To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: African American intellectuals.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'African American intellectuals'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 25 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'African American intellectuals.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Ondaatje, Michael L. "Neither counterfeit heroes nor colour-blind visionaries : black conservative intellectuals in modern America." University of Western Australia. History Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0029.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis focuses on the rise to prominence, during the 1980s and 1990s, of a coterie of African American intellectuals associated with the powerful networks and institutions of the New Right. It situates the relatively marginalised phenomenon of contemporary black conservatism within its historical context; explores the nature and significance of the racial discourse it has generated; and probes the intellectual character of the individuals whose contributions to this strand of black thought have stood out over the past three decades. Engaging the writings of the major black conservative figures and the literature of their supporters and critics, I then evaluate their ideas in relation to the key debates concerning race and class in American life debates that have centred, for the most part, on the vexed issues of affirmative action, poverty and public education. In illuminating this complex, still largely misunderstood phenomenon, this thesis reveals the black conservatives as more than a group but as individuals with their own distinctive arguments.
2
Farmer, Ashley Dawn. "What You've Got is a Revolution: Black Women's Movements for Black Power." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10817.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines African American women's gender-specific theorizing and intellectual production during the black power era. Previous histories of this period have focused primarily on the theoretical and activist roles of African American men. This study shows how black women radicals shaped the movement through an examination of their written and cultural production within various black power political ideologies, including cultural nationalism, revolutionary nationalism, and black power feminism.African and African American Studies
3
Myers, Joshua M. "(Re)conceptualizing Intellectual Histories of Africana Studies: Preliminary Considerations." Master's thesis, Temple University Libraries, 2011. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/163901.
Full textAbstract:
African American StudiesM.A.
The overarching objective of this thesis outlines the preliminary rationale for the development of a comprehensive review of the sources that seek to understand disciplinarity, Africana Studies, and Africana intellectual histories. It is the conceptual overlay for an extended work that will eventually offer a (re)conceptualization of Africana Studies intellectual genealogies.
Temple University--Theses
4
Myers, Joshua M. "Reconceptualizing Intellectual Histories of Africana Studies: A Review of the Literature." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2013. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/227924.
Full textAbstract:
African American StudiesPh.D.
Properly understood, Africana Studies is a stand-alone "discipline." One that goes beyond, and disengages the normative boundaries and understandings of Western disciplinarity. This work is premised on such an understanding of autonomy. It reifies such a proposition by compiling scholarly literature on the subject of Africana intellectual traditions as a point of departure for articulating a rationale for viewing Africana Studies' disciplinary history as inclusive of the expansive tradition of Africana intellectual thought. It posits several generations of thinkers associated broadly with what can be referred to as Africana Studies have determined that African intellectual traditions should influence and often provide the methodological direction for disciplinary Africana Studies. It assembles much of the literature that attempts to contextualize disciplinarity firstly, and then those that theorize connections of Africana Studies disciplinary work to intellectual traditions arising out of the African experience. Through a process of culling the intellectual commitments of Western structures of knowledge from general intellectual historical texts and other disciplinary histories, this work situates its development of communities of thought and their academic and ideological legacies. From there it assesses how Africana thinkers understood these knowledge formations, a process Cedric Robinson considers to be the beginnings of a Black intelligentsia. The combination of all these reviewed literatures will be analyzed to reveal why and how, if at all, Africana thinkers have developed work that contributes to the construction of its own disciplinary space--with its concomitant methodological considerations.
Temple University--Theses
5
Evans, Jazmin Antwynette. "Scientific Racism's Role in the Social Thought of African Intellectual, Moral, and Physical inferiority." Master's thesis, Temple University Libraries, 2019. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/581847.
Full textAbstract:
African American StudiesM.A.
Scientific Racism was a method used by some to legitimize racist social thought without any compelling scientific evidence. This study seeks to identify, through the Afrocentric Paradigm, some of these studies and how they have influenced the modern western institution of medicine. It is also the aim of this research to examine the ways Africans were exploited by the western institution of medicine to progress the field. Drawing on The Post Traumatic Slave Theory, I will examine how modern-day Africans in America are affected by the experiences of enslaved Africans.
Temple University--Theses
6
Brooks, Zachary D. "Optimizing the Functional Utility of Afrocentric Intellectual Production: The Significance of Systemic Race Consciousness & Necessity of a Separatist Epistemological Standpoint." Master's thesis, Temple University Libraries, 2018. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/500843.
Full textAbstract:
African American StudiesM.A.
