Not available / text

Abstract not available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2000.

The purpose of this study were three-fold: First, this study examined occupation prestige ratings of African American adolescents using a modified version of the Hatt-North (1947) Occupation Prestige Scale. A second purpose investigated the effects of cultural mistrust on occupation prestige preferences, as well as aspirations and expectations. Finally, this study examined the effects of cultural mistrust and achievement motivation on the occupational aspirations of Black youth.

Thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Masters of Arts in Political Studies to the Faculty Humanities, School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / Blackness has become a right to death that sees in death its almost essential property. The essence of blackness, its origin or its possibility, would be this right to death; but a death denuded of that ...sovereignty that gains from death its own sacrificial mastery ... and maintains itself in it. This is life as the work of death, a work born of fidelity to death, but death without transcendence (Marriot cited in Sexton 2015: 132). The advent of colonial modernity in South Africa marks the rupture of identity and being of Africans. That is, after the emergence of colonial modernity Africans cease to be Africans only but however they become black. Blackness becomes an object exclusion in the encounter with modernity. Blacks and by extension Africa is seen as being outside modern temporality inhabiting a zone of non-being and fungability. The encounter with modernity, without any doubt causes doubts in the Africans modes of existence or being and it is here that liberation and emancipatory movements/projects that have been initiated by blacks have sought to steer their lenses to try and liberate as well as understand how blacks can best live in modern conditions of racism or should there be any alternative to modern empty time. This study seeks to make an intervention, especially in South African Political studies, with concern to alternative political strategies that have not been take into consideration. [No abstract provided. Information taken from introduction]. / MT2017

Thesis (M.Fine Arts)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Arts, 2016. / This paper will be an analysis of the covers and contents of the South African editions of Glamour magazine from September 2014 to August 2015 and True Love magazine from September 2014 to August 2015. The analysis will consider the effects of: globalisation; globalised culture and consumption; and perceptions of race and skin colour, (specifically the notion of colourism) in South Africa. Colourism is a prejudicial system that renders value and perpetuates social hierarchies along perceived tonal difference in skin colour. It has been asserted by writers like Deborah Gabriel and Nicole Fleetwood that this value system exists within communities of people of colour and is perpetuated by mainstream media, but maintains a somewhat obscure presence. I will consider the mechanisms that inform this colour system and will show how globalisation works to facilitate colourism. Finally, I aim to explain how skin colour extends beyond the body and define the effects of global cultural interaction, showing that colourism is not simply about skin colour and tone, but about economic, social, and political realities. / MT2017

Thesis (M.A (Psychology))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2016. / The purpose of the research was to explore issues of identity amongst young, English speaking black middle class women focusing on belonging and alienation. Qualitative research using narrative interviews was conducted with 10 middle class women, aged between 20 and 35 years, who were among the first cohort of black children to attend model C schools at the end of the apartheid era and be taught in English. Several themes and findings were identified, starting with the multigenerational influence on the journey into being assimilated into the English language and culture. Grandmothers and parents experienced tensions between loss of indigenous languages and gaining class mobility for their daughters. Participants also unpacked their journeys of being assimilated into the English language and whiteness and the traumatic experiences they went through as their childhoods were racialised and they became positioned as inferior black people. These traumatic experiences of race continued into their adulthood and intersected with gender, class and language, as the women were positioned as ‘cultural clones’ in the workplace. Language also influenced the women’s intimate relationships as they positioned English speaking male partners as providers and therefore potential life partners. Issues of hair and skin colour were also found to be significant identity markers through insertion into western culture through language, and blackness is actively redefined, resisted and reclaimed. This shows how our identities are fragmented and fluid, allowing the women to experience multiple identities and make them work. The women experience tensions between the loss of their mother tongue and culture, and the positive gains of class mobility that they attribute almost solely to their adoption of the English language as their primary (or only) language of communication. They are alienated from their communities because of their immersion into English and western culture but they are actively generating a new sense of belonging and identity within a new imagined community of English speaking black middle class women / GR2017

