Dissertations / Theses: 'African Americans – History and criticism'

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Robinson, Heather Lindsey. "Ours is the Kingdom of Heaven: Racial Construction of Early American Christian Identities." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc849673/.

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This project interrogates how religious performance, either authentic or contrived, aids in the quest for freedom for oppressed peoples; how the rhetoric of the Enlightenment era pervades literatures delivered or written by Native Americans and African Americans; and how religious modes, such as evoking scripture, performing sacrifices, or relying upon providence, assist oppressed populations in their roles as early American authors and speakers. Even though the African American and Native American populations of early America before the eighteenth century were denied access to rights and freedom, they learned to manipulate these imposed constraints--renouncing the expectation that they should be subordinate and silent--to assert their independent bodies, voices, and spiritual identities through the use of literary expression. These performative strategies, such as self-fashioning, commanding language, destabilizing republican rhetoric, or revising narrative forms, become the tools used to present three significant strands of identity: the individual person, the racialized person, and the spiritual person. As each author resists the imposed restrictions of early American ideology and the resulting expectation of inferior behavior, he/she displays abilities within literature (oral and written forms) denied him/her by the political systems of the early republican and early national eras. Specifically, they each represent themselves in three ways: first, as a unique individual with differentiated abilities, exceptionalities, and personality; second, as a person with distinct value, regardless of skin color, cultural difference, or gender; and third, as a sanctified and redeemed Christian, guaranteed agency and inheritance through the family of God. Furthermore, the use of religion and spirituality allows these authors the opportunity to function as active agents who were adapting specific verbal and physical methods of self-fashioning through particular literary strategies. Doing so demonstrates that they were not the unrefined and unfeeling individuals that early American political and social restrictions had made them--that instead they were intellectually and morally capable of making both physical and spiritual contributions to society while reciprocally deserving to possess the liberties and freedoms denied them.

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Birge, Amy Anastasia. ""Mislike Me not for My Complexion": Shakespearean Intertextuality in the Works of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278175/.

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Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).

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Taylor, Juko Tana. "Misrecognized and Misplaced: Race Performed in African American Literature, 1900-2015." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc984162/.

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In my dissertation, I explore the ways in which racial identity is made complex through various onlookers' misrecognition of race. This issue is particularly important considering the current state of race relations in the United States, as my project offers a literary perspective and account of the way black authors have discussed racial identity formation from the turn of the century through the start of the twenty-first century. I highlight many variations of misrecognition and racial performance as a response to America's obsession with race.

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Erickson, Stacy M. "Animals-as-Trope in the Selected Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2227/.

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In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African-American women's fiction is relational and expresses these writers' "ethic of caring" that stems from their folk and womanist world view. Found primarily in slave narratives and in domestic fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatic animal metaphors and/or similes provide direct analogies between the treatment of African-Americans and animals. Here, these writers often engage in rhetoric that challenges pro-slavery apologists, who attempted to disprove the humanity of African-Americans by portraying them as animals fit to be enslaved. Animals, therefore, become the metaphor of both the abolitionist and the slavery apologist for all that is not human. The second function of animals-as-trope in the fiction of African-American women writers goes beyond the pragmatic goal of proving African-Americans's common humanity, even though one could argue that this goal is still present in contemporary African-American fiction. Animals-as-trope also functions to express the African-American woman writer's understanding that 1) all oppressions stem from the same source; 2) that the division between nature/culture is a false onethat a universal connection exists between all living creatures; and 3) that an ethic of caring, or relational epistemology, can be extended to include non-human animals. Twentieth-century African-American writers such as Hurston, Walker, and Morrison participate in what anthropologists term, "neototemism," which is the contemporary view that humankind is part of nature, or a vision that Morrison would most likely attribute to the "folk." This perspective places their celebration of the continuous relations between humans and animals within a spiritual, indeed, tribal, cosmological construction. What makes these particular writers primarily different from their literary mothers, however, is a stronger sense that they are reclaiming the past, both an African and African-American history. What I hope to contribute with this dissertation is a new perspective of African-American women writers' literary tradition via their usage of animals as an expression of their "ethic of caring" and their awareness that all oppression stems from a single source.

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Wellborn, Brecken. "Musicals and the Margins: African-Americans, Women, and Queerness in the 21st Century American Musical." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2018. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1404583/.

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This thesis provides an overview of the various ways in which select marginalized identities are represented within the twenty-first century American musical film. The first intention of this thesis is to identify, define, and organize the different subgenres that appear within the twenty-first century iterations of the musical film. The second, and principal, intention of this thesis is to explore contemporary representations of African-Americans, women, and queerness throughout the defined subgenres. Within this thesis, key films are analyzed from within each subgenre to understand these textual representations.

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CHINCOLI, Veronica. "Black North American and Caribbean music in European metropolises : a transnational perspective of Paris and London music scenes (1920s-1950s)." Doctoral thesis, European University Institute, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/62230.