This research aims to reinforce the functional aspect of the Afrocentric paradigm by coupling the development of Afrocentric consciousness with a systemic race consciousness so that the intellectual production coming out of the discipline of Africology can more practically address the needs of Afrikan people under the contemporary system of white supremacy. By examining strengths and limitations of some existing theories and concepts within Black Studies, the goal of this examination becomes to more effectively address the problems of the epistemic convergence Eurocentrism structurally imposes on Afrikan people seeking liberation. Through an examination of how the cultural logic of racism/white supremacy has determined the shape and character of institutions within the United States, this work will argue that the most constructive political disposition for an Afrocentrist to take is one of separatist nationalism. The argument being made is that this ideological component is a necessary catalyst to produce Afrocentric scholarship that has optimal functional utility toward the goal of achieving sustainable liberation for Afrikan people from the Maafa.
Temple University--Theses
7
Golden, Timothy. "James Samuel Stemons history of an unknown laborer and intellectual, 1890-1922 /." Diss., Connect to the thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10066/1007.
Full text
8
Hendricks, Avila D. "The influence of professional socialization on African American faculty perceptions of academic culture and intellectual freedom /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1998. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9901241.
Full text
9
Gaetan, Maret. "The early struggle of black internationalism : intellectual interchanges among American and French black writers during the interwar period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e649fb42-e482-428b-8fd4-a62acecbb899.
Full textAbstract:
The thesis focuses on the interchanges which took place during the interwar period between the American and the French black communities. It explores the role of national and transnational frames of reference in the definition of the New Negro movement during the 1920s as well as in its reception by French black intellectuals during the 1930s. Black internationalism during the interwar period can be seen as a circuit of interconnections which resulted in multifaceted and shifting identifications encompassing national and transnational affiliations as well as, sometimes, a cosmopolitan sense of belonging. My work explores the difficulties and successes that the writers under consideration encountered at the time in their attempts to communicate with fellow black people across socio-cultural boundaries. Although, during the interwar period, the perspective shifted from a preeminence of local paradigms to an emphasis on diasporic views of the black race, the national and the transnational, understood as sites of social positioning, cultural self-definition, and political agency, remained inextricably intermingled. All the examples presented in the thesis show that literature, often understood as a national category, does not exist in a vacuum. It is constantly formed and informed through transnational exchanges. The American Harlem Renaissance depended on external sources of inspiration to come to existence. Not restricted to the United States, it then spread across territorialized borders and, in turn, affected the French black community, becoming a major influence in the emergence of Négritude. The thesis successively explores five defining instances of black internationalism: René Maran's Batouala (1921), Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), black Parisian newspapers from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, Claude McKay's Banjo (1928), and the early theorization of Négritude. Through the use of Glissant's notion of detour, theorized in Le Discours antillais (1981), this thesis frames 'black internationalism' as a shifting web of negotiations expanding between national and transnational spaces.
10
Vinas-Nelson, Jessica. "The Future of the Race: Black Americans' Debates Over Interracial Marriage." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155557927861785.
Full text
11
Marion, Marlon DeWayne. "Victimization, Separatism and Anti-intellectualism: An Empirical Analysis of John McWhorter's Theory on African American's Low Academic Performance." PDXScholar, 2014. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/1635.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this study was to test John McWhorter's theory on African American academic underachievement. The theory claims that since the 1960's African American identities have been significantly influenced by beliefs of victimization and anti-intellectualism along with values of separatism. In order to test for the existence of these dimensions in African American's thinking and for their relationship to academic achievement, data from the Maryland Adolescence Development In Context Study (MADICS) were used. Findings indicated that victimization, separatism and anti-intellectualism have a causal relationship and that sentiments of victimization are found to be significantly higher among African Americans. A Bourdieuian theoretical framework is used in the framing and interpretation of the results.
12
Mavromatidou, Eleni. "The Role Of The (Postcolonial) Intellectual/Critic: Textualization Of History As Trauma: The African American And Modern Greek Paradigm." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1213616340.
