By drawing upon aspects of critical geography to explore three writers' representations of urban space and subject formation, American Ethni/Cities develops and advocates for a new methodological approach to the study of literature. Predicated on theories devised by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Gil Valentine and other geographically-minded thinkers, this spatially conscious literary practice has the potential to enhance one's understanding of literary texts, power dynamics, identity construction, and the spaces one inhabits. Each of the chapters comprising this study aims to demonstrate what this interdisciplinary partnership between geography and literature can reveal. By focusing on Cahan's representation of Jewish immigrants living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Wright's depiction of black migrants adjusting to life in the industrial North, and Baldwin's exploration of masculinity as a socio-spatial construct, each respective case-study draws attention to the relationship between spatial production and subject formation. The overarching hope of American Ethni/Cities is that others will find this inter-disciplinary partnership productive and will subsequently make it their own, thereby producing even greater understandings of how power works in the spaces we read about, create, and inhabit in our own daily lives.

<p>Responding to African American literary criticism's recent engagements with contemporary U.S. imprisonment, <italic>From Slave Ship to Supermax</italic> traces the development of a heretofore un-theorized tradition in African American literature in which fiction writers bring to light the voice, critical thinking, and literary production of actual prisoner abuse survivors. This dissertation treats novelists James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Ernest Gaines as the contemporary prison's literary intermediaries, as writers whose fictional narratives of jailhouse beatings, rape and wounding on slave ships, and state-sponsored execution are inspired and haunted by the critically-unexamined abuse stories of late-twentieth century prisoners. Drawing from the field of African American literary theory, political prisoners' writings, as well as prisoners' low-circulating zines, journals, and pamphlets, I argue that the production and distribution of abuse narratives by African American fiction's captive characters illuminate the clandestine and insurgent literary practices of actual abused prisoners. This revelatory work accomplished by Baldwin, Morrison, Johnson, and Gaines demonstrates the radical utility of African American fiction at a moment in which prisoner abuse is widespread, underrepresented, and rarely documented in a way that affords the abused prisoner any measure of authorial control. In contradistinction to the victimization narratives that typify mainstream prisoner abuse stories, stories which appear in the human rights literature of advocacy organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, this dissertation concludes that contemporary African American novelists emphasize the authorial control of abused captives and thus make apparent the rich complexities of their interior lives and the way in which the repressive spaces to which</p><p>they are confined are also generative sites for reimagining the self and community.</p> / Dissertation

This study suggests, through a rhetorical analysis of the role of orators and oration in Ralph Ellison's <em>Invisible Man</em> and N. Scott Momaday's <em>House Made of Dawn</em>, that literature can be a valuable resource for the study of comparative and contrastive rhetoric; conversely, it also demonstrates that a knowledge of culturally-specific rhetorical and narrative practices is important for understanding ethnic-American novels and their social significance. Written during periods of intense racial upheaval in the United States, <em>Invisible Man</em> and <em>House Made of Dawn</em> are, to use a term coined by George Kennedy, metarhetorics: works that explore, from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, the ends and means of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetoric is linked to the formation of individual, ethnic, and national identities. This exploration is undertaken through the diegetic rhetoric of the novels, the depiction of rhetorical practice within their fictional worlds. Ellison's young orator, who vacillates between accommodationist, communist, and African American vernacular rhetorics, and Momaday's alienated protagonist, who is healed through the postcolonial rhetoric of a Peyotist street preacher and the ritual rhetoric of a displaced Navajo chanter, both illustrate how the recovery of traditional rhetorical practices is an integral part of cultural empowerment. The interaction of culturally-specific systems of rhetoric is also embodied in the extradiegetic rhetoric of the novels, the means by which the novels themselves influence their readers. Central to the novels' own rhetorical effectiveness is their authors' strategic appropriation of modernist techniques, which allowed the works to negotiate multiple literary traditions or social contexts, to penetrate and transform the American canon, and to accommodate and affect readers from a broad range of cultural backgrounds.

