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This dissertation examines Black women’s sexual narratives in contemporary Soul music. Through a close analysis of various songs, videos, and images from Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Syd Bennett, and Ari Lennox this research explores the relationship between sexual narratives in contemporary-Soul music and African social and spiritual thought and practice. I examine Black women’s eroticism as a production and reflection of African pleasure, sexuality, and intimacy. This work employs Afrocentricity as a methodological tool to engage with sexual expressions that center on African historical, social, political, and social phenomena. Location theory, Womanism, and ADQT (Afrocentric Decolonizing Queer Theory) provide a framework for interrogating Afrocentric erotic politics historically and contemporarily through patterns of traditional practices of intimacy and cultural productions of sexuality. Ethnographic Content Analysis and Iconography are utilized to examine the artists' work in their discography, interviews, photographs, and social media content. The heart of this work examines how Soul as a cultural symbol and aesthetic can be used as a tool for Black women in this context to acquire agency through freely exploring eroticism. Through analysis of Erykah, Jill, Syd, and Ari, this research develops an ongoing conversation about Black Americans’ relationship with the erotic and its role in African culture and spirituality. Ultimately this research demonstrates the importance of Black women’s erotic expression and how this importance reflects a more extensive conversation of what sexual expression means to African people. Through analyzing these artists' iconography and lyricism, this work demonstrates how erotic expressions in Soul are a self-affirming, self-determining, agentic force of African life. / Africology and African American Studies

This dissertation addresses the problem of African American K-12 miseducation and its institutional pathways in carceral and employment agency reduction. Merging cultural and public policy frameworks, it creates a novel theoretical paradigm altogether. Culturally, it anchors in three Diopan concepts: cultural unity, historical continuity and cradles theory. Through this cultural lens it reimagines the current gold standard in public policy analysis, the problem solving methodology. Pursuing expansive cultural-policy holism, the new framework establishes broad, systemic categories conjoining multiple values for who commits three hierarchical behaviors within an institutional triumvirate—all united historically in when, and culturally by why and how they miseducate African descended children. Using the mixed methods of qualitative, multi-institutional cultural observation and quantitative public policy empiricism, the author, thus, derives a series of novel joint categories and cultural-policy concepts within each category. Hierarchical racism, patriarchy and classism form one combined western cultural behavioral phenomenon. Institutional geographies of school, prison and work constitute the same analytical sequence. Cultural purpose, similarly, unifies western men, women and corporate actors. As importantly, these multi-actor, behavior and institution unities form cross-associations among each other. Ultimately, Afrocentric recentering necessitates African Womanist, Manist and community based Maatic cultural policy correctives. Key terms: K-12, miseducation, cultural unity, historical continuity, criminal injustice, economic injustice, institutional analysis, Afrocentricity, Diopism, Maat, location, racism, patriarchy, classism, public policy / Africology and African American Studies

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This dissertation examines the process of desegregation on the campus of a Catholic university in the North. Focusing on Villanova University during the period from 1940-1985, the narrative explores the tension between the University's public commitment to desegregation and the difficulties of implementing integration on a predominately white campus. Through oral histories, newspaper accounts (especially the student newspaper), University committee meeting minutes, administrators' personal correspondence, and other internal documents, I examine how Villanova students and administrators thought about and experienced desegregation differently according to their race. In examining the process of desegregation, this dissertation makes two arguments. The first argument concerns the rise and fall of Catholic racial liberalism. In early post-World War II era, Catholic racial liberalism at Villanova was consolidated when the philosophy of Catholic interracialism combined with the emerging postwar racial liberalism. This ideology promoted the ideals of an equitable society where everyone had equal rights but it did so with a specific appeal to Christian morality. Catholic racial liberalism held that segregation, let alone racism and discrimination, was a sin. Therefore, Catholic racial liberals possessed an unshakeable faith in the ideal of integration. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Villanova adhered to the ideal of integration as the number of African American students increased. Indeed, a consensus of Catholic racial liberalism prevailed on campus. As the civil rights movement began to demand more of white Americans throughout the 1960s, the consensus of Catholic racial liberalism began to weaken as white Villanovans expressed racial anxieties. In the late 1960s, when black Villanova students adopted a position of Black Power and threatened to change the campus culture, the orthodoxy of Catholic racial liberalism was shattered. At Villanova, the 1970s were marked by the struggle to increase minority enrollment. These efforts represented a last desperate attempt by racial liberals to keep alive the civil rights movement's promise of integration. Finally, during the 1980s, as affirmative action programs based on race in higher education came under fire, Catholic racial liberalism was replaced by the ideology of diversity. Therefore, I argue that the rise and fall of Catholic racial liberalism on Villanova's campus demonstrated both the possibilities and the limits to this philosophy. Second, I argue that, despite Villanova's adoption of Catholic racial liberalism, meaningful integration proved elusive. The administration's inconsistent efforts to recruit and to include African American students on campus demonstrated that they were unwilling to transform the campus culture to further the goals of the black freedom movement. Indeed, most white Villanovans, students and administrators, expected African Americans to simply be grateful for the chance to be at Villanova. This, of course, left black students on a campus that was desegregated but integrated in only the thinnest and least meaningful sense of the word. Integration is more than the absence of segregation, yet throughout the period of this study most black Villanova students continued to feel the sting of segregation on campus. In place of integration, Villanova University adopted a paradigm of "acceptance without inclusion" with regard to African American students on campus. In tracing the limits to Catholic racial liberalism and the failure of integration, this research highlights the experiences of historical actors who have not appeared in the previous studies of Catholic higher education - black students. The investigation of the experiences of African American Villanova students reveals a story about race and Catholic higher education that moves the focus away from abstract commitments to racial equality and places it on the men and women who experienced the disparity between public pronouncements and day-to-day practice. To be sure, black Villanova students were not simply pawns in the social drama of desegregation. As such, the narrative examines how black Villanova students, by their presence and their activism, challenged the racial status quo and how white Villanova students and administrators responded to these challenges. / History