Full text
13
Mwangi, Perpetua Njeri. "Intellectual property rights protection of publicly financed research and development outcomes: lessons Kenya can learn from the United States of America and South Africa." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/15213.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation explores the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) as they relate to publicly financed research and development (R&D) outcomes. Kenya has the opportunity to learn from the experience of the United States of America (US) and South Africa (SA). The US enacted the Bayh-Dole Act (BDA) in 1980 while SA enacted the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act (IPR-PFRD Act) in 2008. The main research question is whether Kenya ought to enact similar legislation. In addition to the main research question, there are six other secondary questions. The first and second research questions are explored in chapter two which discuss the enactment of the BDA and its impacts in the US. The dissertation uses literature to look at the legislative journey of the BDA which upon its enactment created a uniform approach towards the protection of federally funded R&D outcomes. Literature also points to the fact that years later, the BDA still invokes debates across the US and beyond. There is no consensus on the impact of the BDA. Despite the lack of a clear stand point on its exact effect, several countries have emulated the US and still continue to do so. The third and fourth research questions discussed in chapter three adopts a similar approach but focuses on SA, the first African country to emulate the BDA. The IPR-PFRD Act has been operational since 2010. The limited period of its existence means that the literature available is work in progress. Despite that, SA has had some impacts experienced so far across its leading universities in the form of; realignment of IP policies to comply with the provisions of the IPR-PFRD Act as well as discussions among researchers, innovators and the National Intellectual Property Management Office (NIPMO). There is evidence that Universities, industries and NIPMO are trying to implement the spirit as well as the letter of the IPR-PFRD Act. The fifth and sixth questions discussed in chapter four turn to Kenya. The dissertation tries to establish whether there is a demand in Kenya for legislation that regulates publicly financed R&D outcomes. It proposes that the time is not yet ripe for Kenya to have a BDA model, but that Kenya needs to first develop sustainable capacity and infrastructure to support the protection, management and ownership of IP. Chapter five concludes that Kenya can learn invaluable lessons from the US and SA when it considers regulating publicly-financed R&D outcomes.
14
Rodriguez, Richard. "The Bible Against American Slavery: Anglophone Transatlantic Evangelical Abolitionists' Use of Biblical Arguments, 1776-1865." FIU Digital Commons, 2017. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3511.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation argues that transatlantic abolitionists used the Bible to condemn American slavery as a national sin that would be punished by God. In a chronological series of thematic chapters, it demonstrates how abolitionists developed a sustained critique of American slavery at its various developing stages from the American Revolution to the Civil War. In its analysis of abolitionist anti-slavery arguments, “The Bible Against Slavery” focuses on sources that abolitionists generated. In their books, sermons, and addresses they arraigned the oppressive aspects of American slavery. This study shows how American and British abolitionists applied biblical precepts to define the maltreatment of African Americans as sins not only against the enslaved, but also against God. The issues abolitionists exposed to biblical scrutiny, and that are analyzed in this dissertation, correlate with recent scholarly treatments of American slavery.
American slavery evolved in the period bracketed by the American Revolution and the Civil War. From 1790 to 1808 American slavery transitioned from reliance on the international slave trade to a domestic market. Abolitionists’ anti-slavery arguments likewise transitioned from focusing on the maltreatment of the immigrant, widow and orphan, to a focus on the proliferation of the sexual exploitation of women and the destruction of African American families. Abolitionists challenged every evolutionary step of American slavery. They argued that slavery was responsible for the destruction of American cities and the split of the British Empire during the crisis of the Revolution. They also denounced the constitutional compromises that protected slavery for 78 years, they challenged its spread westward, decried its dehumanization and sexual exploitation of African Americans, and its destruction of African American families. They galvanized a generation of women anti-slavery activists that launched the feminist movement. Abolitionists’ prediction, meanwhile, that divine retribution would come remained constant. Abolitionists produced such a prodigious body of biblical anti-slavery literature that by the Civil War, their arguments were echoed among northern pastors and even President Abraham Lincoln.
15
Tan, Twan Eng. "Can Intellectual Property Rights form a part of the Salvors' Traditional Rights, and Can a Balance be achieved between them? The position of English, American and South African Salvors in the light of the recent decisions of the RMS Titanic cases in." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/4567.
Full textAbstract:
A review of Salvage Law as it existed before the discovery of the RMS Titanic wreck, and the subsequent disputes about """"ownership"""" of the wreck. The laws of several maritime nations relating to Intellectual Property is examined, including Law of Copyright, of Trademarks and of Trade Secrets are examined and suggestions are made regarding the way forward.