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Defence date: 15 April 2019
Examining Board: Professor Stéphane Van Damme, European University Institute; Professor Laura Downs, European University Institute; Professor Catherine Tackley, University of Liverpool; Professor Pap Ndiaye, SciencesPo
This thesis examines black music circulation in the urban spaces of London and Paris. It shows the complexity of the evolutionary processes of black musical genres, which occurred during the late imperial period (1920s-1950s) within the urban music scenes of two imperial metropolises, and how they played an important role on the entertainment circuit. Both cities functioned as sites of crossfertilisation for genres of music that were co-produced in a circulation between empires and Europe. Musicians of various origins met in the urban spaces of the two cities. The convergence and intermingling of musical cultures that musicians had brought with them produced new sounds. This process was influenced by a minority group (blacks), but had a significant and lasting influence on the musical world. By creating an historical account of the encounters and exchanges between people of different origins within the music scenes, this thesis examines music development and the complexity of processes of racialisation according to their historical locality and meaning. Using a variety of sources including police reports, government documents, interviews, guidebooks and newspapers, this work contributes to widen the perspective of historical studies on music developments, emphasising their social and spatial dimensions, which are fundamental for the exploration of music scenes, in general, and for the spread of black genres of music in particular. Black music styles spread internationally, but were produced in several specific locations where music industry infrastructure was developing. In the urban spaces of the music scenes of London and Paris social networks were formed by various actors - both blacks and whites - and were crucial for music production and reception; different perceptions of blackness, processes of competition, and debates on authenticity emerged; and processes of regulation and negotiation underpinned the intervention of public authorities.
Chapter 4 'Black Music Styles as Vehicles for Trans-racial Interplay: Practices of Learning, Perceptions of Blackness and Commercialisation of Music' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article “Black Music Styles as Vehicles for Transnational and Trans-Racial Exchange: Perceptions of Blackness in the Music Scenes of London and Paris (1920s-1950s),” (2017) in the journal 'Zapruder world'

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Wolfe, Andrea P. "Black mothers and the nation : claiming space and crafting signification for the black maternal body in American women's narratives of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation, 1852-2001." CardinalScholar 1.0, 2010. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1560845.

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“Black Mothers and the Nation” tracks the ways that texts produced by United States women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries position the black maternal body as subversive to the white patriarchal power structure for which it labored and that has acted in many ways to abject it from the national body. This study points to the ways in which the black mother’s subversive potential has been repeatedly, violently, and surreptitiously circumscribed in some quarters even as it succeeds in others. Several important thematic threads run throughout the chapters of this study, sometimes appearing in clear relationship to the texts discussed and sometimes underwriting their analysis in less obvious ways: the functioning of the black maternal body to both support the construction of and undermine white womanhood in slavery and in the years beyond; the reclamation of the maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; the resistance of black mother figures to oppressive discourses surrounding their bodies and reproduction; and, finally, the figurative and literal location of the black mother in a national body politic that has simultaneously used and abjected it over the course of centuries. Using these lenses, this study focuses on a grouping of women’s literature that depicts slavery and its legacy for black women and their bodies. The narratives discussed in this study explore the intersections of the issues outlined above in order to get at meaningful expressions of black maternal identity. By their very nature as representations of historical record and regional and national realities, these texts speak to the problematic placement of black maternal bodies within the nation, beginning in the antebellum era and continuing through the present; in other words, these slavery, Reconstruction, and segregation narratives connect personal and physical experiences of maternity to the national body.
The subordination of embodied power : sentimental representations of the black maternal body in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl -- Recuperating the body : the black mother's reclamation of embodied presence and her reintegration into the black community in Pauline Hopkins's Contending forces and Toni Morrison's Beloved -- The narrative power of the black maternal body : resisting and exceeding visual economies of discipline in Margaret Walker's Jubilee and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose -- Mapping black motherhood onto the nation : the black maternal body and the body politic in Lillian Smith's Strange fruit and Alice Randall's The wind done gone -- Michelle Obama in context.
Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only
Department of English

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Ciobanu, Jennifer Odom. ""The Wider View": Engaging a New Generation of Singers through African-American Art Song." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2010. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc31528/.

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Through studying the poetry and its context, the lives of the poets and composers, and the musical choices which emerged from these combined influences, students of the "Millennial" generation may experience a deeper connection to art song and its role in defining and reflecting national character. Not yet a part of the traditional canon of American art song, the songs of African-American composers are of particular value in this regard, offering teachers, students, and recitalists less frequently-performed repertoire to explore. Representing a broad spectrum of literary and cultural influences, these songs are just as diverse, multi-faceted, and full of variety as any other body of art song repertoire and richly contribute to the past and present life of the genre. Going beyond the music and the words can only reinforce the study of technique and enrich the studio experience, while at the same time providing a multicultural learning environment which more accurately reflects the America in which these same students will become the singers and voice teachers of tomorrow.

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Scannell, John School of Media Film &amp Theatre UNSW. "James Brown: apprehending a minor temporality." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Media, Film and Theatre, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/26955.

