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(1 - 5 of 5)
Title
"Readin' sistahs after school : counterstories from an all black girl book club"
Creator
Carey, Carleen
Date
2015
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
This study uses ethnographic tools to analyze one after-school Black girl book club. It addressesthe question, “How do the students construct raced and gendered identities as they engage withtexts?” While some studies highlight the need for teachers to employ culturally relevantcurricula, more studies are required to illuminate how students themselves define which texts areculturally sustaining. Drawing on Gee’s model of discourse as type of toolkit, this studyinvestigates the stories...
Show moreThis study uses ethnographic tools to analyze one after-school Black girl book club. It addressesthe question, “How do the students construct raced and gendered identities as they engage withtexts?” While some studies highlight the need for teachers to employ culturally relevantcurricula, more studies are required to illuminate how students themselves define which texts areculturally sustaining. Drawing on Gee’s model of discourse as type of toolkit, this studyinvestigates the stories narrated by six female African American1 seventh-graders over the courseof one school year in a large Midwestern city. Using critical discourse analysis, this studyillustrates how written and oral story-telling can support students’ critical literacy development.This dissertation expands the literature on identity and literacy. It expands our knowledge aboutan oral narrative in conversational response to text, thus uncovering the potential of narrative andconversational response to text as a tool for both young adult identity development and teachereducation, especially among young women of color studying English in urban settings.
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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
Ain't I a preacher? : black women's preaching rhetoric
Creator
Marshall, Cona Sava Marie
Date
2016
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
“Any attempt to understand American religious history, the black Church, or American women’s history without an adequate grasp of the groundbreaking work of these black preaching women will be incomplete.” (Collier-Thomas 8) Building on the call-to-action by historian, Bettye Collier-Thomas in the above quote, my project examines sermonic rhetoric of three leading contemporary preacher-scholars – Teresa Fry Brown, Vashti McKenzie and Eboni Marshall Turman – to contribute to narratives of...
Show more“Any attempt to understand American religious history, the black Church, or American women’s history without an adequate grasp of the groundbreaking work of these black preaching women will be incomplete.” (Collier-Thomas 8) Building on the call-to-action by historian, Bettye Collier-Thomas in the above quote, my project examines sermonic rhetoric of three leading contemporary preacher-scholars – Teresa Fry Brown, Vashti McKenzie and Eboni Marshall Turman – to contribute to narratives of Black rhetorical scholarship that suggests that Black preaching has served as a catalyst in the cultivation of Black rhetoric; all while underrepresenting Black women preachers within this cultivation. My objective is to identify recurring components of Fry Brown, McKenzie and Marshall Turman’s preaching rhetoric in order (1) to name Black women preaching tenets and (2) build a Black woman’s preaching method. I accomplish this by using an interdisciplinary approach, synthesizing perspectives from Women, Black, Rhetorical, and Religious Studies. In doing this, I can better categorize, name and scaffold Black women’s preaching rhetoric. I outline how Black preaching has been taken up within the fields of Rhetoric and Homiletics overtime; illustrating its contributions and importance to the field. After establishing terms and relevance of Black preaching to both disciplines, I position my work to showcase the gap in literature that does not represent preaching methods constructed solely by Black women. While the method is descriptive of Black women’s preaching rhetoric it is prescriptive in providing a method for all preachers to utilize. I succeed in constructing a Black woman’s preaching method by conducting primary research, investigating methods of Black women’s preaching. I analyze six sermons; two sermons each of Fry Brown, McKenzie and Marshall Turman. My analysis shows that their preaching offered four fundamental tenets that include (1) addressing gender through abstaining from attributing male gender pronouns to God and humanity, utilizing gender neutral Bibles, incorporating LGBT2QQIAAP concerns within Black and womanist agendas for justice, and including women and children into sermonic narratives (2) providing complementary sources to the Bible that include Black literarians, activists, and personal lived narratives (3) inserting womanist interpretations by focusing on the liberation of women characters in the Bible while also aligning oppression in the Bible with that of Black women in the U.S. and (4) scaffolding the sermon to include prayers, contextualized obstacles, titles, and promotion of ethics. Ultimately, my research is important because it provides a better understanding for identity formation, gender relations and active resistance towards patriarchal normativizing.
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Title
Death and blackness : the aestheticization of death from lynching photography, to African American literature, to memorials
Creator
Taylor, Jack, III
Date
2013
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
Death and Blackness: the Aestheticization of Death from Lynching Photography to African American Literature to Memorials is located at the nexus of literary criticism, African American studies, visual culture theory, and continental philosophy. The project examines a host of media ranging from major African American literary texts to more marginalized paintings, photographs, graffiti art, and public memorials, and explores how these various aesthetic objects represent the function of death in...