16
Gondek, Abby S. "Jewish Women’s Transracial Epistemological Networks: Representations of Black Women in the African Diaspora, 1930-1980." FIU Digital Commons, 2018. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3575.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation investigates how Jewish women social scientists relationally established their gendered-racialized subjectivities and theories about race-gender-sexuality-class through their portrayals of black women’s sexuality and family structures in the African Diaspora: the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, Swaziland, and the U.K. The central women in this study: Ellen Hellmann, Ruth Landes, Hilda Kuper, and Ruth Glass, were part of the same “political generation,” born in 1908-1912, coming of age when Jews of European descent experienced an ambivalent and conditional assimilation into whiteness, a form of internal colonization. I demonstrate how each woman’s familial origin point in Europe, parental class and political orientations, were important factors influencing her later personal/professional networks and social science theorizing about women of color. However, other important factors included the national racial context, the political affiliations of her partners, her marital status and her transracial fieldwork experiences. One of the main problems my work addresses is how the internal colonization process in differing nations within the Jewish diaspora differently affected and positioned Jewish social scientists from divergent class and political affiliations. Gendering Aamir Mufti’s primarily male-oriented argument, I demonstrate how Jewish internal divergences serve as an example that highlights the lack of uniformity within any “identity” group, and the ways that minority groups, like Jews, use measures of “abnormal” gender and sexuality, to create internal exiled minorities in order to try to assimilate into the majority colonizing culture. My dissertation addresses three problems within previous studies of Jewish social scientists by creating a gendered analysis of the history of Jews in social science, an analysis of Jewish subjectivity within histories of women (who were Jewish) in social science, and a critique of the either-or assumption that Jewishness necessarily equated with a “radical” anti-racist approach or a “colonizing” stance toward black communities. The data collection followed a mixed methods approach, incorporating archival research, ethnographic object analysis, site visits in Brazil and South Africa, consultations with library, archive and museum professionals, and interviews with scholars connected to the core women in the study.
17
Ivol, Ambre. "Relectures des générations intellectuelles aux Etats-Unis : la vie et l’œuvre de Howard Zinn ( 1922- )." Thesis, Paris 3, 2009. http://www.theses.fr/2009PA030121/document.
Full textAbstract:
La vie et l’oeuvre de Howard Zinn cristallisent un ensemble de dynamiques contradictoires. Issu d’une génération marquée par la Grande Dépression et la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il deviendra – à la différence d’autres figures publiques de sa génération – une figure phare de la nouvelle gauche et de son pendant historiographique, la nouvelle histoire sociale. Hissé ainsi au rang d’intellectuel engagé suite aux mouvements sociaux des années 1960, il reste pourtant influencé par la Weltanschauung de son temps. Or loin d’être une trajectoire atypique au sein de sa classe d’âge, un tel parcours permet d’éclairer autrement les comportements collectifs de cette génération, notamment en permettant de s’extraire d’une grille de lecture encore largement axée sur des identités culturelles spécifiques. A ce titre, il permet une relecture des générations intellectuelles aux Etats-Unis associant des communautés trop souvent dissociées selon une approche idéologique plus inclusiveHoward Zinn’s life and work embodies contradictory dynamics. Though himself from a generation which came of age during the Great Depression and World War Two, he became a leading figure of the New Left as well as a representative of the new social history. He indeed rose to prominence as a public intellectual through his involvement in the social movements of the 1960s, while remaining influenced by the Weltanschauung of his own times. Far from being atypical for his age group, his trajectory sheds new light on the collective behavior of this generation. Indeed, it points to the possibility of going beyond a historiography which has been largely informed by specific cultural identities. By moving away from an approach too narrowly ideological, the study of Howard Zinn’s life and work will offer a more inclusive approach to generational issues in the United States
18
Bursuc, Vlad A. "Amateurism and Professionalism in the National Collegiate Athletic Association." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1374144535.
Full text
19
Womack, Autumn Marie. "Social Document Fictions: Race, Visual Culture and Science in African American Literary Culture, 1850-1939." Thesis, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8BK19V9.
Full textAbstract:
When in 1928 Alain Locke coined the phrase "social document fiction" to describe W.E.B. DuBois' 1911 novel Quest of the Silver Fleece, he magnified a tenuous interplay between aesthetics, politics, and social science that underpins nineteenth and early twentieth century black intellectual activity. For Locke, social document fiction describes the small body of literature that, although important as "sociological" treatises, had yet to achieve the aesthetic sophistication that writers of the Harlem Renaissance would master. Even in his dismissal, Locke's phrasing suggests that black authors had succeeded in connecting two representational forms that continue to be positioned as polar opposites: those that use objective observation to index social life (surveys, statistics, photographs, and catalogs) and the imaginative realm of fiction. Indeed, in Quest of the Silver Fleece, DuBois combines technical analyses of agriculture, Southern economy, and Post-Reconstruction education with tales of magic cottonseed in order to convey a social world that remained opaque to positivist analysis. Belonging to neither the sphere of slave narratives, domestic family romance, or Realism, social document fiction combines formal innovation with scientific discourse to produce racial knowledge that exceeds the nineteenth century's emergent regimes of truth. This understudied genre of literature invites us to consider a simple but fraught question: what does it mean to think of social document fiction as a tool for the study of black life?
