As women began to establish themselves in the United States workforce in the first half of the twentieth century, one especial group of career women, women writers, began to use the space of their self-authored life writing narratives to inscribe their own understanding of themselves. Roundly criticized for not adhering to conventional autobiographical standards, these women writers used purposeful political strategies of resistance to craft self-authored life writing works that varied widely from the genre of autobiography. Rather than employ the usual ways critiquing autobiographical texts, I explore a deeper understanding of what these prescient women sought to do. Through revision of the terminology of the field and in consideration of a wide variety of critics and approaches, I argue that these women intentionally employed resistance in their writings. In Dust Tracks on A Road (1942), Zora Neale Hurston successfully established her own sense of herself as a black woman, who could also comment on political issues. Her fellow Southerner, Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), used orality to deliberately showcase her view of her own life. Another Southern writer, Lillian Smith in Killers of the Dream, employed an overtly social science approach to tell the life narrative of all white Christian Southerners, and described how she felt the problems of racism should be overcome. Anzia Yezierska, a Russian émigré to the United States, used an Old World European understanding of storytelling to refashion an understanding of herself as a writer and at the same time critiqued the United States in her work, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). Mary Austin, a Western woman writer, saw Earth Horizon as an opportunity to reclaim the fragmentation of a woman’s life as a positive, rather than a negative space.

This study employs African American literary criticism and critical discourse analysis to evaluate Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988). These women write stories of African American life on the Sea Islands through different prisms that evoke cultural memory within and outside the texts. Peterkin, a white Southerner, writes as an "onlooker" and “pioneer” of fictional Gullah culture; Naylor, a black Northerner by birth, writes as an "outsider" to Gullah culture, although a veteran of African American Southern heritage. The authors' hybridity produce different literary voices. A close examination of their discourse conveys a coded language pertinent to understanding the historical, social, and political conditions portrayed through their texts. This study will examine their discourse to prove that Julia Peterkin’s, Scarlet Sister Mary, takes ownership over the Gullah experience rendering stereotypical characterizations promoting hegemony; while Gloria Naylor's, Mama Day, resurrects Peterkin’s view rendering multi-dimensional characterizations that legitimize the authenticity of Gullah culture and aid in its preservation.

<p>"Reading the Street" chronicles the rise of black pulp fiction in the post-civil rights era from the perspective of its urban readership. Black pulp fiction was originally published in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it consisted of paperback novels about tough male characters navigating the pitfalls of urban life. These novels appealed mainly to inner-city readers who felt left out of civil rights' and Black Power's promises of social equality. Despite the historic achievements of the civil rights movement, entrenched structural inequalities led to America's ghettos becoming sites of concentrated poverty, rampant unemployment, and violent crime. While mainstream society seemed to turn a blind eye to how these problems were destroying inner-city communities, readers turned to black pulp fiction for the imaginative resources that would help them reflect on their social reality. In black pulp fiction, readers found confirmation that America was not on the path toward extending equal opportunities to its most vulnerable citizens, or that the rise of Black Power signaled a change in their fortunes. Yet in black pulp fiction readers also found confirmation that their lives as marginalized subjects possessed a value of its own, and that their day-to-day struggles opened up new ways of "being black" amid the blight of the inner city.</p> / Dissertation

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In this Master’s Report, I examine Samuel R. Delany’s use of language in his pornographic novel, Hogg. Through a postcolonial lens, I investigate the ways Delany employs white colonizers’ language to subvert white dominant patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. As theorists Frantz Fanon and Hortense J. Spillers posit, language is essential to black identity. The arrival of Europeans on the African continent and the subsequent enslavement of blacks resulted in the loss of an indigenous African name. For blacks, the loss of this name serves as a larger metaphor by which one can uncover various wrongdoings committed by white colonizers, such as forcing Africans to learn a foreign language, refusing to acknowledge and respect an established African culture, and the physical violence enacted upon black bodies during slavery. In Hogg, the eleven-year-old black narrator negotiates his existence as a voiceless object and sex slave. I argue that through this narrator, one can see the devastating effects of colonization. Further, by creating a fictional world--the Pornotopia--Delany temporarily creates a space in which patriarchal boundaries no longer exist. Thus, the narrator challenges patriarchal, heteronormative discourse by taking advantage of the assumption that the narrator lacks the ability to master language. / text