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This thesis is concerned with popular music's working of time. It takes the experience of time as crucial to the negotiation of social, political or, more simply, existential, conditions. The key example analysed is the funk style invented by legendary musician James Brown. I argue that James Brown's funk might be understood as an apprehension of a minor temporality or the musical expression of a particular form of negotiation of time by a minor culture. Precursors to this idea are found in the literature of the stream of consciousness style and, more significantly for this thesis, in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the cinema in his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. These examples are all concerned with the indeterminate unfolding of lived time and where the reality of temporal indeterminacy will take precedence over the more linear conventions of traditional narrative. Deleuze???s Cinema books account for such a shift in emphasis from the narrative depiction of movement through time the movement-image to a more direct experience of the temporal the time-image, and I will trace a similar shift in the history of popular music. For Deleuze, the change in the relation of images to time is catalysed by the intolerable events of World War II. In this thesis, the evolution of funk will be seen to reflect the existential change experienced by a generation of African-Americans in the wake of the civil-rights movement. The funk groove associated with the music of James Brown is discussed as an aesthetic strategy that responds to the existential conditions that grew out of the often perceived failure of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Funk provided an aesthetic strategy that allowed for the constitution of a minor temporality, involving a series of temporal negotiations that eschew more hegemonic, common sense, compositions of time and space. This has implications for the understanding of much of the popular music that has followed funk. I argue that the understanding of the emergence of funk, and of the contemporary electronic dance music styles which followed, would be enhanced by taking this ontological consideration of the experiential time of minorities into account. I will argue that funk and the electronic dance musics that followed might be seen as articulations of minority expression, where the time-image style of their musical compositions reflect the post-soul eschewing of a narratively driven, common sense view of historical time.

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Wellborn, Brecken. "Musicals and the Margins: African-Americans, Women, and Queerness in the Twenty-First Century American Musical." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2012. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1404583/.

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This thesis provides an overview of the various ways in which select marginalized identities are represented within the twenty-first century American musical film. The first intention of this thesis is to identify, define, and organize the different subgenres that appear within the twenty-first century iterations of the musical film. The second, and principal, intention of this thesis is to explore contemporary representations of African-Americans, women, and queerness throughout the defined subgenres. Within this thesis, key films are analyzed from within each subgenre to understand these textual representations.

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Pugh-Patton, Danette Marie. "Images and lyrics: Representations of African American women in blues lyrics written by black women." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2007. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/3235.

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The purpose of this thesis is to examine to what extent representations of double jeopardy and the stereotypical images of African American females: Mammy, Matriarch, Sapphire, and Strong Black Woman emerge in the blues lyrics of Alberta Hunter, Gertrude "Ma" Rainy, Memphis Minnie, and Victoria Spivey, using the theoretical framework of Black feminist rhetorical critique. The findings in this research entail several meanings regarding the lives of African American women during the 1920s and 1930s. Representations of racism, sexism, and classism also appear in the theme of relationships with various subthemes. The focus of this study is to explore the evolution of Black music and examine the role women have played in both the development and advancement of the blues genre. Additionally, the study will explore various concepts of cultural identity development in order to establish the process of how identity is constructed and negotiated in African Americans specifically African American women.

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Morales, Mariah. "Children of Hispaniola: Báez and Duval-Carrie´, Mending the Future by Visually Exploring a Turbulent Past and Present." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1526269413936894.

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Bird, Lori. "Beauty in Bronzeville." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2004. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/BirdL2004.pdf.

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Van, Patterson Cameron. "A Black Presence Disclosed in Absence: The Politics of Difference in Contemporary Art." Thesis, Harvard University, 2011. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10050.

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As an interdisciplinary project that integrates African and African American Studies, critical race theory, and Art History, this dissertation attempts to enrich our understanding of the politics of difference in contemporary art by interrogating the formal practices of artists and the social significance of their work. The artwork discussed reflects a pattern of creative engagement with archival institutions and documents that is characteristic of contemporary artists who are concerned with questions of consumption and the body; representation and erasure; the social construction of race and space; and the relationship between history, memory, and identity. Taken together, these themes constitute a discursive landscape within contemporary art that is central to the principle question raised here—namely, how do social genres of difference and relations of power influence artistic practices of representation, curatorial display, and reception? In an attempt to both answer and reverse the direction of this question, this text presents insightful perspectives from different artists on the complex relationship between art and society. Using the politics of difference as a lens through which to examine the aforementioned themes in contemporary art, I argue that the artists under consideration are transforming the meaning of race in post-slavery societies throughout the black diaspora. Through various creative practices, these artists are shifting the terms, coordinates, and representations of difference seen in the archive in order to reimagine the language of identity in the twenty-first century. Fundamentally, their work challenges the way certain bodies are recognized—compelling us, as viewers, to reinterpret the past from alternative and critical perspectives. Moreover, by focusing on the disclosure of a black presence in western cultures through the comparative formal and historical analysis of contemporary works of art that call our attention to misrepresentation, commodification, invisibility, and displacement, this dissertation contributes to developing conversations about how contemporary artists challenge dominant narratives and representational aesthetics. Through their work, these artists expand our conception of the archive—disclosing the overlapping ways in which objects, images, words, signs, ideas, ads, bodies, and spaces register social and historical meaning through the demarcation of racialized difference. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how art can transform the way we see and represent ideas of difference, and therein, the way we see and represent ourselves.
African and African American Studies

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Burgess, Rachel. "Dementure." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1289927073.