[pt] Este trabalho busca conhecer a trajetória de vida dos universitários provenientes dos pré-vestibulares comunitários e populares em rede, que foram beneficiados com as ações afirmativas da PUC-Rio desde 1993, após a sua formatura na graduação, com especial ênfase nos indivíduos da população negra. Para tanto, procurou-se conhecer a atual realidade profissional desses indivíduos e o impacto da sua formação universitária sobre sua vida material e sobre suas relações com a família e com a comunidade de onde são provenientes. Ao empreender esta análise, que é política e simbolicamente relevante, procura-se descrever aspectos ainda desconhecidos, tanto no que diz respeito à estes novos profissionais e sua entrada no mercado de trabalho, quanto ao acesso a bens culturais recentemente aberto para os indivíduos da população negra. Assim, para além de mapear a trajetória dos 14 indivíduos entrevistados, procurou-se entender as questões colocadas a partir de sua formação, para saber se o acesso ao ensino superior e a passagem pela universidade tem de fato ampliado os seus direitos de cidadania. A intenção é a de contribuir com informações que permitam avaliar se as perspectivas integradoras da população negra, muito presentes nos discursos sobre ações afirmativas, tanto nas universidades, como na esfera do trabalho, têm sido capazes de transformar os conteúdos subjacentes às relações raciais no contexto sociocultural brasileiro. / [en] This work deals with life histories of college students from PUC-Rio, after their graduation, who were included in the university s affirmative action program since 1993, with special emphasis on the black population. Those students belong to social networks called community pré-vestibulares. The aim of this work is to know the present professional reality of those individuals and to measure the impact of their college education upon their material lives and their social relations within family and community. This analysis is political and symbolically relevant because will enable to describe unknown aspects of the present professional life of the black population. Those aspects relate to day-to-day experiences of their entrance to the job market, as well as to the recently open access to a new cultural reality to the black population. The research is based on the interview of 14 individuals, whose life histories were described and analyzed with the purpose of understanding the impact of their professional training upon their rights as citizens of Brazilian society. The goal is to contribute information which will enable an evaluation of the impact of the affirmative actions of higher education institutions, as well as in the job market, concerning the remaining contents of racial relations in Brazilian cultural and social life.

Through the example of students at Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, this dissertation ethnographically examines how vocality is racialized as "black" in the United States. For students at Fisk, voice serves as a mechanism of speaking and singing, and mediates ideological, discursive, embodied and affective constructions of blackness. Fisk built its legacy by cultivating and promoting a specific kind of New World blackness through vocal expression, and the indispensability of Fisk's historical legacy shapes how the university continues to promote the self-worth of its students as well as a remembrance of and recommitment to the social justice and citizenship journey of black people through the 21st century. The relationships between expressive culture, the politics of racial inequality, and higher education experiences overdetermine Fisk students' vocality in relation to blackness, in addition to students' agentive choices to express and (re)form black racial identity. This dissertation traces the differences between curricular and non-curricular vocality to foreground the ways that students resist 21st century forms of racial violence and create paths towards the world they desire. The project opens with an analysis of the role of diction in the performance practice of the Fisk Jubilee Singers®. The following chapter compares the repertoire and rehearsal style of the two primary choral ensembles at Fisk. The dissertation then explores how the neo soul genre figures in the Fisk Idol vocal competition. The concluding chapter describes students' different renditions of singing the university's alma mater, "The Gold and the Blue." These analyses of students' embodied, ritualized vocality show how Fisk students' voices performatively (re)construct blackness, gender, class, genre and institutionality.

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.

The present study examined the psychological effects of racism-related stress on Asian Americans (N=866). The purpose of the current study was to investigate a stress and coping model for Asian Americans by considering culturally based coping options. As such, the study sought to understand collectivistic coping as mediating the relationship between racism-related stress and psychological distress for Asian Americans. The stress and coping model, which was tested through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), hypothesized that higher racism-related stress leads to increased use of collectivistic coping strategies, which then decreases psychological distress (depression, anxiety, hostility and defensive paranoia). It was hypothesized that higher racism-related stress would have a positive effect on more collectivistic coping strategies which would then have a negative effect (decrease) on psychological distress. Racial identity status attitudes were also included separately to understand one's experience with racism related stress to provide more information into the within group variability in racism-related stress reactions that exist among Asian Americans. Results from this study indicated that Asian Americans utilize a culturally based coping style to respond to racism-related stress. However, those coping strategies are significantly related to increased psychological distress, which is contrary to the proposed hypothesis. Although not all the hypotheses were supported, the results of the study showed an overall acceptable model fit. The results therefore provide strong evidence to support that psychological distress is experienced as a result of racism-related stress for Asian Americans, despite the use of collectivistic coping strategies.