Browsing by Subject "African American literature"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Black mourning : readings of loss, desire, and racial identification
(2006-12) Williams, Jennifer Denise; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Woodard, Helena, 1953-
Black Mourning: Readings of Loss, Desire and Racial Identification explores a diverse archive of African American literary and cultural texts in order to reveal loss as a necessary condition of racial identification. To support this assertion, this study broaches a theoretical gap that persists between black literary and cultural studies and revisionist approaches to psychoanalytic theory. Using the lens of trauma theory, Black Mourning reframes cultural memory and black subjectivity in ways that supplant performances of racial authenticity with an affective politics. Black expressive culture and performance aesthetics undergird this critical model. Chapter One "Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning" configures cultural memory in relation to the formation of modern blackness. Chapter Two "'Nobody Knows My Name': Ann Petry's The Street and Black Women’s Blues Protest" uses a blues aesthetic to access hidden texts of black female sexual trauma. Chapter Three "The Queerness of Blackness: Marlon Riggs's Black Is … Black Ain't" looks at embodied trauma as an a foundation for reimagining black collectivity. The fourth chapter "Archiving Blackness: Danzy Senna's Caucasia and Post-Soul Aesthetics" moves beyond fixed narratives of race to conceptualize innovative ways of archiving blackness.
Blackness and rural modernity in the 1920s
(2011-12) Elliott, Chiyuma; Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth; Green, Laurie; Hoelscher, Steven D; Jones, Meta D; Meikle, Jeffrey L
The New Negro Movement (often called the Harlem Renaissance) made black creative production visible to an extent unprecedented in American History. Complex representations of African Americans started to infiltrate a popular culture previously dominated by stereotypes; people from all walks of life were confronted for the first time with art made by African Americans that asked them to think in new ways about the meaning of race in America. The term Harlem Renaissance conjures up images of urban America, but the creative energies of many New Negro figures were actually focused elsewhere—on rural America. Urbanite Jean Toomer spent time teaching in an agricultural college in the rural South, and wrote award-winning poetry and prose about that experience. Langston Hughes wrote blues lyrics about the struggles of rural migrants in New York that highlighted the complex interconnections of rural and urban experience. And the pioneer black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux incorporated numerous fictionalized accounts of his own experiences as a homesteader in South Dakota into his race movies and novels. New Negro writers asserted that their art shaped how people understood themselves and were understood by others. Accordingly, this project examines both literary representations, and how literary works related to the real lives and struggles of rural African Americans. My research combines archival, literary, and biographical materials to analyze the aesthetic choices of three New Negro authors (Hughes, Micheaux, and Toomer), and explain the interrelated literary and cultural contexts that shaped their depictions of African American rural life. Houston Baker, in his influential 1987 book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, defined black modernism as an awareness of radical uncertainty in human life. My central contention is that one of the most radical uncertainties in interwar-period America was the changing rural landscape. I revisit the largely-forgotten (though large-scale) social movement to fight rural outmigration by modernizing rural life. And I argue that, rather than accepting the simple binary that took the urban to be modern and the rural backward, African Americans in the 1920s created and experienced complicated formulations of the rural and its connections to modern blackness.
The crossroads of race : racial passing, profiling, and legal mobility in twentieth-century African American literature and culture
(2004-08) Dunbar, Eve, 1976-; Woodard, Helena, 1953-; Harlow, Barbara, 1948-
MultipliCities : the infrastructure of African American literature, 1899-1996
(2012-12) Dean, Jeremy Stuart; Barrish, Phillip
MultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 explores intersections between black fiction and canonical sociology through two extended case studies focusing on the authors Richard Wright and Paul Beatty. The formation of disciplinary sociology in the early twentieth century had a profound influence on the production and reception of African American literature. Sociologists at the University of Chicago were among the first to teach black fiction and poetry in the academy, and institutionalized a social scientific framework for comprehending black culture. This framework, which assumes that black writing produces racial knowledge about black experience, continues to pressure contemporary African American authors through the demands of the publishing industry today. At the same time, though, African American authors throughout the twentieth century have resisted sociological expectations for their work and responded critically to the social scientific study of the black community more broadly. MultipliCities studies black writers whose fiction is specifically critical of sociological conceptions of black personhood and place. While Richard Wright's best-selling Native Son (1940) has been canonized as a type of sociological fiction, I read against this critical tradition for the ways in which his juvenile delinquent protagonist, Bigger Thomas, evades his production as a social scientific object. I locate further evidence for Wright's revision of sociological knowledge production in his final, posthumously published novel, A Father's Law (1960; 2008), in which the main character is a sociologist and a serial killer who violently deforms the mastery of the social scientific expert. In my second case study, I turn to contemporary novelist Paul Beatty's post-civil rights era novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), which I read as a mock ethnography in its description of a postindustrial ghetto that exceeds the sociological imagination of the so-called "culture of poverty." Though rap music is often interpreted as evidence of the alleged impoverishment of inner-city black community, in my final chapter I read Beatty's "hip hop novel" as challenging the social scientific expectations for black popular culture that are part of the ongoing legacy of the canonical sociology of race.