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De, Wagter Caroline. "Mouths on fire with songs: negotiating multi-ethnic identities on the contemporary North american stage." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210237.

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A travers une étude interculturelle détaillée et comparée de la production théâtrale minoritaire canadienne et américaine, ma thèse cherche à mettre en lumière les les apports thématiques et esthétiques du théâtre multi-ethnicque nord-américain contemporain à la tradition anglo-américaine du 20ème siècle. Les communautés asiatiques, africaines et aborigènes sont retenues comme poste d'observation privilégié de l'expression esthétique de la condition multiculturelle postcoloniale dans le théâtre nord-américain de la période allant de 1972 à nos jours. Sur base d'un corpus de pièces de théâtre, ma recherche m'a permis de redéfinir les grandes articulations des notions d'hybridité, d'identité et de communauté/nation postcoloniale.

Through a detailed cross-cultural approach of the English Canadian and American minority theatrical production, my thesis aims to identify the thematic and aesthetic contributions of multi-ethnic North American drama to the Anglo-American tradition of the 20th century. My study examines North American drama from the vantage points of African, Asian, and Native communities from 1972 until today. Relying on a number of case studies, my research opened up new avenues for rethinking the notions of hybridity and identity in relation to the postcolonial community/nation.

Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Upton, Corbett Earl 1970. "Canon and corpus: The making of American poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11286.

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viii, 233 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This dissertation argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" I mean extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry. Through case studies, I examine longstanding assumptions about these poets and the literary histories and myths surrounding their legendary texts. In carefully historicized readings of these and other iconic poems, I elucidate the pressure a single poem can exert on a poet's reputation and on American poetry broadly. I study the iconic poem in the context of the poet's corpus to demonstrate its role within the poet's oeuvre and the role assigned to it by canon makers. By tracing a poem's reception, I aim to identify the national, periodic, political, and formal boundaries these poems enforce and the distortions they create. Because iconic poems often direct and justify our inclusions and exclusions, they are of particular use in clarifying persistent obstacles to the canon reformation work of the last thirty years. While anthologies have become more inclusive in their selections and self-conscious about their ideological motives, many of the practices regarding individual poets and poems have remained unchanged over the last fifty years. Even as we include more poets in the canon, we often ironically do so by isolating a particular portion of the career, impulse in the work, or even a single poem, narrowing rather than expanding the horizon of our national literature. Through close readings situated in historical and cultural contexts, I illustrate the varying effects of iconic poems on the poet, other poems, and literary history.
Committee in charge: Dr. Karen J. Ford, Chair; Dr. John T. Gage, Member; Dr. Ernesto J. Martinez, Member; Dr. Leah W. Middlebrook, Outside Member

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Moore, Elizabeth Roosevelt. "Being Black existentialism in the work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin /." Access restricted to users with UT Austin EID Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3034939.

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Washington, Julius C. "Historic preservation, history, and the African American a discussion and framework for change /." Thesis, Atlanta, Georgia. : Georgia Institute of Technology, 1992. http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA252306.

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Thesis (Master of City Planning) Georgia Institute of Technology, March 1991.
"March 6, 1992." Description based on title screen as viewed on April 8, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-126). Also available in print.

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Cosby, Bruce. "Technological politics and the political history of African-Americans." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1995. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/AAI9543185.

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This dissertation is a critical study of technopolitical issues in the history of African American people. Langdon Winner's theory of technopolitics was used to facilitate the analysis of large scale technologies and their compatibility with various political ends. I contextualized the central technopolitical issues within the major epochs of African American political history: the Atlantic slave trade, the African artisans of antebellum America, and the American Industrial Age. Throughout this study I have sought to correct negative stereotypes and to show how "technological gauges" were employed to belittle people of African descent. This research also has shown that the mainstream notion that Africans had no part in the history of technology is false. This study identifies and analyses specific technologies that played a major role in the political affairs of Africans and African Americans. Those technologies included nautical devices, fort construction, and automatic guns in Africa, and hoes, plows, tractors, cotton gins, and the mechanical cotton pickers in America. The findings of this study suggested that African Americans have been disengaged and victimized by western technologies. This dissertation proposes how to overcome the oppressive uses of technology.

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Vaughn, Curtis L. "Freedom Is Not Enough| African Americans in Antebellum Fairfax County." Thesis, George Mason University, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3671770.

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Prior to the Civil War, the lives of free African Americans in Fairfax County, Virginia were both ordinary and extraordinary. Using the land as the underpinning of their existence, they approached life using methods that were common to the general population around them. Fairfax was a place that was undergoing a major transition from a plantation society to a culture dominated by self-reliant people operating small farms. Free African Americans who were able to gain access to land were a part of this process allowing them to discard the mantle of dependency associated with slavery. Nevertheless, as much as ex-slaves and their progeny attempted to live in the mainstream of this rural society, they faced laws and stereotypes that the county's white population did not have to confront. African Americans' ability to overcome race-based obstacles was dependent upon using their labor for their own benefit rather than for the comfort and profit of a former master or white employer.

