’s No Ordinary Love (2009) featured romantic relationships between African American women and Chinese men. The core of my analysis is to interpret the shared experiences between African Americans and two Asian American groups, Japanese and Chinese. Each author’s literary imagination seeks to call into existence a Black-Asian presence. History, law, and some social science help explain the relationships represented in each text. In each chapter, I discuss forgotten histories, such as the impact of Japanese and Chinese emigrants on the American labor force of the 1800s; the relocation of American soldiers to Kansas due to segregation laws in other parts of the United States during the 1950s; African American supporters of the Pro-Japan movements in the 1930s; and the effect of American racial laws on interracial couples prior to the US Supreme Court ruling on Loving vs. Virginia of 1967. These historical references are included in literature across genres, including drama, science fiction, satire, and romance, and cover topics on colorism, multiethnic identity, and interracial relationships. Furthermore, in this study, I attempt to address a popular cultural term, Blasian, that encapsulates contemporary experiences of African and Asian Americans in the United States. By the end of the dissertation, I define and discuss what Blasian Narratives are and create a literary and cultural niche for exploring more Blasian experiences.
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Title: "Taming the Sexual Tempest" : sexual education programs in Protestant youth groups, 1960-1980
Creator: McLean, Jaime Lynn
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACT "TAMING THE SEXUAL TEMPEST": SEXUAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN PROTESTANT YOUTH GROUPS, 1960-1980 By Jaime Lynn McLeanMy dissertation makes a contribution to four fields of historical scholarship: the history of youth ministry, baby boom generation, the social and cultural history of the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of the sexual revolution. Set in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, I examine the formal and informal sexual education literature and programming designed...
Show moreABSTRACT "TAMING THE SEXUAL TEMPEST": SEXUAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN PROTESTANT YOUTH GROUPS, 1960-1980 By Jaime Lynn McLeanMy dissertation makes a contribution to four fields of historical scholarship: the history of youth ministry, baby boom generation, the social and cultural history of the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of the sexual revolution. Set in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, I examine the formal and informal sexual education literature and programming designed and used by two Protestant youth groups during this period: Liberal Religious Youth, a youth run denominational group supported by the Unitarian Universalist Association and Youth For Christ an evangelical para-church organization for high school students. Protestant religious groups, evangelicals in particular, were at the center of debates over comprehensive sexual education in American high schools in the 1960s. However what often gets lost in the discussion of liberal support for and evangelical objections to sex education in schools are the alternative and/or supplemental programs designed and utilized by those working within the youth ministry. The content and the tone of these programs changed significantly between 1960 and 1980, coinciding with changes in youth culture happening among three cohorts of baby boomers. However, the strategies the groups used to reach teenagers were remarkably similar. The history of sexual education in YFC and LRY during the 1960s and 1970s indicates both conservative and liberal religious adults moved away from impersonal and overt efforts to control and monitor teen sexuality to a strategy which allowed them to manage teen sexuality by teaching teens to monitor themselves. I argue that the changing sexual culture in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s prompted Youth for Christ and Liberal Religious Youth to employ similar strategies to deliver very different messages about gender, love, relationships, and sexuality. Both groups employed three separate strategies over the course of these two decades each targeted at a specific wave of the baby boomer generation. I divide these strategies/cohorts into three rough periods. The first period encompasses 1960-1966. The second period runs from 1967-1972. The third period is from 1973 to 1980. I have divided the baby boomers into these cohorts because of the nature of the high school experience. Typically, scholarship focusing on youth culture privileges college students. In my study, I focus on high school students who have a much shorter and more contained youth experience.