This dissertation answers this question by reconstructing African Americans' responses to key moments between 1850 and the late 1920s when visual technology, like the microscope, the photograph, and film, joined with emerging fields of natural history, sociology, and anthropology to render black subjects as intelligible objects of scientific inquiry. Immersed in this "racial data revolution," blacks grappled to identify a strategy for transmitting new "facts of blackness." I consider social document fiction as an important strategy for reassembling racial epistemologies and reorienting the public's racialized gaze. I extend this genre beyond the work of DuBois to consider how literature by Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston each manifest a struggle to articulate a poetics and politics in relationship social science.
20
Prisock, Louis G. "Uneasy alliance: The participation of African Americans in conservative social, political, and intellectual movements." 2007. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3275813.
Full textAbstract:
A “one-size fits all” approach often characterizes discussions of conservatism amongst African-Americans. The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to provide a more nuanced account of black conservatism in the United States by examining how it is articulated within three distinct contexts, the intellectual, the political and the social. Second, this study focuses on challenges African-American conservatives face in each of the three spheres as they operate within a larger white conservative movement that purports to adhere to the principle of “colorblindness.” The dissertation not only makes clear the fallacy of that principle, but also, demonstrates how conservatism falls prey to what is termed here, the “inescapability of race.
21
Fenderson, Jonathan Bryan. "“Journey toward a Black aesthetic”: Hoyt Fuller, the Black Arts Movement & the Black intellectual community." 2011. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3465202.
Full textAbstract:
"Journey Toward A Black Aesthetic" is a study of the activist and cultural work of Hoyt W. Fuller and the formation of the Black intellectual community in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It fills a major gap in Black Arts Movement Studies by exploring the public work of Fuller and the (inter)national sensibilities he helped to arouse among Black intellectuals, artists and activists. Much like the position granted to Alain Locke by scholars of the Harlem Renaissance, this study situates Hoyt Fuller as the "midwife" or "dean" of the Black Arts Movement. One of the central aspects of "Journey Toward A Black Aesthetic" is the way the project explores the various networks Fuller developed at the local, national and international levels. The project traces Fuller's role as editor of Negro Digest (Black World) and First World. It also examines the key part he played as a founder of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago, and unpacks his position as an unofficial ambassador in several African festivals. The project is based upon extensive archival research, oral history interviews, local periodicals and Black Arts literature. It is an attempt to lobby for an altered view of the movement from the perspective of Hoyt Fuller. As a gay black man, respected elder, engaged activist, leading editor, and passionate advocate for Black writers, Fuller's public work offers us a unique perspective on the 1960s. In sum, this study of his activism will help complement, contradict, and in some instances, transform our understanding of the Black Arts Movement, and the Black intellectual community that was formed in its wake.
22
Courau, Rogier Philippe. "States of nomadism, conditions of diaspora : studies in writing between South Africa and the United States, 1913-1936." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/162.
Full textAbstract:
Using the theoretical idea of ‘writing between’ to describe the condition
of the travelling subject, this study attempts to chart some of the literary,
intellectual and cultural connections that exist(ed) between black South
African intellectuals and writers, and the experiences of their African-
American counterparts in their common movements towards civil liberty,
enfranchisement and valorised consciousness. The years 1913-1936 saw
important historical events taking place in the United States, South Africa
and the world – and their effects on the peoples of the African diaspora
were signficant. Such events elicited unified black diasporic responses to
colonial hegemony. Using theories of transatlantic/transnational cultural
negotiation as a starting point, conceptualisations that map out, and give
context to, the connections between transcontinental black experiences of
slavery and subjugation, this study seeks to re-envisage such black South
African and African-American intellectual discourses through reading them
anew. These texts have been re-covered and re-situated, are both published
and unpublished, and engage the notion of travel and the instability of
transatlantic voyaging in the liminal state of ‘writing between’. With my
particular regional focus, I explore the cultural and intellectual politics of
these diasporic interrelations in the form of case studies of texts from several
genres, including fiction and autobiography. They are: the travel writings
of Xhosa intellectual, DDT Jabavu, with a focus on his 1913 journey to the
United States; an analysis of Ethelreda Lewis’s novel, Wild Deer (1933), which
imagines the visit of an African-American musician, Paul Robeson-like figure
to South Africa; and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s representation of her African
Journey (1945) to the country in 1936, and the traveller’s gaze as expressed
through the ethnographic imagination, or the anthropological ‘eye’ in the text.Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.