When free African Americans were able to have access to the labor of their entire family, they were more likely to become self-reliant, but the vestiges of the slave system often stymied independence particularly for free women. Antebellum Fairfax had many families who had both slave and free members and some families who had both white and African American members. These divisions in families more often adversely impacted free African American women who could not rely on the labor of an enslaved husband or the lasting attention of a white male. Moreover, families who remained intact were more likely to be able to care for children and dependent aging members, while free African American females who headed households often saw their progeny subjected to forced apprenticeships in order for the family to survive.

Although the land provided the economic basis for the survival of free African Americans, the county's location along the border with Maryland and the District of Columbia also played a role in the lives of the county's free African American population. Virginia and its neighbors remained slave jurisdictions until the Civil War, but each government wished to stop the expansion of slavery within its borders. Each jurisdiction legislated against movement of new slaves into their territory and attempted to limit the movement of freed slaves into their jurisdictions. Still, in a compact border region restricting such movement was difficult. African Americans used the differences of laws initially to petition for freedom. As they gained access to the court system, free African Americans expanded their use of the judiciary by bringing their grievances before the courts which sided with the African American plaintiffs with surprising regularity. Although freed slaves and their offspring had few citizenship rights, they were able to use movement across borders and the ability to gain a hearing for their grievances to achieve increasing autonomy from their white neighbors.

No one story from the archives of the Fairfax County Courthouse completely defines the experience of free African Americans prior to the Civil War, but collectively they chronicle the lives of people who were an integral part of changing Fairfax County during the period. After freedom, many African Americans left Fairfax either voluntarily or through coercion. For those who stayed, their lives were so inter-connected both socially and economically with their white neighbors that any history of the county cannot ignore their role in the evolution of Fairfax.

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Grimm, Kevin E. "Symbol of Modernity: Ghana, African Americans, and the Eisenhower Administration." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1334240469.

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Chapi, Aicha. "Towards a reading of Toni Morrison's fiction : African-American history, the arts and contemporary theory /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1995. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19671441.

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Kendall, Clayton Maxwell. "International Activism of African Americans in the Interwar Period." ScholarWorks @ UVM, 2016. http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/564.

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African Americans have a rich history of activism, but their involvement in affecting change during the interwar period is often overlooked in favor of post-Civil War and post-World War II coverage. African Americans also have a rich history of reaching out to the international community when it comes to that activism. This examination looks to illuminate the effect of the connections African Americans made with the rest of the world and how that shaped their worldview and their activism on the international stage. Through the use of newspapers and first-hand accounts, it becomes clear how African American figures and world incidents shaped what the African American community in the United States took interest in. In Paris, however, musicians explored a world free from Jim Crow, and the Pan-African Congresses created and encouraged a sense of unity among members of the black race around the globe. When violence threatened Ethiopians through the form of an Italian invasion, African Americans chose to speak out, and when they saw the chance at revenge against fascists they joined the Spanish Republic in their fight against Francisco Franco. In the interwar period African Americans took to heart the idea of black unity and chose to act in the interest of the black race on the international stage. Their ideas and beliefs changed over the course of the two decades between the World Wars, eventually turning thoughts into actions and lashing out against any injustice that befell any member of the black race.

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Phiri, Aretha Myrah Muterakuvanthu. "Toni Morrison and the literary canon whiteness, blackness, and the construction of racial identity." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002255.

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Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, observes the pervasive silence that surrounds race in nineteenth-century canonical literature. Observing the ways in which the “Africanist” African-American presence pervades this literature, Morrison has called for an investigation of the ways in which whiteness operates in American canonical literature. This thesis takes up that challenge. In the first section, from Chapters One through Three, I explore how whiteness operates through the representation of the African-American figure in the works of three eminent nineteenth-century American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The texts studied in this regard are: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This section is not concerned with whether these texts constitute racist literature but with the ways in which the study of race, particularly whiteness, reveals the contradictions and insecurities that attend (white American) identity. As such, Morrison’s own fiction, written in response to white historical representations of African-Americans also deserves attention. The second section of this thesis focuses on Morrison’s attempt to produce an authentically “black” literature. Here I look at two of Morrison’s least studied but arguably most contentious novels particularly because of what they reveal of Morrison’s complex position on race. In Chapter Four I focus on Tar Baby and argue that this novel reveals Morrison’s somewhat essentialist position on blackness and racial, cultural, and gendered identity, particularly as this pertains to responsibilities she places on the black woman as culture-bearer. In Chapter Five I argue that Paradise, while taking a particularly challenging position on blackness, reveals Morrison’s evolving position on race, particularly her concern with the destructive nature of internalized racism. This thesis concludes that while racial identities have very real material consequences, whiteness and blackness are ideological and social constructs which, because of their constructedness, are fallible and perpetually under revision.