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Title: Specters of freedom : forced labor, social struggle, and the Louisiana State Penitentiary system, 1835-1935
Creator: Hermann, Christina Pruett
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines the history of the Louisiana State Penitentiary from its founding in 1835 to 1935. Its purpose is to reveal the deep historical forces underlying the state’s present-day distinction for incarceration with rates twice the U.S. national average. In doing so, it contributes to the history of punishment, the history of race and slavery, labor history, Southern history, and histories of the state. It adopts an Atlantic perspective and a longue durein order to preserve...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the history of the Louisiana State Penitentiary from its founding in 1835 to 1935. Its purpose is to reveal the deep historical forces underlying the state’s present-day distinction for incarceration with rates twice the U.S. national average. In doing so, it contributes to the history of punishment, the history of race and slavery, labor history, Southern history, and histories of the state. It adopts an Atlantic perspective and a longue durein order to preserve the singularity of the penitentiary’s development without isolating the institution from its larger transnational context. This investigation challenges the conventional wisdom that all southern penitentiaries were the preserve of white men and repudiates the use of regional exceptionalism or “backwardness” to explain either the presence or absence of penal reform. It draws on official reports, government documents, newspapers, publications by penal reformers and labor organizations, prisoner narratives, and the Louisiana State Penitentiary Prisoner Database (LSPPD), my own database created from information drawn from the records of nearly 10,000 inmates. Quantitative analysis combined with qualitative sources offer unique insight into life and labor inside the penitentiary. This study demonstrates that convict servitude was a specific species of forced labor, an institution that was historically and structurally distinct from chattel slavery, yet, coexistent with other forms of forced labor in the Atlantic system. My vantage problematizes the literal and figurative use of slavery as a term to depict penal labor and confinement in the penitentiary system during its first one hundred years. I argue that the state of Louisiana, an early leader in the nineteenth century penitentiary movement, established a rationalized, “modern,” and state-of-the-art penitentiary by 1835. It instituted a distinctive system of forced labor, which generated a nascent prison industrial complex and supported the slave system in the name of humanitarian reform and civilizational progress. This enduring system powered the Confederacy and Union forces. It survived the Civil War to prop up the New South by providing a cheap captive labor force, which advanced state-building, planter power, and infrastructural development. Yet, the institution was not a functional equivalent to the institution of slavery. A constituent part of the Mississippi Delta’s “alluvial empire,” Louisiana’s penitentiary system was an agent in the making of Jim Crow by 1901 and acted to more closely link associations of blackness and criminality. Penitentiary enterprise and the state’s convict population continued to expand and consolidate under ‘progressive,’ scientific management during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The shift from convict leasing to direct state management of the penitentiary in 1901 led to an even more entrenched, rationalized, and extensive prison industrial complex and system of forced labor but one that was all the more vulnerable to its own contradictions. This specter of freedom, institutionalized in the penitentiary system, carried within itself a hidden history of resistance, one that signified the depth of working people’s enduring struggle to live and labor on their own terms.
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Title: Our need for heroes : asian American and Black American reconstructions of draft resistance and Japanese American incarceration narratives
Creator: Kozar, Meaghan Mari
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The construction of a white American heroism through uncritical celebrations of World War II, within public spaces, accompanied with the recurring antagonistic anthem of "Never Forget Pearl Harbor!" serves simultaneously to reinforce the perception of Asian Americans as foreign and un-American, legitimizing the physical and symbolic violence perpetrated against them post-World War II. Problematically, World War II heroism is centered on a seemingly inclusive discourse of Americanness and...
