As a project located in the academic field of the study of African American religion, this dissertation examines the black body in four critical moments of the Nation of Islam (NOI), represented by the ministries of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammed, and Louis Farrakhan. Defined as the material locus of the self and the site of the symbolization of a given collective culture and cosmology, the project argues that the body was the central concern in all four moments in their religious efforts to re-imagine, reform, and re-present bodies that they perceived had been distorted, disfigured, and devalued by racist violence, discourses, and oppression in America. The research contends that the NOI was only partially "successful" in its reformative efforts to reconstitute and valorize black bodies. Utilizing the hermeneutical frameworks of critical social theory, which includes psychoanalysis, philosophy of embodiment (phenomenology) and race, and a theory and method based approach to the study of religion in its analysis and interpretation, the project suggests that the NOI may have internalized many of the dynamics and values of white supremacy and, as a consequence, re-produced and re-deployed its own system of intra-"race" marginalization and hierarchical classification within the NOI and in the greater African American community. Such discrimination was predicated upon an ideal black bodily economy that ranked bodies based on indicators such as gender, sexuality, and skin complexion. As a result of having co-opted middle-class American and African American values and practices, the research concludes that the NOI converted problematic issues of "race" into an ambiguous and indeterminate class system in their response to the exigencies of the conditions of existence for African Americans. The research suggests both the need for greater attention to the body in African American religious studies, analyses of the co-constitutive elements of class, gender, race, and sexuality, and for reflexive consideration of the ways in which systems of domination may be socially reproduced and/or disrupted by marginalized collectivities.

<p>The increasing ethnic diversity among Black people in the United States is growing at a near exponential rate due to the migration of Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, and African immigrants to the United States. This study is an endeavor to understand how this increasing diversity in ethnicity among Blacks in the U.S. will influence the boundaries of Black identity and Black politics. I ultimately aim to gain a sense of the processes by which Black immigrants come to embrace or reject a racial identity, the mechanisms by which African-Americans become more accepting of "cross-cutting" political issues, and the extent to which an intraracial coalition and a broader, more inclusive racial consciousness--a diasporic consciousness--might develop among Black immigrants and African Americans. This study utilizes survey data, in-depth interviews with African Americans and Black immigrants, and controlled experiments to examine the questions presented here. This study finds that African Americans and Black immigrants are accepting of a Black identity that is inclusive of ethnic diversity, largely due to shared racialized experiences. Moreover, this study concludes that while group consciousness influences the behaviors and attitudes of Black immigrants and African Americans in very similar ways, there are important differences between the groups that will need to be considered in future Black politics studies. Finally, this study finds that there are obstacles to raising a more inclusive racial consciousness because African Americans and Black immigrants do not see eye-to-eye on what issues should be be prioritized on a unified Black political agenda.</p> / Dissertation

<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

<p>This dissertation examines the topic of social perceptions regarding political candidates at the intersection of race and gender. Within this project I analyze 1) the degree to which stereotypes are held at different points of this intersection; 2) the degree to which these stereotypes can be influenced by way of priming via common news reporting messages; and 3) the ways in which these stereotypes and perceptions influence evaluations of Black female political candidates and their electoral prospects. In order to examine these issues, I utilize data from two surveys I have designed: the 2011 Social Cognition and Evaluation Survey and the 2012 Political Candidate Evaluation and Social Beliefs Survey. The former gathers information regarding social and personal perceptions of "average" and "elite" Black women, White women, Black men, and White men, and the ways in which negative intersectional priming messages can influence the evaluation of each of these groups. The latter survey includes an embedded experiment in which respondents participate in two mock elections and candidate evaluations. One mock election includes a Black female with a relatively dark complexion as the fixed candidate and the other includes a Black female with a relatively light complexion as the fixed candidate, with each competing against either a White male, White female, or Black male opponent. Based on the data from the aforementioned surveys, I find that people engage in stereotyping in an intersectional, rather than a one-dimensional, manner. Consequently, Black women at different social status levels and with differing skin tones are subject to distinct intensities of the attribution of racialized, gendered, and intersectional stereotypes. In turn, the ways in which the voting public evaluates them as political candidates are influenced by these stereotypes.</p> / Dissertation

This qualitative grounded study explores power dynamics and its influence on sexual decision-making amongst college-age African American women. The film All of Us was shown to eighteen African American women to understand how they perceive power dynamics and sexual decision-making. Taking place at Georgia State University‟s main campus in Atlanta, focus groups and one on one interviews were implemented. Much of the research being conducted theorize that the risk factors regarding HIV infection are related to risky sexual decision-making and lack of consistent condom use; however this study concluded that there is a relationship between sexual decision-making and gendered power dynamics.