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Pinkham, Caitlin E. "The integration of African Americans in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Massachusetts." Thesis, University of Massachusetts Boston, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10010722.

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The Civilian Conservation Corps employed young white and black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. In 1935 Robert Fechner, the Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, ordered the segregation of Corps camps across the country. Massachusetts’ camps remained integrated due in large part to low funding and a small African American population. The experiences of Massachusetts’ African American population present a new general narrative of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Federal government imposed a three percent African American quota, ensuring that African Americans participated in Massachusetts as the Civilian Conservation Corps expanded. This quota represents a Federal acknowledgement of the racism African Americans faced and an attempt to implement affirmative action against these hardships.

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Maris-Wolf, Edward Downing. "Between Slavery and Freedom: African Americans in the Great Dismal Swamp 1763-1863." W&M ScholarWorks, 2002. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626358.

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Hoak, Michael Shane. "The Men in Green: African Americans and the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942." W&M ScholarWorks, 2002. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626375.

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Fitchue, M. Anthony. "Situating the contributions of Alain Leroy Locke within the history of American Adult Education, 1920-1953 /." Access Digital Full Text version, 1995. http://pocketknowledge.tc.columbia.edu/home.php/bybib/1179074x.

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Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995.
Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Kathleen Loughlin. Dissertation Committee: Matthais Finger. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 431-463).

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Marvel, Heather M. SoRelle James M. "The history of African Americans in Fort Worth, Texas, 1875-1980." Waco, Tex. : Baylor University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/5100.

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Trembanis, Sarah L. ""They opened the door too late": African Americans and baseball, 1900-1947." W&M ScholarWorks, 2006. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623506.

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During Jim Crow, the sport of baseball served as an important arena for African American resistance and negotiation. as a (mostly) black enterprise, the Negro Leagues functioned as part of a larger African American movement to establish black commercial ventures during segregation. Moreover, baseball's special status as the national pastime made it a significant public symbol for African American campaigns for integration and civil rights.;This dissertation attempts to interrogate the experience and significance of black baseball during Jim Crow during the first half of the twentieth century. Relying on newspapers, magazines, memoirs, biographies, and previously published oral interviews, this work looks at resistance and political critique that existed in the world of black sport, particularly in the cultural production of black baseball.;Specifically, this dissertation argues that in a number of public and semi-public arenas, African Americans used baseball as a literal and figurative space in which they could express dissatisfaction with the strictures of Jim Crow as well as the larger societal understanding of race during the early twentieth century. African Americans asserted a counter-narrative of black racial equality and superiority through their use of physical space in ballparks and on the road during travel, through the public negotiation of black manhood on the pages of the black press, through the editorial art and photography of black periodicals, and through the employment of folktales and nicknames.;The African American experience during Jim Crow baseball and the attendant social and cultural production provide a window into the subtle and unstated black resistance to white supremacy and scientific racism. Thus this dissertation explores and identifies the political meanings of black baseball.

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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.

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Coil, William Russell. "Mayoral politics and new deal political culture: James Rhodes and the African-American voting bloc in Columbus, Ohio, 1943-1951." The Ohio State University, 1996. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1399627321.

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Atmaca, Munevver. "Crossing the Divide: Voice and Representation of African Americans : Kathryn Stockett and Harper Lee: - I understand the weight of history but can I be your sister?" Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för kultur och lärande, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-30602.

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This project examines how the oppression of African Americans, especially those in domestic service to white families, is reflected in literature. The two works The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird will be the main sources. I investigate issues of race and skin colour, as well as the depiction of the ‘black’ and‘ white’ races in America in literature. Yet I will also make use of writers on African American issues to evaluate the writings on the main works concerned. What I will try to establish is whether the two authors (Kathryn Stockett and Harper Lee) effectively give a voice to the less empowered African-American segment of US society (this question of empowerment will be addressed below). And most importantly, I attempt to understand how two white women from relatively privileged backgrounds can reach across the supposed racial divide and, through aesthetic expression. I contend that peaceful protest and the mobilization of the arts in all its forms raised awareness of the terrible wrongs suffered by African Americans in the timeframe concerned in this work – anawareness raised not just in the USA but also around the world - and led to a new situation in which discrimination is not only illegal, but also widely acknowledged as deeply wrong.

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Nakasa, Dennis Sipho. "The dialectic between African and Black aesthetics in some South African short stories." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22394.