Show moreThe construction of a white American heroism through uncritical celebrations of World War II, within public spaces, accompanied with the recurring antagonistic anthem of "Never Forget Pearl Harbor!" serves simultaneously to reinforce the perception of Asian Americans as foreign and un-American, legitimizing the physical and symbolic violence perpetrated against them post-World War II. Problematically, World War II heroism is centered on a seemingly inclusive discourse of Americanness and patriotism while counter-narratives of non-white resistance are constructed almost exclusively from the specificity of distinct racial communities. I focus on the significance of a handful of racially intersecting "moments" in which Japanese Americans drew parallels between their experiences and the racial exclusion of Black Americans and similarly when Black Americans drew parallels between their experience and the racial exclusion of Japanese Americans. While the feeling of shared racial exclusion were not expressed by most Americans of color, this dissertation centers on historical and literary expressions of shared strategies of resistance towards their racial exclusion during World War II Our Need for Heroes is an interdisciplinary study grounded in an American Studies perspective incorporating history, literature and contemporary popular culture. I locate racially intersecting moments that surface within the memoirs and oral histories of Japanese American incarceration by both Nisei and Issei as well as various articles in the Black Press, two critical sites for documenting the history of non-white American World War II resistance. These moments also surface in how resistance is remembered in post-World War II literature. Chester Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and John Okada's No-No Boy (1957) raise questions of whether or not fighting in the war was politically advantageous for Americans of color by critiquing the racially exclusive constructions of patriotism and citizenship. Draft resistance is constructed as a legitimate response to this exclusion as the novels attempt to reheroize the performance of draft resisters through a process of remasculating each protagonist. Laureen Mar's short story Resistance (1993) and Shawn Wong's American Knees (1995) remember and rewrite the Japanese American incarceration history as a narrative of empowerment as each protagonist's nostalgic search for heroism is reflected in the absence of heroism in their current lives. This dissertation explores the memory of draft resistance and Japanese American incarceration, considering processes of rethinking and reheroization through which these experiences are transformed from a history of shame into one rooted in agency. I argue Asian American and Black American reconstructions of narratives of draft resistance and Japanese American incarceration histories during World War II are critical for rethinking the exclusive racialized constructions of patriotism, dissent and citizenship.
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Title: Oromo transnationalism in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area : an examination of the development, challenges, and prospects of gaining an institutional footing
Creator: Posey, Zakia Louise
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This dissertation is a historically informed ethnographic account that explores the development, transnational character, and tensions associated with ethnic institution building and discourse production among self-identified Oromos active in ethnic institutions in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area."--From abstract.

Title: A history of Black women faculty at Michigan State University, 1968 - 2009
Creator: Smith, Marshanda Ann Latrice
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines the careers of African American women faculty at Michigan State University from the 1960s through 2009. In mid-1960s, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's movement, the first generation of African American females gained employment as faculty members at Michigan State University. This study illuminates the obstacles which African Americans confronted and overcame in East Lansing during this tumultuous period. Moreover, this dissertation...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the careers of African American women faculty at Michigan State University from the 1960s through 2009. In mid-1960s, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's movement, the first generation of African American females gained employment as faculty members at Michigan State University. This study illuminates the obstacles which African Americans confronted and overcame in East Lansing during this tumultuous period. Moreover, this dissertation examines the coping mechanisms employed by some Black female faculty who encountered institutional racism and sexism on multiple levels at MSU. Finally, I highlight the careers and intellectual women who broke through racial, sexual, and class barriers to become successful scholars in the academy.Black women faculty members worked towards equality of opportunity and social justice accomplishments of African Americans in and out of the classroom. They contributed to changing curriculum and created diverse approaches to learning about race, class, gender and the experiences of other ethnic groups. Outside of the walls of the ivory tower, a number of Black women professors participated in community building by working in social, civic and religious organizations. It is important to note that several scholars published books and essays that sought to assist the African American community on local, national and international levels. Some of the works include books on the African Diaspora by Ruth Simms Hamilton, African American Women's History by Darlene Clark Hine, African American Language by Geneva Smitherman, the Black Family by Harriette Pipes McAdoo, Children's Literacy by Patricia Edwards and Religion by Jualynne Dodson.The data used for this study include: essays of Black female faculty; Affirmative Action Records; Board of Trustees Minutes; examination of Almanacs of the Chronicle of Higher Education; Association of Academic University Professors (AAUP) documents and reports; examination of local and regional newspapers - Lansing State Journal, The State News, The Michigan Chronicle, and Detroit Free Press; unpublished writings, and other relevant historical materials relating to the MSU community during the 1960s to 2009. This dissertation illuminates some of the concerns, challenges as well as barriers broken down by MSU's Black women faculty. Implications for future research suggest that Michigan States' climate, race relations, and the institutionalized mentoring of junior scholars must improve in order to increase retention of Black women faculty. This historical study of the life stories and professional experiences of Black female faculty may inspire other scholars of marginalized groups, institution leaders, and students to take note and devise measures that will ensure their survival, retention, and success within the academy.
