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<p>This dissertation examines the way in which funk music, in the context of twentieth century African American literature, operates as a means of stimulating the sensorium. Funk, narrowly defined as a musical form, once carried negative connotations. Whether understood as depression, a genre of popular music, an odor, or as a euphemism for sex, the genre is concerned with attitude and visible emotions. Much work has been done in the field of African American literature regarding jazz and blues, and studies of hip-hop are gaining traction. Funk, however, has not fulfilled its potential for investigating its affect of musical performance or its connection to narratives. This project is an examination of the aesthetics of this musical form, which will generate more nuanced readings of musical and literary narratives of the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of sound and its sensorial variants. I examine the function of music in a literary text as opposed to how it is described.</p><p>Funk operates as a link between the jazz- and blues-inspired poetry and novels of the early twentieth century on the one hand and the emergence of "urban," "street," or "hip-hop" narratives on the other. Its artistic intervention in social relationships brings the aesthetic and political into conversation. I argue against the binary differentiating "serious" and "popular" musical forms; funk bridges the gap between these two designations in an important context, which creates a sonic and social space to examine the idea of difference both in terms of the general and the specific. A misconception of "sameness" is the site of theoretical and ontological difference or disruption.</p><p> Funk's ability to disrupt resides in its paradoxical nature. Rhythmically, the musical genre departs from soul of the 1960s and is fundamental to the development of hip-hop in the late-1970s and early 1980s. Though rooted in distinct rhythmic patterns, Funk seeks to dismantle conceptions of rhythmic expectation and production common in popular music by pushing back against previously popular forms. Prior to Funk's popularity, most musical forms ranging from jazz to rock and roll emphasized the second and fourth beats in a measure. Funk compositions typically emphasize the first and third beats, which changes the momentum of the music. Though it is a genre geared towards dance and therefore rooted in the body and movement, Funk gravitates towards transcending the physical limits of the body by addressing discourses of sensorial perception. Funk (both as a musical genre and an aesthetic) is something of sensory ensemble--each sense a part of the whole, complex experience. The five senses are brought together in an all-out attack on what hegemony comes to represent. Each chapter presents a different mode of assault on the body's ability to process the sensorium. I demonstrate the way Funk disrupts through a fusion of ethnomusicology, socio-cultural analysis, and literary criticism in the act of reading, hearing, watching, smelling, and tasting musical performances, cultural events, and works of literature.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation responds to a lacuna in both ecocriticism and Chicana/o literary history. The former lacks input from ethnic American literatures, while the latter offers very little commentary on environmental aspects of Chicana/o writing. Why have these two fields remained separate despite often overlapping institutional histories? My study points to their common roots in activist movements, and how this early period critically preconditioned a disengagement with Chicanas/os as environmentalists. I engage these two fields to get at a literary history that is only weakly understood at the moment. What emerges is a greater understanding of the ways that the social construction of nature has operated to reinforce the oppression of people of color, as well as the ways that Chicana/o writing has transcended this subjugation. Environmental literary study has privileged introspective nature writing and individual exploration of nature. While this perspective is understood in certain Anglo American contexts, it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is insufficient as a paradigm for the study of other environmental literatures. More particularly, it cannot account for non-Anglo American mediations of nature. Chicana and Chicano writers, with their concern for social justice and community, nonetheless take up their pens to reflect on the natural environment, albeit differently than conventional ecocriticism expects. Curiously, Chicana/o literary study has been complicit with overlooking Chicana/o writers' environmental insights, largely because the environment has been perceived to be a lesser priority than the seemingly more immediate needs of social equity. However, broadening the category of nature writing to environmental writing, and considering the close ties between social justice and environmental issues reveals the ways that Chicana/o writers demonstrate how human interaction with the environment differs along lines of ethnicity and class. This study investigates what's behind these differences. Specifically, I explore the writings of four Chicana/o environmental writers: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita Gonzalez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Cherrie Moraga. Their environmental writing provides valuable insights about how Chicanas/os maintain a sustainable relationship with the environment.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1711. Adviser: James Anderson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-209) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> Since 1989, significant mortgage finance innovation and federal policies with the intent of increasing homeownership participation particularly amongst minorities were implemented until the 2007 recession. This paper uses the Survey of Consumer Finances to analyze the lasting effectiveness of the mortgage finance innovations and federal policies on owner-occupancy rates leading up to and after the financial recession in 2007 until 2013. The results indicate that policy and macroeconomic factors offer temporary shifts in homeownership participation while household attribute changes have long lasting impact. Trends in the savings patterns of renters work as an effective measure for transitioning into homeownership. Shift-share analysis reinforces the idea that the model coefficients effectively capture household sentiment and macroeconomic conditions. Homeownership participation, especially amongst minorities, improved in 2013 relative to 1989 but the homeownership gap between minorities and white households has grown.</p><p>

