The purpose of this thesis is to discover and assess the rhetorical methods employed by LeRoi Jones in the evolution of cultural black nationalism. First, the thesis concentrates on his ethos and philosophy. Second, it analyzes the cultural black nationalism organization in Newark, New Jersey. Third, it discusses the impact of LeRoi Jones on the black cultural nationalism movement. The conclusions drawn from this study reveal that LeRoi Jones was able to attract, maintain, and mold his followers, to build a sizable power base, and to adapt to several audiences simultaneously. Implications of the study are that because of his rigid requirements and a gradual change in ideology, LeRoi Jones is now losing ground as a leader.

Despite radical differences in their political commentary, Amiri Baraka and V.S. Naipaul’s literary careers have obsessively centered on the divided Self of the colonized artist. Esther Jackson argues that Baraka’s “search for form” becomes “symbolic of a continuing effort to mediate between warring factions within the perceiving mind” (38). Similarly, many critics have interpreted Naipaul’s grave manifestos as the outpourings of a writer disenchanted with his own past and national identity. For Selwyn Cudjoe, Naipaul’s work is “reflective of a man who failed to discover any psychological balance in his life” (172-173). This thesis analyzes how Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas engage with various fairy tale conventions in order to narrate the colonized victim’s divided Self. These narratives ultimately function as anti-fairy tales, revealing the black protagonist’s accursed position in the symbolic order. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Not long after the invention of sound recording technology, two phrases arose to describe a host of relationships to this new era of sound: high fidelity and low fidelity. The idea of fidelity when applied to sound was used to describe the accuracy of reproduction – how much did a sound reproduced by phonograph technology sound like the original? While the idea of fidelity continues to serve the function as a way to measure the quality of sound recording, through technical measurements of frequency response, signal-to-noise ratios, and the ability to reproduce extremes of quietude and loudness, fidelity also functions in ideologies of listening. High fidelity ideology, in its never-ending quest for perfect fidelity, insists upon hearing musical records as realistic recordings of original events, obscuring how the majority of musical recordings are assembled in the studio by an unheard engineer. Beyond music, high fidelity ideology insists that sounds can and, indeed, must be heard in certain ways. Low fidelity represents that which is left in high fidelity’s wake: outdated technology, poor sound quality, and the obvious intrusion of the process of recording into the media. What develops is a low fidelity mode of listening that does not listen for the perfect reproduction of an originary event or an imagined ideal. This project examines how experimental Black authors from the 1960s to the 1990s engaged with low fidelity sound recording technology in prose and poetry. The authors and works examined include: Amiri Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964) and The System of Dante’s Hell (1965); Fran Ross’s Oreo (1974); Nathaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook (1986); and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994). The chapters examine how these authors look to sound technologies such as monophonic LPs, tape editing decks in recording studios, cassettes, and early reel-to-reel tape recorders as a grounding for the experimental forms of the texts and their approach to creating literary voice. I conclude that by approaching these texts by close reading through the history of the media presented in each chapter that we can develop a form of low fidelity reading that offers a new approach to the interstices between sound and text.

In Rhythm Changes: Jazz Rhythm in the African American Novel, I demonstrate how novelists from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement adapted jazz rhythm into literary form. In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison famously defines invisibility as a state of being “never quite on the beat.” Ellison frames the novel as a kind of translation of the “invisible” rhythm the narrator hears in Louis Armstrong, a syncopated rhythm rooted in Black aesthetic and cultural forms. “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility?” Ellison was not alone in this project. The writers I study all exemplify what Duke Ellington calls a “tone parallel”—the concept that literary form could reproduce or “parallel” the particularities of musical form. However, these writers find literary strategies to transcend parallelism, such that the lines between medium begin to touch. Considering devices that cut across music and literature—anaphora, antiphonal dialogue, polysyndeton, parataxis—I argue that novelists, not just poets, respond formally to the rhythmic concepts they hear on the bandstand, synthesizing these innovations with a broader literary tradition. Rudolph Fisher’s novel The Conjure-Man Dies brings the complex rhythmic sensibility of Louis Armstrong to detective fiction; Ann Petry’s The Street channels the rhythmic phrasing of Ethel Waters in a “novel of social criticism”; Ellison’s epic unfinished second novel follows the paratactic rhythm of the preacher and jazz trombonist; and Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell projects the rhythm of Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor onto Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” By finding the literary in the musical and vice versa, these novelist-experimenters move beyond Pater’s credo that all art aspires to the condition of music.