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Title: "To find shelter she knows not where" : freedom, movement, and gendered violence among free people of color in Natchez, Mississippi, 1779-1865
Creator: Ribianszky, Nicole S.
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This thesis explicates how freedom, movement, and violence were inextricably linked for free people of color in Natchez, Mississippi from 1779-1865. It considers the relevance that violence or the implicit threat of it--in the form of sexual exploitation, re-enslavement, kidnapping, deportment, poverty, and racial discrimination--exerted on this population. This work centers itself within the field of violence studies.

Title: Modes of resistance : colonialism, maritime culture and conflict in Southern Gold Coast, 1860--1932
Creator: Nti, Kwaku
Date: 2011
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTMODES OF RESISTANCE:COLONIALISM, MARITIME CULTURE AND CONFLICT IN SOUTHERN GOLD COAST, 1860-1932 ByKWAKU NTIBetween the period 1860 - 1932 coastal Southern Gold Coast communities, particularly the Fanti, demonstrated that they were willing and able to resist the colonial government in its project of controlling their lives. To this end, they pursued the means and mechanisms readily available to them; and were also quick to take advantage of whatever opportunities that opened up. These...
Show moreABSTRACTMODES OF RESISTANCE:COLONIALISM, MARITIME CULTURE AND CONFLICT IN SOUTHERN GOLD COAST, 1860-1932 ByKWAKU NTIBetween the period 1860 - 1932 coastal Southern Gold Coast communities, particularly the Fanti, demonstrated that they were willing and able to resist the colonial government in its project of controlling their lives. To this end, they pursued the means and mechanisms readily available to them; and were also quick to take advantage of whatever opportunities that opened up. These communities acted on their own by drawing on ideas from their maritime culture. They also collaborated with the Western-educated elite. Together they openly resisted the colonial administration through demonstrations, discussions with government through delegations, official letters of protest, use of newspaper articles and editorials, and also took advantage of confusion and inaction of colonial officers as the main modes of resistance to colonial rule. Some of the issues on which their resistance centered included entrenchment of British power, weakening of the position of chiefs, colonial government attempt to take over "waste lands," and controversial 1932 legislative council elections. For instance, communities in this region conceptualized land as a cultural and religious resource, among others, whereas the colonial government saw it a resource the possession of which secured political and economic clout. This situation set the stage for a protracted resistance as colonial militarism was confronted by an equally militant people. Furthermore, the indecision and lack of action on the part of local colonial officers in critical moments portrayed them as taking a stand in support of one group in a dispute. This for instance presented an opportunity for a disgruntled majority to resist colonial government orders. In all of these experiences coastal Southern Gold Coast chiefs and their people organized under indigenous organizations sought and did get help from their Western-educated compatriots to navigate the complex bureaucracy of colonial governance. Yet, even this collaboration had its own challenges. This dissertation, explores the issues and events around which resistance to colonial rule in coastal Southern Gold Coast revolved, as well as the means and mechanisms by which they did so.
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Title: "it's the feelings i wear" : black women, natural hair, and new media (re)negotiations of beauty
Creator: Rowe, Kristin Denise
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: At the intersection of social media, a trend in organic products, and an interest in do-it-yourself culture, the late 2000s opened a space for many Black American women to stop chemically straightening their hair via "relaxers" and begin to wear their hair natural-resulting in an Internet-based cultural phenomenon known as the "natural hair movement." Within this context, conversations around beauty standards, hair politics, and Black women's embodiment have flourished within the public...
