Browsing by Subject "Ralph Ellison"
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Item An angle of vision : southern cosmopolitanism 1935-1974(2011-12) Mass, Noah; Hutchison, Coleman, 1977-; Limón, José Eduardo; Lesser, Wayne; Kevorkian, Martin; Hoelscher, StevenAs they took stock of the ways that the Great Migration and America’s post-war global role were changing the South, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray crafted narratives that articulated a particular perspective on the South. These writers dreamed of putting the regionally distinctive characteristics that they found valuable in the South into conversation with a sense of expansiveness and possibility, one that they associated with a migratory and increasingly globally-connected nation. In this project, I examine these southern cosmopolitan negotiations in Wright, McCullers, Ellison, and Murray’s southern narratives, and I argue that these writers are crucial to our understanding of the post-migration South in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Item Black Western thought : toward a theory of the black citizen object(2012-12) Reeves, Roger William; Jones, Meta DuEwa; Richardson, Matt, 1969-; Young, Dean; Wilks, Jennifer; Jones, Joni LBlack Western Thought: Toward a Theory of the Black Citizen-Object troubles and challenges the philosophical category of the human, particularly the black human. Oppositionally reading Enlightenment texts like Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Emanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime, I extend Emanuel Eze and Charles Mills critiques of Kant and the Enlightenment through relinquishing the quest for a black humanity. This project embraces the abjection of blackness and posits that in the rejection of quest for humanity the black citizen-object reveals heretofore unexplored ontology, epistemology, poetics, and philosophy. Through careful close-reading of poets Phillis Wheatley, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, and Jericho Brown, this project explores the political and aesthetic possibility of extending the democracy of subjectivity and presiding intelligence to black aesthetic and intellectual productions. Moving away from the notion of blackness as fear-inducing, funky, reprobate, and disorderly, this project constantly seeks to play with the dark rather than play in the dark. This act of ‘playing with the dark’ manifests as an interrogation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in relationship to quantum physics and visibility / invisibility of blackness. The project hopes to shake the very stable ground of the ontology of aesthetics and academic discourse.Item Dismantling the master's house : the afterlife of slavery in twentieth-century representations of home(2016-05) Quesal, Susan; Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth; Marshall, Stephen H.; Hoelscher, Steven; Stewart, KathleenThis dissertation explores the historical and contemporary interactions between blackness and the structure, sense, and practice of home. Informed by Afro-pessimist scholarship that finds traces of the logic of slavery in present-day cultural and social formations, this project describes the plantation as a tangle of conflicting, interacting, and antagonistic homes. Taking as its central object(s) the different structures of home on the plantation—for example, the white supremacist-masculinist dominion and racial anxiety that informs what home means for the slave-master, or the artful fugitive practices that allowed the enslaved to hide their homes in plain sight—this dissertation explores the way these social and material structures haunt representations of home in 20th century art and literature, thus mapping the locations where blackness and home constitute and produce one another. The intervention of this project is two-fold: First, it seeks to trouble the assumptions of certain strains of Afro-pessimist thought—particularly those invested in a totalizing narrative of perpetual, inescapable violence and oppression, rooted in plantation slavery but extant in the present. By looking at how black writers, thinkers, and visual artists in the 20th century engage the structure, space, and affect of home, this project charts a counterhistory of resistance and freedom rooted in the geography and culture of slavery but fugitive from its logics of domination. Second, it seeks to theorize “home” in a way that disengages the term from normative domesticity, opening the concept to include alternate ways of being at home not rooted in power or possession but rather in a sociality that antagonizes the normative domestic through its embrace of fugitivity. Following scholars who engage critical geography to disrupt flattened or overdetermined understandings of home, I look for moments that both confirm and disrupt dominant narratives about the legacy of slavery and its impact on home. My project thus works to complicate our understanding of how the past shapes and delimits individual and collective freedom in the present.Item Impossible harmonies: music, race and nation in the neobaroque novel(2015-05) Strong, Franklin Wallace, III; Salgado, César Augusto; Friedman, Alan; Moore, Lorraine; Moore, Robin; Wilks, Jennifer“Impossible Harmonies: Music, Race and Nation in the Neobaroque Novel” addresses questions of national identity and the literary uses of music as they apply to the writings of James Weldon Johnson, Alejo Carpentier and Ralph Ellison. I argue that each of these authors uses literary techniques that can be called neobaroque to interrogate the notion of harmony as a metaphor for national identity formation. While the idea of the Neobaroque is generally associated with Latin America, I take advantage of critical spaces opened up by recent work on the global Neobaroque to see Baroque traces in other postcolonial areas. And while the Neobaroque is described by Severo Sarduy and Linda Hutcheon as an art of disharmony, I argue instead that as these authors consider nationality from multi-racial perspectives, they work to reproduce the impossible harmonies (the phrase comes from a line in Carpentier’s 1974 novel, Concierto barroco) that dominate African-based music forms in the Americas. This dissertation addresses continuing controversies in the interpretation of each author’s work. Critics, for example, have read Carpentier’s preoccupation with form, which is closely connected to his love of music, as a reflection of un-subversive, even elitist tendencies. The charges makes sense: it is hard to reconcile the Beethoven-loving Carpentier who argued that novelists, like musicians, should work within predetermined forms in order to conform to “pressing spiritual needs” with the Carpentier who celebrated the formlessness of Havana’s cityscape in “La ciudad de las columnas” (“The City of Columns,” 1964). Similarly, Salim Washington argues that Johnson’s narrator’s quest for a music form that would combine black American music with Western classical music reflects Johnson’s assimilationist, “mulatto-based American nationalism.” This charge resonates with the central complaint of Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness (1997): that white Cubans intellectuals and artists, including Carpentier, appropriated black music forms in their construction of a mixed-race national identity. Where Johnson is accused of cultural betrayal, Moore argues that Carpentier participates in a sort of cultural hijacking. Without putting aside those objections, “Impossible Harmonies” recuperates the revolutionary potential of these authors’ texts.