African-Americans have been portrayed in stereotypical entertainment roles since their arrival into American society. Before film and television were developed, minstrel and side-shows were the source of entertainment at African-American’s expense. Minstrel shows were performed by White individuals dressed to impersonate Blacks and behaved in a White inter-pretation of Black behavior (Pieterse, 1992, pg. 134). African American women in particular were portrayed in three primary stereotypical ways: the Mammy, the Jezebel, and the Sap-phire. This research examines the relationship between the stereotypes and these historical typecasts of African-American women are relevant to Black director Tyler Perry’s popular character Mabel Simmons, better known as ‘Madea’.

Relationships Between Political Competition and Socioeconomic Status in the United States

<p>"We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 addresses the questions of mothering and survival from a queer, diasporic literary perspective, arguing that the literary practices of Black feminists Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith enable a counternarrative to a neoliberal logic that criminalizes Black mothering and the survival of Black people outside and after their utility to capital. Treating Audre Lorde and June Jordan as primary theorists of mothering and survival, and Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith as key literary historical figures in the queer manifestation of Black feminist modes of literary production, this dissertation uses previously unavailable archival material, and queer of color critique and critical Black diasporic theoretical approaches to create an intergenerative reading practice. An intergenerative reading practice interrupts the social reproduction of meaning and value across time, and places untimely literary moments and products in poetic relationship to each other in order to reveal the possibility of another meaning of life. Ultimately this dissertation functions as a sample narrative towards the alternate meaning of life that the poetic breaks of Black feminist literary production in the queer spaces of counter-cultural markets, classrooms, autonomous publishing collectives make possible, concluding that mothering is indeed a reflexive and queer way of reading the present in the service of a substantively different future in which our outlawed love survives.</p> / Dissertation

<p>During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cadre of black women merged the ideals of the "New Woman" and the "New Negro" to configure New Negro Womanhood. For these women, the combining of these two figurations encapsulated the complexity and strivings of black women attempting to achieve racial and gender equality and authorial control of their bodies and aspirations. New Negro women challenged racial and gender inequality and exclusion from participating in contemporaneous political and cultural currents. New Negro women are meaningful in understanding how ideas about black women's political, economic, social and cultural agency challenged New Negro's ideological focus on black men and New Woman's ideological focus on white women. At the core of the New Negro woman ethos was a transformation in how black women thought about the possibility of moving into the public sphere. Black women etched out the parameters of individual and collective aspirations and desires within a modern world in which they were treated as second-class citizens.</p> <p>My dissertation explores New Negro womanhood in Washington, D.C. The nation's capital functioned as a preeminent site for the realization of African American possibility. The District of Columbia also offered unique opportunities for African American political, civic, social and cultural involvement. More specifically, the city was a fruitful site for the development of African American women's leadership, entrepreneurship and creativity. I use black beauty culture, performance activism, women's suffrage activism, higher education, and black leisure spaces in Washington to examine how black women grappled with and configured ideas about black modernity. Each of these areas provided a distinct context in which African American women in Washington transgressed boundaries of both racial and gender hierarchies and aspired to greater visibility, mobility, and legibility within the modern world. African American women in Washington embraced New Negro Womanhood as a conduit to black modernity.</p> / Dissertation

Toni Morrison's recovery of the African-American presence in her novels is uniquely tied to the space of the kitchen. The recovery of the African-American presence has been accomplished in various ways for various groups: historians, critics, authors, sociologists. They have named names, recalled incidents, and 'discovered' texts. Recovery has been accomplished by reconstructing culture through songs, storytelling, folklore and myth. Morrison establishes a connection between the space of the Garden that represents a white male empowered world in which African-American women have difficulty establishing power to a space of the kitchen where we see how well each character has been able to confront the public sphere (garden) and maintain her sense of self and a sense of empowerment. Each character's interiority is reflected in the activities and her relationship to the kitchen.