In the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson the city and culture of 19th century New Orleans figures prominently, and is a major character affecting the lives of her protagonists. While race, class, and gender are among the focuses of many scholars the eccentricity and cultural history of the most exotic American city, and its impact on Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is unmistakable. This essay will discuss how the diverse cultural environment of New Orleans in the 19th century allowed Alice Dunbar Nelson to create narratives which allowed her short stories to speak to the shifting identities of women and the social uncertainty of African Americans in the Jim Crow south. A consideration of New Orleans’ cultural history is important when reading Dunbar-Nelson’s work, whose significance has often been disregarded because of what some considered its lack of racial markers.

This study suggests, through a rhetorical analysis of the role of orators and oration in Ralph Ellison's <em>Invisible Man</em> and N. Scott Momaday's <em>House Made of Dawn</em>, that literature can be a valuable resource for the study of comparative and contrastive rhetoric; conversely, it also demonstrates that a knowledge of culturally-specific rhetorical and narrative practices is important for understanding ethnic-American novels and their social significance. Written during periods of intense racial upheaval in the United States, <em>Invisible Man</em> and <em>House Made of Dawn</em> are, to use a term coined by George Kennedy, metarhetorics: works that explore, from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, the ends and means of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetoric is linked to the formation of individual, ethnic, and national identities. This exploration is undertaken through the diegetic rhetoric of the novels, the depiction of rhetorical practice within their fictional worlds. Ellison's young orator, who vacillates between accommodationist, communist, and African American vernacular rhetorics, and Momaday's alienated protagonist, who is healed through the postcolonial rhetoric of a Peyotist street preacher and the ritual rhetoric of a displaced Navajo chanter, both illustrate how the recovery of traditional rhetorical practices is an integral part of cultural empowerment. The interaction of culturally-specific systems of rhetoric is also embodied in the extradiegetic rhetoric of the novels, the means by which the novels themselves influence their readers. Central to the novels' own rhetorical effectiveness is their authors' strategic appropriation of modernist techniques, which allowed the works to negotiate multiple literary traditions or social contexts, to penetrate and transform the American canon, and to accommodate and affect readers from a broad range of cultural backgrounds.

Black Mourning: Readings of Loss, Desire and Racial Identification explores a diverse archive of African American literary and cultural texts in order to reveal loss as a necessary condition of racial identification. To support this assertion, this study broaches a theoretical gap that persists between black literary and cultural studies and revisionist approaches to psychoanalytic theory. Using the lens of trauma theory, Black Mourning reframes cultural memory and black subjectivity in ways that supplant performances of racial authenticity with an affective politics. Black expressive culture and performance aesthetics undergird this critical model. Chapter One "Jean Toomer's Cane and the Erotics of Mourning" configures cultural memory in relation to the formation of modern blackness. Chapter Two "'Nobody Knows My Name': Ann Petry's The Street and Black Women’s Blues Protest" uses a blues aesthetic to access hidden texts of black female sexual trauma. Chapter Three "The Queerness of Blackness: Marlon Riggs's Black Is … Black Ain't" looks at embodied trauma as an a foundation for reimagining black collectivity. The fourth chapter "Archiving Blackness: Danzy Senna's Caucasia and Post-Soul Aesthetics" moves beyond fixed narratives of race to conceptualize innovative ways of archiving blackness. / text

"Matters of State: American Literature in the Civil Rights Era" argues that American writers engaged with the American civil rights movement as it unfolded by turning their attention to the state and the state's relationship to its subjects and by imagining new forms for both. Postwar American literary culture, then, understood racial inequality not solely as a problem of identity and difference, nor simply as an economic problem, but as a problem of formal citizenship. Between around 1948 and around 1968, that problem as such spurred diverse and unruly literary inquiries into a range of matters of state, each taken up in dialogue with American constitutional law and each also a meditation on the particular capacities of literary art as a site for political thinking. William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor tried to reimagine the structure of federalism; James Baldwin and Harper Lee interrogated the real workings of democracy; Chester Himes and Sam Greenlee asked whether social movements ought to collaborate with the existing U.S. state in the first place; Norman Mailer, William Styron, Amiri Baraka, and others reoriented literary culture toward a new, post-civil-rights set of questions. Read as one archive, the novels and plays and essays that they produced tell a new story about American literature at midcentury: a story about literature's quasi-autonomous engagement with the political-theoretical questions that racial inequality had rendered urgent. They remind us of the complexity of history itself, and of the difficulty and uncertainty obscured by triumphalist narratives of democratic liberalism's inevitable civil-rights redemption. And they afford a glimpse into the kaleidoscopic legal worldmaking for which literary art in general can be an arena.