Show moreDeath and Blackness: the Aestheticization of Death from Lynching Photography to African American Literature to Memorials is located at the nexus of literary criticism, African American studies, visual culture theory, and continental philosophy. The project examines a host of media ranging from major African American literary texts to more marginalized paintings, photographs, graffiti art, and public memorials, and explores how these various aesthetic objects represent the function of death in African American culture over the last 100 years. I argue that the aestheticized cultural byproducts of death provide a hermeneutics to interpret the formation of modern African American culture, and perhaps more importantly construct African American male subjectivity. The ever-present threat of death is constitutive of a bio and necropolitics that works to oppress and discipline African American subjects. I lay the basis for this argument in the introduction by tracing the genealogy of a specifically American racialized necropolitics in the 19th century writings of William Wells Brown and the declaration "death is freedom" in Clotel not only from the vantage point of philosophy, but as a political pronouncement designed to show the limits of democracy. This line of analysis is further developed by reading Frederick Douglass's autobiographical writings as texts engaging the construction of black subjectivity through political oppression and subjection in a way that foreshadows theories of subjectivity developed by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and in a away that allows Douglass to be read side-by-side the philosopher Hegel. Chapter one focuses on lynch photographs as mediums that allow for an understanding of the political subjection of African Americans on the American landscape through vigilante justice that takes place outside of formal law during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the 20th century. This chapter draws on the philosophy of Guy Debord and Jacques Ranciere and argues that lynch images disclose American culture's weltanschauung. Additionally, this chapter argues that lynch photographs demonstrate that the spectacle of punishment did not fade with the onset of modernity while also maintaining that lynch photographs are "tear-images" directed at the real. Chapter two proposes a new reading of Richard Wright's Native Son to show how the politics of death functions at the hands of the state and circumscribes Bigger Thomas's subjectivity while simultaneously arguing that Wright himself can be read as presenting a biopolitical theory concerning death vis-à-vis African Americans. Further, this chapter relies on the existential-phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon and argues that Bigger's subjectivity is constituted by the Other through "the look"; that is, through the gaze. In chapter three, I discuss Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a point of entry into the conditions of the mid-twentieth century that (re)produced symbolically or socially dead subjects. I read Invisible Man from the vantage point of Hegelian phenomenology and argue that the anonymous hero is struggling for recognition. In the conclusion, I analyze the graffiti and memorials associated with the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant by the Bay Area Rapid Transit police and argue that these aesthetic phenomena are explicit engagements with the contemporary form of necropolitics that governs black subjectivity. To that end, I draw on Walter Benjamin's theory of the police, arguing that police brutality functions as a form of law-preserving mythic violence.
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Title
Traditional terrain : land, gender, and cultural biodiversity preservation in Venda, South Africa
Creator
Ross, Kimberly Bernita
Date
2017
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
This study examines the colonial and apartheid frameworks manifest in South Africa's land act legacies and the specific impact on land administration, gender, and the environment in the former apartheid homeland of Venda, South Africa. These historical forces shape present-day neocolonialism and globalization in the region which challenge the rights and citizenship of Black South African women within traditional leadership structures--concurrent with the country's democracy. In Venda,...
Show moreThis study examines the colonial and apartheid frameworks manifest in South Africa's land act legacies and the specific impact on land administration, gender, and the environment in the former apartheid homeland of Venda, South Africa. These historical forces shape present-day neocolonialism and globalization in the region which challenge the rights and citizenship of Black South African women within traditional leadership structures--concurrent with the country's democracy. In Venda, politicians, traditional leaders, and multinational corporations reinforce colonial and apartheid gender ideologies which undermine Vhomakhadzi roles and eco-cultural knowledge practices. Vhomakhadzi are women who have historically played a central role in their clans by advising Vhamusanda (chiefs) on community affairs and presiding over customs that connect with environmental sustainability. Yet today, leaders and politicians ignore Vhomakhadzi warnings that development projects threaten biodiversity and food and water security in the region-- instead commencing with deals to establish foreign coal mines, commercial farms, casinos, and tourist resorts. This empirical study in particular investigates the environmental and community activism and cultural biodiversity preservation strategies of Vhomakhadzi of the community-based organization Dzomo La Mupo. Through ethnographic-style interviews, participant observation, and archival research, this scholarship analyzes the historical and present-day gender politics that have diminished cultural biodiversity. The study reveals that colonial social formations historically confronted the role of makhadzi and continues to undermine her authority today in a globalized, post-apartheid era.
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