Once upon a time in South Central Los Angeles : race, gender and narrative in John Singleton's Hood trilogy
(2010-05) Cunningham, Mark Douglas; Watkins, S. Craig (Samuel Craig); Neal, Mark A.; Ramirez-Berg, Charles; Wilkins, Karin G.; Woodard, Helena
As a result of the groundbreaking success of his debut film Boyz N the Hood (1991), filmmaker John Singleton gained worldwide acclaim, the respect of major film industry figures and became the topic of both scholarly and popular culture film conversations. He also made history, becoming the youngest and the first African-American to be nominated for the Academy Award for excellence in directing. However, the lukewarm critical reception for his sophomore release Poetic Justice (1993) countered the promise many felt he had shown earlier and initiated a lack of interest in Singleton’s subsequent films, rendering him almost obsolete from any future cinematic analysis. This dissertation seeks to resurrect the discussion of John Singleton as a substantial contributor to the world of cinema by bringing attention to the voice that he has given young African-American men and women in the works that comprise what he calls his “hood trilogy,” which includes the aforementioned films and Baby Boy (2001). Specifically, the dissertation addresses this topic by examining how Singleton’s own discussion of black masculinity via film is an extension of the same conversation about maleness began by writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, how the South Central Los Angeles environment has had a tremendous effect on the behaviors and attitudes of the young people that populate the area, the influence of hip hop culture on gender dynamics, and the strain often placed on black male/female relationships in urban settings. The methodological approach of the dissertation combines film, literature, music, and cultural and sociological studies in the effort to locate Singleton and these films as meaningful components in the investigation of film, popular culture and African-American history and culture. In analyzing these films that, as a result of their subject matter and setting, find the filmmaker at his most assured both narratively and cinematically, the intent of the dissertation is to confirm the potential that Singleton revealed in his debut and also bring awareness to the significant effect his work has on African-American youth culture at large.
"The primacy of discourse" : language lessons in Samuel Delany's Hogg
(2011-05) Dechavez, Yvette Marie; Richardson, Matt, 1969-; Pritchard, Eric D.
In this Master’s Report, I examine Samuel R. Delany’s use of language in his pornographic novel, Hogg. Through a postcolonial lens, I investigate the ways Delany employs white colonizers’ language to subvert white dominant patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. As theorists Frantz Fanon and Hortense J. Spillers posit, language is essential to black identity. The arrival of Europeans on the African continent and the subsequent enslavement of blacks resulted in the loss of an indigenous African name. For blacks, the loss of this name serves as a larger metaphor by which one can uncover various wrongdoings committed by white colonizers, such as forcing Africans to learn a foreign language, refusing to acknowledge and respect an established African culture, and the physical violence enacted upon black bodies during slavery. In Hogg, the eleven-year-old black narrator negotiates his existence as a voiceless object and sex slave. I argue that through this narrator, one can see the devastating effects of colonization. Further, by creating a fictional world--the Pornotopia--Delany temporarily creates a space in which patriarchal boundaries no longer exist. Thus, the narrator challenges patriarchal, heteronormative discourse by taking advantage of the assumption that the narrator lacks the ability to master language.
Seizing the laurels : nineteenth-century African American poetic performance
(2011-12) Mabry, Tyler Grant; Woodard, Helena, 1953-; Kevorkian, Martin, 1968-; Hutchison, Coleman; Thompson, Shirley; Brooks, Joanna
The diverse voices of African American poets from the nineteenth century have yet to receive their due. The critical gap is regrettable, because the nineteenth-century phase of the African American poetic tradition, although sparser and less philosophically unified than some later phases, nevertheless constituted a true tradition, connecting writers to one another and to writers of the coming century. Nineteenth-century black poets laid the groundwork for their artistic descendants both stylistically (by “signifyin’” on the tropes of their contemporaries) and thematically (by interrogating Euroamerican claims to exclusive political and moral authority), while building communal sites for literary and political activity such as the black press, the book club, the abolitionist circuit, and the university. In order to adequately theorize the nineteenth-century African American poetic tradition, we need a new critical narrative that would contextualize nineteenth-century African American poetry by emphasizing its interactions with various currents of literary and political enterprise in America and abroad. This study will gesture towards some of the possible outlines of such a narrative, while also suggesting a new set of hermeneutics for apprehending the achievements of early black poets, urging an examination of the early black poetic tradition in terms of performativity. A critical emphasis on performativity is particularly well-suited to the explication of nineteenth-century African American poesis for several reasons. Firstly, because the poetry so often centers around acts of repetition and revision, the primary texts are vulnerable to being misunderstood as imitative. By insisting that poetry’s meaning is generated through relationships between poets, texts, and various readers, the performative emphasis helps to spotlight the competitive and revisionary nature of much black poetry. Secondly, when African American poems are read as performances, their political dimensions come into sharp relief. This study examines the performances, personas, and prophecies of George Moses Horton, Frances Harper, Joshua McCarter Simpson, and Albery Allson Whitman in order to generate a deepened critical understanding of nineteenth-century African American poesis.