<p>"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions," writes Thoreau: "Let us spend our lives in conceiving then." This dissertation depicts how Thoreau's fellow antebellum antislavery writers discerned the power of concepts to shape "the universe." Wishing for a new universe, one free of slavery, they spent their lives crafting new concepts. "Ground Plans" argues that antebellum antislavery writers confiscated the concept of nature from proslavery forces and fundamentally redefined it. Advocates of slavery routinely rationalized slave society by referencing a particular conception of nature--as static, transhistorical, and hierarchical--claiming that slavery simply mirrored the natural, permanent racial order. This dissertation demonstrates that to combat slavery's claim to naturalness, antislavery writers reconceptualized nature as composed of dynamic species and races, evolving in relation to one another. In four chapters on David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Gerrit Smith, it shows that this theory of nature enabled these writers to argue for the complete transformation of society to bring it into line with what they characterized as nature's true principles. This dissertation thus restores the concept of nature as a crucial intellectual battleground for abolitionism. Moreover, it shows these politically-charged antebellum debates over nature's meaning to be crucial to the story of natural science, showing that abolitionists speculated on the natural principles that would eventually constitute the founding insights of ecology.</p> / Dissertation

Esta dissertação tem por objetivo investigar o papel das slave narratives como poderoso gênero literário na denúncia da escravidão africana e na representação do homem negro e da mulher negra nos séculos dezoito e dezenove. Este trabalho também se propõe a investigar o papel das neo-slave narratives no estudo do passado e a representação da identidade negra no século vinte. Ambos os gêneros desafiam seus tempos presentes ao discutirem questões de etnia e subjugação humana, em uma abordagem crítica. Em Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs narra sua experiência na escravidão, deixando um importante legado não somente para a História mas também para a Literatura Afro-Americana. Em Dessa Rose (1986), Sherley Anne Williams, revisa o passado para resgatar a memória da escravidão e reescrever a história para examinar seu tempo presente. Além disso, as duas autoras apresentam questões de gênero, levantando questões feministas em suas obras / This dissertation aims to investigate the role of slave narratives as a powerful literary genre in the denouncement of African slavery and in the representation of the black man/woman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also aims to analyze the role of neo-slave narratives in the revision of the past and the representation of black identity in the twentieth-century. Both genres challenge their present times by discussing issues of ethnicity and human bondage through a critical approach. In Incidents in the Life of s Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs narrates her experience in slavery, leaving an important legacy not only to History but also to African-American Literature. In Dessa Rose (1986), Sherley Anne Williams revises the past in order to recover slavery memory and rewrite history to examine her present time. Besides, these two authors present matters of gender, bringing feminist issues in their works

Um estudo sobre a maternidade como um tema recorrente na Literatura Afro-Americana nos últimos três séculos e isso pode ser observado nas palavras de Harriet Jacobs e Maya Angelou. Em suas obras, respectivamente, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, as autoras posicionam o eu negro feminino no centro de suas experiências e revêem suas memórias passadas. Fazendo isso, elas narram histórias que transcendem as suas próprias e dão voz as mulheres duplamente marginalizadas cujos testemunhos foram excluídos da História oficial e do cânone literário por serem negras e mulheres. / A study of motherhood as a recurrent theme in African American Literature in the last three centuries and this may be seen in the words of Harriet Jacobs and Maya Angelou. In their autobiographical works, respectively, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the authors place their marginalized black female self in the center of their own experience and revisit their past memories. By doing so, they narrate stories that transcend their own and voice the double jeopardized black women whose testimonies were excluded from official History and suffocated by the literary canon.