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Most current studies on 'African' and/or 'Black' literature in South Africa appear to ignore the contradictions underlying the valuative concepts 'African' and 'Black'. This (Jamesonian) unconsciousness has led, primarily, to a situation where writers and critics assume generally that the concepts 'African' and 'Black' are synonymous and interchangeable. This study argues that such an attitude either unconsciously represses an awareness of the distinctive aspects of the worldview connotations of these concepts or deliberately suppresses them. The theoretical and pragmatic approach which this study adopts to explore the distinctive aspects of the worldview connotations of these concepts takes the form, initially, of a critique of such assumptions and their connotations. It is argued that any misconceptions about the relations between the concepts 'African' and 'Black' can only be elucidated through a rigorous and distinct definition of each of these concepts and the respective world views embodied in them. Each of the variables of these definitions is also examined thoroughly through an application of, inter alia, Frederick Jameson's 'dialectical' theory of textual criticism, Pierre Macherey's 'theory of literary production' and also through the post-colonial notions of 'hybridity' and 'syncreticity' propounded by Bill Ashcroft et.al (eds). In this way the study examines the dialectical interplay between, for instance, such oppositional notions as 'African' and 'Western' (place-conscious), 'Black' and 'White' (race-conscious), and other forms of ideological 'dominance' and 'marginality' reflected in the 'African' and/or 'Black' writers' motivations for the acquisition, appropriation and uses of the language of the 'other' (i.e. English) and its literary discourse in South Africa, Africa and elsewhere in the world. A close textual reading of the stories in Mothobi Mutloatse's (ed) Forced Landing, Mbulelo Mzamane's (ed) Hungry Flames underlies an examination of the processes of anthologisation and their implications of aesthetic collectivism, reconstruction and world view monolithicism which repress the distinctive world outlooks of the stories in these anthologies. The notions of aesthetic monolithicism implicit in each of these anthologies are interrogated via the editors' truistic assumptions about the organic nature of the relations between the concepts 'African' and 'Black'. The notion of a monolithic 'African' and 'Black' aesthetic is further decentred through a close textual reading of the uses of the 'African' and 'Black' valuative concepts in the short story collections The Living and the Dead and In Corner B by Es'kia (formerly Ezekiel) Mphahlele. The humanistic pronouncements in Mphahlele' s critical and short story texts suggest various ways of resolving the racial demarcations in both the 'Black' and 'White' South African literary formations. According to Mphahlele, a predominant racial consciousness inherent in the racial capitalist mode of economic production has deprived South African literature and culture an opportunity of creating a national humanistic and 'Afrocentric' form of aesthetic consciousness. The logical consequence of such a deprivation has been that the racial impediments toward the formation of a single national literature will have to be dismantled before the vision of a humanistic and 'Afrocentric' aesthetic can be realised in South Africa. The dismantling of both the 'Black' and 'White' monolithic forms of consciousness may pave the way toward the attainment of a synthetic and place-centred humanistic aesthetic. Such a dismantling of racial monolithicism will, hopefully, stimulate a debate on the question of an equally humanistic economic mode of production.

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Holder, Meghan Brooke. "Strange Fruit: Images of African Americans in Advertising Cards and Postcards, 1860-1930." W&M ScholarWorks, 2012. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626680.

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Owens, Kris B. ""This racism is killing me inside" : African American identity and Chappelle's show : a generic criticism." Virtual Press, 2008. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1397647.

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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.

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Campo, Allison Michelle. "Nineteenth Century Enslaved African Americans' Coping Strategies for the Stresses of Enslavement in Virginia." W&M ScholarWorks, 2015. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539626789.

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40

Moss, Janice W. "The history and advancement of African-Americans in advertising from 1895 to 1995." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1996. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/3667.

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This study examined the history and advancement of African-Americans in advertising from 1895 to 1995 by analyzing images and portrayals of African-Americans in the print and broadcasting media. In addition, the study traced the growth of the African-American consumer market which was created largely by Black businesses. Pertinent information regarding the history and progress of African-Americans in advertising was obtained through interviews conducted by the author with media and advertising industry professionals from regional and national corporations. The conclusions of this study show that in today's contemporary society the interaction and inclusion of African-Americans in the advertising industry reveal positive and progressive signs. However, forces such as racism, discrimination, and segregation slowed the progress of Black Americans in advertising for decades. Nonetheless, America has witnessed progress from the largely negative advertising images of Aunt Jemima and Sambo to a photograph of sports hero Michael Jordan on a Wheaties cereal box.

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Chambers, Jason P. "Getting a job and changing an image : African-Americans in the advertising industry, 1920-1975 /." The Ohio State University, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1486399160104473.

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42

Rae, Lyn MacCrostie. "A study of the versification of the African carmina latina epigraphica." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31157.

