This exploratory qualitative study describes the criteria that African American Literature professors use in defining what is African American Literature. Maulana Karenga’s black arts framework shaped the debates in the literature review and the interview protocol; furthermore, the presence or absence of the framework’s characteristics were discussed in the data analysis. The population sampled was African American Literature professors in the United States who have no less than five years experience. The primary source of data collection was in-depth interviewing. Data analysis involved open coding and axial coding. General conclusions include: (1) The core of the African American Literature definition is the black writer representing the black experience but the canon is expanding and becoming more inclusive. (2) While African American Literature is often a tool for empowerment, a wide scope is used in defining methods of empowerment. (3) Black writers should balance aesthetic and political concerns in a text.

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.

The diverse voices of African American poets from the nineteenth century have yet to receive their due. The critical gap is regrettable, because the nineteenth-century phase of the African American poetic tradition, although sparser and less philosophically unified than some later phases, nevertheless constituted a true tradition, connecting writers to one another and to writers of the coming century. Nineteenth-century black poets laid the groundwork for their artistic descendants both stylistically (by “signifyin’” on the tropes of their contemporaries) and thematically (by interrogating Euroamerican claims to exclusive political and moral authority), while building communal sites for literary and political activity such as the black press, the book club, the abolitionist circuit, and the university. In order to adequately theorize the nineteenth-century African American poetic tradition, we need a new critical narrative that would contextualize nineteenth-century African American poetry by emphasizing its interactions with various currents of literary and political enterprise in America and abroad. This study will gesture towards some of the possible outlines of such a narrative, while also suggesting a new set of hermeneutics for apprehending the achievements of early black poets, urging an examination of the early black poetic tradition in terms of performativity. A critical emphasis on performativity is particularly well-suited to the explication of nineteenth-century African American poesis for several reasons. Firstly, because the poetry so often centers around acts of repetition and revision, the primary texts are vulnerable to being misunderstood as imitative. By insisting that poetry’s meaning is generated through relationships between poets, texts, and various readers, the performative emphasis helps to spotlight the competitive and revisionary nature of much black poetry. Secondly, when African American poems are read as performances, their political dimensions come into sharp relief. This study examines the performances, personas, and prophecies of George Moses Horton, Frances Harper, Joshua McCarter Simpson, and Albery Allson Whitman in order to generate a deepened critical understanding of nineteenth-century African American poesis. / text

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Cette thèse entreprend l’étude du corpus des récits d’esclaves africains-américains publiés entre 1825 et 1861 au prisme de l’histoire du livre et de l’édition. À partir de recherches sur archives, elle met au jour les modes de publication, de circulation et de réception de récits emblématiques – ceux de Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, ou encore Harriet Jacobs – et de récits moins connus. Partant, elle remet en cause certaines idées reçues sur ces récits de la période antebellum, dont la critique considère généralement qu’ils furent publiés grâce à l’aide des sociétés antiesclavagistes, qu’ils rencontrèrent un succès considérable auprès de la classe moyenne blanche du Nord et furent tirés à des milliers d’exemplaires, et qu’ils constituèrent rapidement un genre à part dans la production littéraire de l’époque. Il s’agit dans ce travail de montrer la diversité des dispositifs éditoriaux au sein desquels les récits d’esclaves virent le jour, en même temps que de s’interroger sur le rapport des Africains-Américains au livre et à l’imprimé et sur leurs pratiques en matière de publication, à un moment où l’industrie éditoriale est encore en cours d’émergence et où les acteurs du livre ne publient guère d’ouvrages ayant trait à l’abolitionnisme (au moins jusqu’à la parution d’Uncle Tom’s Cabin de Harriet Beecher Stowe en 1852). En réinscrivant les récits d’esclaves dans le réseau de pratiques et de discours qui ont permis leur essor, et en les considérant dans leur dimension matérielle, cette thèse entend montrer la nature hétérogène et fluide d’un objet littéraire souvent perçu par la critique comme formant un tout cohérent et strictement codifié. / This dissertation is at the crossroads of two distinct disciplinary fields : African American studies and the history of the book. More specifically, it examines the publication, circulation, and reception of antebellum slave narratives—the narratives of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as a number of lesser-known works. The story of the slave narrative is well rehearsed : narratives of ex-slaves, critics say, were usually written in collaboration with white abolitionists, with antislavery societies subsidizing publication ; they met with considerable success, going through multiple editions and selling in the tens of thousands ; they were largely directed toward a northern white audience ; and they soon emerged as a distinct genre in antebellum America. None of these statements is fundamentally untrue. The overall picture they paint of antebellum slave narratives is, however, a distorted one. Slave narratives were produced through a variety of authorial economies. Investigating these economies allows to shed new light not only on the slave narrative as a genre, but also on African Americans’ print practices at a time when the publishing industry was still emerging and when book people were reluctant to publish and distribute antislavery literature—at least before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out in 1852. Acknowledging the heterogeneous and fluid nature of what is often perceived as a homogeneous and strictly codified genre gives us a better sense of how slave narratives might have been variously received and consumed in the decades preceding the Civil War.