<p> During the protests over the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, #BlackLivesMatter activists like Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, Johnetta Elzie, and DeRay McKesson used an African American rhetoric of design to transform Twitter into a platform for social protest. The transformative digital rhetoric of these activists, and activists in other movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street has increasingly become the focus of scholars in critical race studies, English studies, communication, and many other fields, but the emerging field of digital rhetoric&mdash;introduced by Elizabeth Losh, Douglas Eyman, Crystal VanKooten, and others&mdash;lacks frameworks necessary for engaging with these activists&rsquo; rhetoric in relation to its complex contexts. This project proposes a conceptual framework&mdash;what I call a <i>woke rhetorical ecology</i>&mdash;that provides the methodological sensitivity necessary to analyze the transformational rhetoric of activists like those in the #BlackLivesMatter movement.</p><p>

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"(Un)Conventional Coupling" initiates a more expansive critical conversation on the contemporary neo-slave narrative. The dissertation's central argument is that authors of neo-slave narratives rely on the politicized theme of interracial coupling to both reimagine history and explore the possibility of social transformation. to establish a framework for my particular focus on interracial intimacy, this study extends the boundaries of the genre by adopting Paul Gilroy's theory of the black Atlantic. This theoretical paradigm serves as a provisional framework for both accommodating and analyzing the complexity of authorship, nationality, and influence within this large body of work.;This dissertation interprets neo-slave narratives' preoccupation with interracial sex and intimacy as a compelling reason to situate the critical analysis of the genre within a more expansive context. The prevalence of discourses and representations of interracial desire, sexuality, and intimacy within the genre reveals a preoccupation with cross-cultural connection. Additionally, authors of neo-slave narratives rely on black-white coupling to explore the concepts and realities of "race." Indeed, interracial intimacy provides an effective mechanism for this literature to invigorate a dialogue about "race" and why it still matters in the twenty-first century.;Adopting the term (un)conventional coupling to destabilize racialized ideologies of sexuality and desire, this project reads black-white coupling as a trope that represents a complex and conflicted sense of transracial intimacy in these novels. This study analyzes the representation of transracial intimacy in three different novels: Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, and Valerie Martin's Property. Each chapter demonstrates the different ways in which these authors rely on the trope of black-white coupling to construct the double-edged critique of black Atlantic political culture. First, this trope exposes a hidden history in order to reveal a more comprehensive and nuanced version of slavery and its myriad legacies. Secondly, representations of interracial intimacy allow authors to posit utopian possibilities out of relations of difference by creating a space for transformative acts of social reinvention.

The purpose of this study is to explore the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in five fictional narratives published between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century: Charles W. Chesnutt's "Hot-Foot Hannibal," Zora Neale Hurston's their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Cade Bambara's "My Man Bovanne," and John Edgar Wideman's "Doc's Story.".;Using Walter Ong's suggestion that the relationship between storyteller and inside-the-text listener mirrors the hoped-for relationship between writer and readership, this study examines the way these writers grappled with these factors as they generated their texts.;By paying attention to the teller/listener-writer/readership relationship, this study examines the process whereby the narrative "frame" that historically "contained" and "mediated" the black spoken voice (either through a listener/narrator or a third-person narrator) modulated and developed throughout the century, as the frame opens and closes.;The results of this study suggest that what Robert Stepto calls the African-American "discourse of distrust" was a factor from the earliest fictions and is still very much a factor today.