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.

How has the concept of masculinity been revised and adapted by different writers over the course of the early to mid-20th century? How and why did the authors respond to the question of masculinity differently? To answer these questions, this dissertation navigates the contested nature of masculinity in works spanning the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. I juxtapose two to three writers and their selected works in each chapter divided by the authors’ race and ethnicity: William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright by focusing on Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, and Native Son respectively; Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Nathanael West’s A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel; Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. The writers I examine present masculinities that deviate from hegemonic masculinity, challenge and/or reinforce the definition and parameters of hegemonic masculinity, and develop models of masculinity that meet the needs of their specific historical moments. I argue that juxtaposing different modalities of masculinity construction and exploring the multifaceted treatment of American masculinity afford a more comprehensive perspective about the avenues through which masculinity is made manifest. My examination of multiple masculinities reveals the processes of establishing, maintaining, and contesting hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, tracking historical changes in masculinities uncovers how a set of essentialized traits, though changing, have transformed into and manifested as a privileged form of masculinity. / English

The opportunities created by the end of the Mao Era and legislature promoting the rights of African Americans and women in the mid-twentieth century allowed women of both cultures to break further into the literary scene and negotiate their own sense of agency through their work. Although Western feminism also grew rapidly throughout this period, its ethnocentric centering of gender prevented it from being a reliable lens with which to analyze the work of Chinese and African American women who experienced issues of race, class, and gender simultaneously. This caused Western feminists to evaluate the work of Chinese and African American women from a perspective of privilege and misrepresented the cultural, social, and political influences that impacted their agency. Thus, this paper seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of the intersectional paradigm as a comparative lens with which to analyze the construction of female characters in mid-twentieth century Chinese and African American fiction in place of a Western feminist lens. To this effect, it will apply the intersectional lens to Toni Morrison's Sula (1973) and Wang Anyi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2008) specifically, to determine how this research paradigm can be used to reveal the identities the female protagonists construct and their opportunities for agency. This paper hopes to increase discourse on the applications of intersectionality in literature as a tool for better understanding the literature of women of color.

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Rhythmic Literacy: Poetry, Reading and Public Voices in Black Atlantic Poetics" analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems, which I term rhythmic literacy. Growing up in the U.S and Jamaica in the early twentieth century, Hughes and Bennett were both subjected to a similar Anglophone transatlantic schoolroom poetry tradition, which they contend with as one of their only available poetic models. I argue that memorization and recitation practices play a formative role in the development of their poetic projects. As an enactment and metaphor for the dynamics of colonial control, this form of mimicry demonstrates to them the power of embodied performance to reclaim language from dominant forces. This dissertation reveals how black Atlantic poetics refashions the institutional uses of poetry in early twentieth-century U.S and British colonial education for the purposes of decolonization. / English

This thesis explores Dorothy West's interpretation of the migration experience through her novel The Living is Easy. Dorothy West breaks new ground by documenting a Black female migrant's sojourn from South to North in an era in which such narratives were virtually non-existent. West seemingly rejects both a separation between North and South as well any sentiment of condemning the North or South in totality. Instead, West chooses to settle her novel in a gray area. Moreover, in refusing to condemn the South, Dorothy West redeems the South from oversimplified negative assumptions of the region. My interpretation of Dorothy West's The Living is Easy as well as Cleo Judson both highlights West's contributions to the genre by complicating the assumptions of what a migration narrative contains by centering the migrating Black female body. / Master of Arts / This thesis examined Dorothy West's Migration Narrative, <i>The Living is Easy</i>. Migration Narratives are a genre of African – American literature that concerns the historical period in the early 20th century in which thousands of Black Americans migrated from the regional South to the regional North and Midwest. This novel is unique in the fact that it focuses on a female character and concerns the city of Boston, both atypical characteristics. I use this information to analyze the ways in which Dorothy West adheres to and challenges the typical assumptions of the Migration Narrative. The findings of this thesis adds to the body of work on Dorothy West, as well as the male-dominated genre of Migration Narratives.