This dissertation explores Toni Morrison's most prevalent motifs: the ghost, the orphan, and the outlaw. Each figure advances a critique of dominant narratives, specifically those that comprise history, family, and the law. In Chapter One, I argue that Morrison's ghost stories contrast two methods of memory, one that is authoritative and another that is imaginative, in order to counter the official renderings of history. Her ghosts signal forgotten aspects of American history and provide access to another storyline--one that lies in the shadows of the novel's principal narrative. This chapter compares the ghosts of Love and Home in order to show how Morrison uses ghosts as conduits of a subversive individual and communal memory. In my second chapter, I assert a reading of Morrison's orphans as blues figures. They attest to the destructive effects of race, class, and gender oppression, which render her characters biologically and culturally orphaned. I conclude this chapter by comparing Paradise and A Mercy to show how Morrison's orphaned characters posit an alternative model of kinship that is built from the shared project of liberation. In Chapter Three, I examine Morrison's treatment of the law and its foil--the outlaw. I argue that Morrison foregrounds criminality in the absence of the law and its apparatuses (courts, police) in order to subvert the social institutions that give rise to the ghost and the orphan. I compare the crimes at the heart of Tar Baby and Jazz in order to posit another notion of justice operating in Morrison's fiction. When looked at together, Morrison's triptych threatens the coherence of governing ideologies and offers a meditation on the transformative possibilities of narrative.

"'They Will Invent What They Need to Survive': Narrating Trauma in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction" analyzes novels by Octavia Butler, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and Julia Alvarez through the lens of contemporary theories of trauma, tracing the ways in which survivors struggle to construct narratives that contain and make sense of their experiences. Many of the major theorists of trauma studies emphasize the impossibility of re-capturing traumatic events through creating narratives even while recognizing that the survivor's need to tell her story persists. In my project, however, I explore the ways in which the Kindred, Stigmata, Paradise, The Joy Luck Club, Sula, The Temple of My Familiar, and In the Time of the Butterflies extend theories that insist too readily on the survivor's inability to accurately or completely re-member by depicting characters who, despite difficulty, present narrative accounts of their painful memories. In my own readings of the texts, I emphasize that the complexities highlighted by these texts ultimately foster our deeper understanding of the traumatized subject and her attempts to empower herself through testimony.

The struggle for cultural intelligibility can be clearly articulated through intersections between race, class, and socioeconomic status. Judith Butler demystifies the societal symbols responsible for denoting gender through a discussion of a stable “reality” in relation to performativity. When superimposed over Butler’s gender work, class stratifications and their relevance to cultural intelligibility reflect similar concerns presented in Butler’s work. In this work, I argue that through subversive use of black female archetypes presented by Patricia Hill Collins, strategic language, and flamboyant displays of tangible wealth, characters on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta consciously perform class to resist the policing of social boundaries and to highlight their position within liminal social spaces. However, as a result of their performativity, these women violate the liminal space by patrolling class boundaries from within their social circle.

Thesis advisor: Robert S. Lehman / Thesis advisor: Jennifer Greiman / “American Imperception” explores how early American writers investigated the role that political economy plays in the relation between sensory perception and knowledge. This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century American writers used literature to teach their readers to understand how economic forms and forms of economic activity fundamentally shape and train the sensorium to sense in historically and contextually specific ways. In “American Imperception,” I show how literature can make legible otherwise insensible forms of social and economic relations. The impossibility of sensing social and economic form—and the way in which that impossibility is rendered through literature—is what I call in this project “imperception.” Imperception describes the way in which literary form makes intelligible the structures of social, political, and economic life: structures that themselves cannot be sensed directly and which therefore cannot be directly represented by literature. “American Imperception” is focused on how literature interacts with social life within a capitalist modernity defined by the value form and the commodity form, and how literature formalizes the structures of social life through a specifically literary logic, transforming them into something that can be read where they cannot be seen, heard, felt, or represented. This dissertation draws on Karl Marx’s thinking on the senses and the suprasensible to consider how U.S. writers of the nineteenth-century mobilized literary form to make thinkable forms of sociality that cannot be contained by the imperceptible nature of sociality under capital. As I show in this dissertation, the political economy of social life determines what can be sensed, just as what can be sensed marks the horizon of political and social possibility. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Scholars have viewed African American texts written in the years between 1950 and 1960 as espousing confrontation, protest, and resistance. Although fruitful in identifying large writing trends, much of that scholarship narrowly defines what writing during that time accomplished, leaving out important writers whose writing does not fit the mold. One such writer is Owen Vincent Dodson (1914-1983), who published Boy at the Window in 1951. The novel uses modes of drama including song and call-and-response to invite reader sympathy and identification with characters, and eventually provides reader the opportunity to participate in creating meaning. Dodson's novel subtly combats racism by inviting readers to identify with its young, African American protagonist.