From the 1960s, through the Black Arts Movement, until her sudden death in December 2012, Jayne Cortez used her dynamic voice to fight oppression. as the first multiple-chapter study of Cortez’s musical collaborations, this dissertation adds to a growing body of critical work that examines Cortez’s radical poetry. In her “African Confluences” keynote address at Rutgers University, Cortez described herself as a member of a global community of black writers “protesting and calling for an end to self degradation, self fragmentation, self-corruption, and self-fear and selfishness… Poets using the image of Blackness to mean continuity, confidence, creativity and new possibilities.” Cortez created new possibilities through her collaborations with artists and writers across the African diaspora, including American free jazz musicians who worked alongside traditional West African master musicians. Cortez traveled extensively and cultivated lifelong relationships with musicians who challenged boundaries between artistic genres to create a distinctly kinetic form of jazz-inflected poetry that gave voices to black Americans and people displaced across the African diaspora. Cortez’s sustained collaborations with Bill Cole, Denardo Coleman, and her Firespitters band produced unparalleled multivocal cross-genre conversations that embodied the collective spirit of jazz improvisation. “‘When I Put on My Firespitter Mask’: Jayne Cortez’s (R)Evolutionary Musical Poetic Collaborations” offers a chronological analysis of selected collaborative performances and recordings with musicians. Beginning with her earliest collaborations, Cortez’s poetry blended elements of surrealism, Pan-Africanism, ecofeminism, performative poetics, and black vernacular music into dialogic calls to action that embodied diasporic community building through harmolodic improvisation and musical call and response. This dissertation applies the aforementioned theoretical frameworks to close readings and historical contextualization of multiple revisions of eleven poems, including poems published in out-of-print chapbooks, studio recordings, live recordings, unreleased live performance recordings, and uncatalogued documents such as poem drafts, journals, and handwritten performance notes located in fifteen boxes Cortez donated to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The appendices provide the most comprehensive timeline and list of Cortez’s publications available to date, with the intention of providing points of departure for forthcoming critical explorations of Cortez’s archive of over 400 poems and more than ninety recorded musical collaborations.

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This dissertation foregrounds enslaved men who performed personal and domestic service for elite Virginia planters, beginning in the seventeenth century, and eventually for middling planters and urbanites. Because enslaved male domestics have been largely ignored by scholars of slavery in all European colonies, chapters 1 and 2 place their employment in context. Chapter 1 determines as nearly as possible when the practice began among elites in Virginia and became established among the middling. It argues that Virginians adapted the English servant hierarchy to a slave society. Chapter 2 argues that waiting men possessed knowledge and skills prized by their owners and beyond the reach of most poor and middling planters. The social hierarchy that placed all whites above all enslaved men, however, potentially created a disconnect in waiting men's identity formation, perhaps partly mitigated by West African values concerning work and identity. Competence in assimilating gentry culture created material and self-affirming rewards, including skills to resist and escape. Chapter 3 reconstructs the network of urban and rural spaces in which waiting men lived and moved. The social system created by owners and male domestics resulted in many shared intimate and public spaces largely undifferentiated by race, and the "legitimized geography" of male domestics was much larger than that of other enslaved Virginians. Chapter 4 explores the intimate, complicated, and often intense relationships waiting men had with their owners. These relationships, in which the waiting man's skills provided him leverage, involved both masculine contest and cooperation. The domestic's relationship with his master affected his equally complicated relationships within the enslaved community, treated in chapter 5. A waiting man could influence how other enslaved persons in the household or on the plantation, to whom he was often related, were treated, and he could provide his enslaved community with valued information and services. Family formation and maintenance were challenging because of the time the domestic spent with the owner. The waiting man's work allowed him to achieve some, but not all, of the quarter's markers of masculinity. By focusing on one colony/state, this dissertation makes possible an examination of how male domestics lived under and influenced slavery in one social and legal system over time. It is hoped that this study will encourage comparative studies.

This dissertation investigates African liberation agency in Chester County, Pennsylvania, from 1850 to 1865 and its impact within the county and surrounding area. The findings may help to better understand African agency in rural areas that are not always highlighted because of historical analysis mostly focusing on city populations when discussing African agency during the years 1850 to 1865. More specifically, the focus of this dissertation concerns the significant historical events within and near Chester County during that time period. These historical events include African liberation agency related to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Christiana Resistance, Parker sisters’ kidnappings, founding of Hinsonville and its response to African enslavement, creation of Ashmun Institute, Civil War, and Thirteenth Amendment. Analyzing these historical events has immense implications to the role other rural African communities had in terms of liberation agency. This work serves as a scholarly source to help in the study of African communities in areas of Chester County, Pennsylvania, during the nineteenth century that have not been thoroughly researched. This study is conducted with the use of primary and secondary sources such as letters, newspapers, photographs, and literature related to the subject area. As a lifetime resident of Chester County, there has been continuous curiosity and questions towards understanding the extent of African agency in the area. The European and European America agency of Chester County has been thoroughly examined, but there still lacks critical examination of African agency even though the area has had residents of African descent for several hundred years. Furthermore, there is even less critical examination pertaining to African agency in Chester County from an Afrocentric analysis. Much of the scholarship produced on African agency in Chester County is a Eurocentric analysis that does not position African people as subjects but rather as objects in understanding phenomena. This dissertation uses an Afrocentric analysis that seeks to expand on existing literature as well as develop new knowledge that is unlike any previous work related to the subject. With this dissertation, the intent is to initiate new research on African agency in Chester County based upon the theories, methodologies, and traditions of Africology and African American Studies. This dissertation is committed to the purpose of African liberation and the production of knowledge that achieves victorious consciousness which is a key component of African agency. / African American Studies

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