23
Ward, Stephen Michael. ""Ours too was a struggle for a better world" activist intellectuals and the radical promise of the Black Power movement, 1962-1972 /." Thesis, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3108532.
Full text
24
Fleming, Daniel Thomas. ""Living the dream": a history of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday." Thesis, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1314465.
Full textAbstract:
Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)On 2 November 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday into law. His signature ended a fifteen year struggle to make King’s birthday a Holiday. Advocates for the Holiday, such as Coretta Scott King, Representative John Conyers and Senator Ted Kennedy planned to honour not only King, but the entire civil rights movement that famously confronted the ‘American Dilemma’ of institutionalised racism in the 1950s and 1960s. The Holiday was seen as an act of atonement for centuries of racism, slavery and segregation that stretched back to the American Revolution. It honoured the African American contribution to American life and celebrated racial integration and nonviolence. After the first King Holiday in 1986, scholars Vincent Harding, Michael Dyson and David Garrow argued that it relied too much on King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. They wrote that King’s radical legacy was forgotten and that conservatives sought to downplay his criticism of militarism and economic inequality. Scholars were correct to note this trend, yet since 1986 little has been added to this analysis, even as scholars heed the call by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall to study the Long Civil Rights Movement. Most who write about King Day focus on the 1970s and early 1980s Holiday campaign and this thesis builds on their work by analysing Holiday celebrations in the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s. In 1984, Congress established the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission in order to organise King Day. Led by Coretta Scott King, the Commission planned ten King Holidays from 1986 to 1996. It left a vast, but underutilised, archive for scholars. This thesis is based on research in that archive and presents a new understanding of how the King Holiday was celebrated. This thesis is a history of the Holiday and the Commission. It addresses the questions: Why was King celebrated with a Holiday; who celebrated; and how? It analyses who organised the Holiday and what images of King they promoted. The thesis argues that King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech symbolised celebrations in the 1980s because the Commission attempted to create a popular Holiday. This meant that King Day had a moderate and even conservative tone, made possible because many appointed to the Commission were conservatives. Yet, in the mid-1990s, during President Clinton’s administration, a new image of King was presented to the public: King the Drum Major. This image was based on King’s ‘Drum Major Instinct’ sermon and emphasised King’s humility, dedication to service and concern about economic inequality.
25
van, Kessel Irene. "All is One: Towawrd a Spirtual Whole Life Education based on an Inner Life Curriculum." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/32842.
Full textAbstract:
The intent of this thesis is to understand how we as educators and learners in our Western system of education can bridge and heal the fundamental principles of a constructed divide embedded in our consciousness that continues to be reproduced in our Western academy. The primary goal is to make visible this divide that is based on the intellectualization of Western education in the absence of spiritual aspirations, thus revealing the potential of spiritual transformation within the academy and our everyday lives.
In my literature-based thesis research I explored, analyzed and discussed two bodies of literature: the historical intellectualization of Western education on the one hand, and, on the other, Eastern Philosophy with the emphasis on Higher Self Yoga, African Philosophy and North American Aboriginal Spirituality. I investigated these bodies of literature employing a research paradigm that has its foundation in a spiritual ontology and epistemology. I analyzed my findings using such methodologies as appreciative inquiry, content analysis and textual analysis, including anti-colonial and indigenous knowledges theoretical frameworks.
I found that the synthesis and integration of the inner life wisdom revealed in the three philosophies is an integral component fundamental toward a whole life vision of education, an educative vision that has the potential to serve as a catalyst to open the gates for life-enhancing change in the academy and our everyday lives.
Change implies becoming aware of our true origin, who we truly are, and what our intrinsic purpose is. Change implies becoming aware of humanity’s accelerated transition toward a higher level of spiritual planetary consciousness, a spiritual evolution as an inner quest of unity with nature, the larger human community, the universe, and the divine Source itself. Change implies whole life educational processes, inclusive of the unfoldment of inner life wisdom, the authority of the human spirit, and the sense of divinity, as useful bridging work in healing the divide in our aware consciousness and our educational institutions. Whole life change needs to be the responsibility of academic education, as well our self-responsibility of realizing ourselves as citizen of the world living within one-world consciousness. All is one.