Show moreAt the intersection of social media, a trend in organic products, and an interest in do-it-yourself culture, the late 2000s opened a space for many Black American women to stop chemically straightening their hair via "relaxers" and begin to wear their hair natural-resulting in an Internet-based cultural phenomenon known as the "natural hair movement." Within this context, conversations around beauty standards, hair politics, and Black women's embodiment have flourished within the public sphere, largely through YouTube, social media, and websites. My project maps these conversations, by exploring contemporary expressions of Black women's natural hair within cultural production. Using textual and content analysis, I investigate various sites of inquiry: natural hair product advertisements and internet representations, as well as the ways hair texture is evoked in recent song lyrics, filmic scenes, and non-fiction prose by Black women. Each of these "hair moments" offers a complex articulation of the ways Black women experience, share, and negotiate the socio-historically fraught terrain that is racialized body politics and "beauty" as a construct. My project is guided by the following research question: How are Black women utilizing the context of the natural hair movement to (re)define, (re)shape, and (de/re)construct meanings of beauty and Black womanhood? Using an embodied Black feminist framework, I argue that at the intersection of both (re)presentations of natural hair and uses of social/new media, we find new possibilities, intimacies, (re)negotiations, and (re)articulations of both Black women's embodiment and the potentiality of "beauty" as a construct. Ultimately, the project uses hair as a way to underscore the agency within Black women's uses and understandings of their bodies, in a cultural landscape that constantly tries to tell them who and what they are.
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Title: JUMPING OVERBOARD : EXAMINING SUICIDE, RESISTANCE, AND WEST AFRICAN COSMOLOGIES DURING THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
Creator: Stevenson, Jr., Robert L.
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: ABSTRACTJUMPING OVERBOARD: EXAMINING SUICIDE, RESISTANCE, AND WEST AFRICAN COSMOLOGIES DURING THE MIDDLE PASSAGEBy Robert L. Stevenson, Jr.This dissertation examines slave ship mortality, slave ship suicides, and resistance through the lens of traditional West and West Central African cosmologies. The results offer an alternative analysis of suicide by drowning as a form of resistance during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The cases examined in this study recount the testimonies of slave ship...
Show moreABSTRACTJUMPING OVERBOARD: EXAMINING SUICIDE, RESISTANCE, AND WEST AFRICAN COSMOLOGIES DURING THE MIDDLE PASSAGEBy Robert L. Stevenson, Jr.This dissertation examines slave ship mortality, slave ship suicides, and resistance through the lens of traditional West and West Central African cosmologies. The results offer an alternative analysis of suicide by drowning as a form of resistance during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The cases examined in this study recount the testimonies of slave ship captains, surgeons, crewmembers, and linguists who travelled onboard slave ships in the Middle Passage and subsequently documented their experiences. This study proposes that the slave ship engendered a new spatial phenomenon for many enslaved West and West Central African people. Interpreted through this lens, these sources offer evidence that the cosmologies of these enslaved people, in the context of the torturous experiences on slaving vessels, encouraged self-destruction as one of many forms of resistance and one that offered the prospect of a spiritual return back to Africa. The evidence from the cases reveal at least three overlapping practical concepts that informed captives’ decisions to leap overboard: agency, martyrdom, and transmigration. I analyze these cases through the lens of traditional West and Central West African cosmologies, utilizing Africana Critical Theory and slave suicide ecology to develop a critical frame for understanding what motivated suicides by drowning. In doing so, I arrive at an alternative interpretation of these events that resists the implicitly White Supremecist framing found in many earlier historical accounts.
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Title: Ojo Nro : an intellectual history of Nigerian women's nationalism in an umbrella organization, 1947-1967
Creator: Martin, Maria (Maria A.)
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Gender analysis must be further developed in histories of African nationalism and also African intellectual histories. Ojo Nro is an intellectual history that speaks to Nigerian women's ideological and practical contributions to the theory and practice of nationalism. It contends that Nigerian women articulated nationalism in a way that was distinct from the mainstream politically elite male forms. This assertion is assessed through an analysis of unrecognized tenets of their activism,...