O objetivo desta dissertação é apresentar, discutir e analisar a relação que Cane, de Jean Toomer, Dutchman, de Amiri Baraka e Playing in the Dark, de Toni Morrison possuem com seus contextos no século XX em manifestações artisticas em três gêneros literários distintos. Após construir e delimitar o pano de fundo vivido pelos Afro-Americanos ao longo do século, pretendo analisar cada obra ao período em que foi escrita. Desta forma, a questão central de minha dissertação é como a Literatura produzida pelos Afro-Americanos (representada pelos três textos literários em pauta) dialoga com a realidade vivida por essas pessoas dentro da sociedade estadunidense ao longo do século XX, e como essa literatura funciona como um poderoso instrumento de expressão da ideologia, das questões raciais e dos sentimentos Afro-Americanos / This dissertation intends to present, discuss and analyse the relation that Cane by Jean Toomer, Dutchman by Amiri Baraka, and Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison, have with their backgrounds during the twentieth century in artistic manifestations of three distinct literary genders. After designing a background of the African-American people along that century, I intend to relate each of the three works to time in which they were written. This way, the central question of this dissertation is how the Literature produced by the African-Americans (represented by those three works) dialogues with the reality lived by those people within the US society during the twentieth century and how such literature works as an extremely important instrument of expression of the African-American feelings, racial concerns and ideology

O objetivo desta dissertação é apresentar, discutir e analisar a relação que Cane, de Jean Toomer, Dutchman, de Amiri Baraka e Playing in the Dark, de Toni Morrison possuem com seus contextos no século XX em manifestações artisticas em três gêneros literários distintos. Após construir e delimitar o pano de fundo vivido pelos Afro-Americanos ao longo do século, pretendo analisar cada obra ao período em que foi escrita. Desta forma, a questão central de minha dissertação é como a Literatura produzida pelos Afro-Americanos (representada pelos três textos literários em pauta) dialoga com a realidade vivida por essas pessoas dentro da sociedade estadunidense ao longo do século XX, e como essa literatura funciona como um poderoso instrumento de expressão da ideologia, das questões raciais e dos sentimentos Afro-Americanos / This dissertation intends to present, discuss and analyse the relation that Cane by Jean Toomer, Dutchman by Amiri Baraka, and Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison, have with their backgrounds during the twentieth century in artistic manifestations of three distinct literary genders. After designing a background of the African-American people along that century, I intend to relate each of the three works to time in which they were written. This way, the central question of this dissertation is how the Literature produced by the African-Americans (represented by those three works) dialogues with the reality lived by those people within the US society during the twentieth century and how such literature works as an extremely important instrument of expression of the African-American feelings, racial concerns and ideology

Harlem is an emblematic neighborhood in New York City, historically perceived both as the center of African American culture and a black ghetto. This thesis explores the African American urban culture at its birth and analyzes it through the portrayals of Harlem in black literature, music, and visual art of the period. The era of the 1920s through the 1940s illustrates most distinctly the dual identity of Harlem as a cultural capital versus a ghetto as the 1920s marked a period of unprecedented cultural flowering embodied by the Harlem Renaissance, whereas the 1930s and 1940s were characterized by the Great Depression and its aftermath. During these years the living conditions in Harlem significantly deteriorated. The aim of this work is to critically analyze the period of African American cultural boom of the Harlem Renaissance years and discuss its relevance for the period in comparison to the artistic reactions to the experience of life in the ghetto. The proposed argument is that the way Harlem was depicted in African American culture and the artistic reflection of its duality characterized African American urban experience and culture in the period of 1920s through the 1940s, concentrating on the problem of urban reality in contrast with urban fantasy.

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