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This thesis presents a study of the metrics and prosody of the carmina latina epigraphica from the Roman provinces of North Africa, the purpose of which is to test the prevailing but unsubstantiated view that these carmina exhibit especially poor versification, and that in them can be observed a chronological decline in quality of versification. A representative corpus of dated carmina latina epigraphica africana is established, the inscriptions are subjected to an analysis of their metrics and prosody, and conclusions are drawn concerning the nature, extent and chronology of their deviation from classical standards of versification. The corpus of inscriptions has four introductory chapters, which form Part II of the study. The first describes the criteria according to which the texts have been chosen. The second, third and fourth present three premises on which analysis and interpretation of their versification are based; these concern the authorship of the carmina, the educational background of the authors, and the linguistic milieu in which they were composed. The core of the thesis is Part III, which comprises the texts of eighty-six dated carmina, analyses of their versification and commentaries on several features of their composition. Observations are offered regarding: the nature and possible causes of unclassical metric and prosodic phenomena; the extent to which an author deviates from literary norms, and the effect of his errors on a quantitative reading of the poem; a brief assessment of each author's understanding of and competence in the composition of classical quantitative verse; the graphic disposition of the text and its effect on the reader's recognition and recitation of the poetic content. Conclusions drawn from the data compiled in Part III include the following. Unclassical metric features characteristic of the corpus include the combination of different meters in one poem, the composition of hypermetric and hypometric lines and the intermixture of prose with lines of verse. Such phenomena are found in about one-half the texts. Prosodical irregularities fall into two main types: those that can be considered classical (ascribable to an author's application of classical licences); and those that are errors, most of which are attributable to the intrusion of certain unclassical phonological features of an author's everyday speech. Prosodical errors occur in about three-quarters of the texts. Four main observations are offered regarding the distribution of errors in the corpus. The extent to which individual authors adhere to literary norms varies widely; the majority of versifiers, however, have adhered sufficiently well that their works can be read quantitatively without serious hindrance. The presence of metric deviations in a poem carries no chronological significance, for these are fairly evenly distributed throughout the corpus; a general chronological decline in adherence to classical prosody is discernible from the first century to the fifth, with a reverse in the decline seen in poems dated to the last three centuries of the period. The presence in the corpus of several poems of unsound versification of very early date and of poems of sound versification of very late date proves that the practice of some scholars of dating otherwise undatable carmina according to their quality of versification is unsafe. Pagan authors tend to adhere slightly more closely than their Christian counterparts to classical metrics and prosody. Poems of reasonably sound metrics and prosody tend to be inscribed in such a way as to facilitate the reader's recognition and recitation of their poetic content, while poems of poor quality of versification tend to be inscribed haphazardly. Appendix I provides full scansion of each carmen. Appendix II lists initia carminum.
Arts, Faculty of
Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of
Graduate

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43

Sturkey, William Mychael. "The Heritage of Hub City: The Struggle for Opportunity in the New South, 1865-1964." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343155676.

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Bouyer, Anthony L. "African American Males’ Ideas about School Success: A Research Study." University of Toledo / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=toledo1502211217825789.

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Ferguson, Benny Pryor. "The Bands of the Confederacy: An Examination of the Musical and Military Contributions of the Bands and Musicians of the Confederate States of America." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1987. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc798486/.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the bands of the armies of the Confederate States of America. This study features appendices of libraries and archives collections visited in ten states and Washington D.C., and covers all known Confederate bands. Some scholars have erroneously concluded that this indicated a lack of available primary source materials that few Confederate bands served the duration of the war. The study features appendices of libraries and archives collections visited in ten states and Washington, D.C., and covers all known Confederate bands. There were approximately 155 bands and 2,400 bandsmen in the service of the Confederate armies. Forty bands surrendered at Appomattox and many others not listed on final muster rolls were found to have served through the war. While most Confederate musicians and bandsmen were white, many black musicians were regularly enlisted soldiers who provided the same services. A chapter is devoted to the contributions of black Confederate musicians.

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Jackson, Jackie. "Reconstruction the most prolific period in Black history /." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 2007. http://www.tren.com/search.cfm?p031-0171.

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Simpson, Tiwanna Michelle. "'She has her country marks very conspicuous in the face' : African culture and community in early Georgia /." The Ohio State University, 2003. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1486549482672375.

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Powell, Susie Hawley. "Black Reconstruction in Norfolk, Virginia, 1861-1870 : the struggle for change /." Thesis, This resource online, 1992. http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-09052009-040509/.

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Therrien, Denis. "La littérature de la décolonisation en Afrique noire : étude d'un phénomène d'émergence : le roman d'expression anglaise et française." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=63299.

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50

Jones, Derrick Paul. "The Policing Strategy of Racial Profiling and its Impact on African Americans." ScholarWorks, 2017. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/4000.

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Prior literature on racial profiling indicates that African Americans have been mistreated, harassed, and discriminated against by law enforcement because of this controversial policing strategy. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to bridge the gap in knowledge by analyzing the impact of racial profiling on African American adults and discover whether it contributed to unintentional violence in racial and ethnic minority communities. The theoretical framework for this research study was critical race theory. The research question for this study was: How does racial profiling impact African Americans' perception of the police? This phenomenological research study used purposeful sampling to locate 7 African American participants that were interviewed regarding their lived experience with racial profiling. The data collected from the interviews were organized, sorted, and coded to reveal patterns and themes. The findings revealed that the participants believed that they were discriminated against, harassed, treated like criminals, and profiled by the police because of the color of their skin without just cause. Themes that were identified from the data collected and analyzed revealed that the perceptions of the police contributed to African Americans resentment of the police, which frequently results in violence and loss of human life. The implications for positive social change for this study includes the potential redesign of policing and the criminal justice system, the development of new crime fighting strategies that do not involve racial profiling, the creation of new federal and state laws prohibiting racial profiling, cultural awareness and cultural competency education for all police officers, and improved relationships between police and the African American community.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'African Americans – History and criticism'

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