Show moreGender analysis must be further developed in histories of African nationalism and also African intellectual histories. Ojo Nro is an intellectual history that speaks to Nigerian women's ideological and practical contributions to the theory and practice of nationalism. It contends that Nigerian women articulated nationalism in a way that was distinct from the mainstream politically elite male forms. This assertion is assessed through an analysis of unrecognized tenets of their activism, especially their non-political ideology and agenda. These elements, the non-political ideology and agenda, are discussed in great detail because they were the most striking of Nigerian women's expressions of nationalism and, as such, they constitute a large part of their theoretical and practical contributions to Nigerian nationalism.
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Title: Finding asylum : race, gender and confinement in Virginia, 1885-1930
Creator: Pumphrey, Shelby
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Finding Asylum is an institutional and social history that describes how the state of Virginia managed mentally ill African Americans at Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane between 1885 and 1935. As the nation's first asylum dedicated exclusively to the care of African Americans, Central was established in Virginia as the model southern, black asylum, an archetype that was replicated across the southern United States in the decades following the end of the Civil War. It reveals how...
Show moreFinding Asylum is an institutional and social history that describes how the state of Virginia managed mentally ill African Americans at Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane between 1885 and 1935. As the nation's first asylum dedicated exclusively to the care of African Americans, Central was established in Virginia as the model southern, black asylum, an archetype that was replicated across the southern United States in the decades following the end of the Civil War. It reveals how race and gender bias bled into psychiatric theory and practice at Central. It also provides a window into the lives of black Virginians who were committed and eventually confined to the institution. Finally, it tracks how raced and gendered understandings guided state imperatives to confine, treat and sterilize African American patients at Central.
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Title: Framing Atlanta : local newspapers' search for a nationally appealing racial image (1920-1960)
Creator: Bennett, David Stephen
Date: 2020
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: By 1920, the city of Atlanta had long struggled with its white supremacist reputation, and its newspapers were fighting to present the city's obsession with white heritage in a positive light. The growing popularity of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial throughout the South, as well as Atlanta's reputation as the national home of the revived Ku Klux Klan, caused problems for the city's racial image. In 1921, the Atlanta Constitution began to attempt to present a new vision of Atlanta's...
Show moreBy 1920, the city of Atlanta had long struggled with its white supremacist reputation, and its newspapers were fighting to present the city's obsession with white heritage in a positive light. The growing popularity of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial throughout the South, as well as Atlanta's reputation as the national home of the revived Ku Klux Klan, caused problems for the city's racial image. In 1921, the Atlanta Constitution began to attempt to present a new vision of Atlanta's relationship to race, emphasizing the city's growing diversity. Integral to that vision was the launching of a new weekly column written by the city's black leaders, in which they discussed the city's black intellectual and cultural events. At the same time, reporting on federal anti-lynching legislation from Atlanta's white newspapers illustrated their racist failure to adequately represent black perspectives. By 1936, the growing popularity of Gone with the Wind threatened to reveal white newspapers' need to appeal to white supremacist readers, but white newspapers ignored and mocked-sometimes even outright denied-the growing popularity of white supremacist activities in and around the city, attempting to focus on the novel's representation of white heritage instead. In the shadow of World War II, as more racially progressive voices were beginning to be heard throughout the nation, Atlanta's white newspaper editors and journalists, already struggling to bridge the growing divide between competing economic interests, found themselves trying to straddle white and black readership interests as well. This gave Atlanta's black newspaper editors and journalists the opportunity to advocate for the advancement of Atlanta's black community. By 1940, all of Atlanta's newspapers found themselves wielding powerful anti-Nazi rhetoric to promote a more racially moderate and, ultimately modern, vision of Atlanta, attempting to recast the city as an enemy to both racism and fascism. By the late 1950s, the city's editors and reporters were so good at framing Atlanta's struggles with racial and religious tolerance, that even when the city was rocked by the bombing of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple, few questioned Mayor William B. Hartsfield's claim that the perpetrators must have been from outside the city. This is the story of how Atlanta's newspaper industry was able to reshape the city's national reputation from the home of the Ku Klux Klan to a "city too busy to hate" in the span of only forty years.
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