Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2007. Program in Performance and Identity Studies. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. / Open access. Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-295). Print copy also available.

Caractéristique de la littérature noire des années 1960 aux États-Unis, la revendication de l’Être-noir est présente dans les moindres mots écrits par les auteurs africains américains de cette période. William Melvin Kelley, en tant qu’écrivain du Black Arts Movement, le met en avant dans ses œuvres au profit d’une éducation de l’Africain Américain contre la ségrégation et d’autres formes de racisme. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de conceptualiser le Noir par l’écriture, mais surtout de le dépeindre. Selon l’auteur en effet, son rôle est d’abord de mettre en action des personnes, et non pas des idées travesties qui résulteraient d’une quelconque idéologie noire. C’est ce schéma – le passage du monde réel à un monde fictif, ainsi qu’à une représentation idéologique – qui sera étudié dans cette thèse. Il faudra toutefois noter la transformation de l’attitude de l’auteur. En effet, de l’état de simple narrateur, il passe à celui d’activiste. Ce changement est notable par la différence des idées et de la verve entre le premier livre et le dernier publiés par Kelley. Cette évolution de la pensée sera ensuite reliée aux récentes directions prises par l’écrivain. Située au carrefour entre la phénoménologie, la philosophie de l’existentialisme noir, la sociologie ainsi que la littérature, l’analyse qui sera menée aura pour but de mettre en avant l’existence noire vue par William Melvin Kelley. L’auteur ne se place pas seulement en tant que représentant des Noirs, mais comme chargé d’une mission : celle d’aider l’Africain Américain à comprendre la société étatsunienne pour améliorer sa position sociale et culturelle. / Blackness is one of the keywords of the African American literature of the 1960s. It is to be read in each and every word that an Afro-American writer would put down on the paper. As a Black Arts Movement writer, William Melvin Kelley sets blackness forth in his works so that the black population can better struggle against segregation and other forms of racism. Yet, he does not only conceptualize the African American person by writing him or her up, but above all, he depicts them. For Kelley, the role of the author is primarily to show people, not disguised ideas resulting from some other black ideology. It is this pattern – the passage from a real world to a fictitious one, as well as to an ideological representation – that I will study in my dissertation. However, I am first going to note down the transformation in Kelley’s conduct toward race relations as he goes from the narrator to the activist. This change is to be seen in the difference that exists in the verve between his first novel and the last that was published. This renovation will also be linked to the recent direction taken by Kelley in his more recent writings. Phenomenology, Black existentialism, sociology and of course literature will be the bases for this dissertation. The analysis will insist on black existence as seen by William Melvin Kelley. The writer does not only act as a representative of black people, but as one who must help the “Africamerican understand the American society in order to improve his or her social and cultural position.”

This thesis interrogates the historical, philosophical, and existential implications of the Black Arts Movement and its major artists on the recurring themes of social injustice, Western hegemony, and the fight for aesthetic authenticity to reimagine fairy tales for the youth Black Aesthetic. As a personal reflection and foundational document for a larger project, this work weaves these implications through the practical application of the varied stages of program development for youth artists. This project also is a handbook that encompasses scholarly research, reflective analysis and anecdotal journal evidence. The subsequent chapters explore the theological and theatre pedagogical educational influences that informed the phases of inception through completion of the 2015 Courage Summer Workshop (a six-week devised theatre workshop for middle school students) to include its two-year program history, curriculum design, and weekly program overviews.

Thesis advisor: Carlo Rotella / Thesis advisor: Cynthia A. Young / From the BLKARTSOUTH literary collective in the 1970s, to public-storytelling-based education and performance forms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and fiction and nonfiction collections in the years since the storm, this study traces how New Orleans authors, playwrights, educators, and digital media makers concerned with social justice have mirrored the aesthetics and epistemologies of the collaborative African diasporic expressive traditions that began in the antebellum space of Congo Square and continue in the traditions of second-line parading and Mardi Gras Indian performances today. Combining literary analysis, democratic and performance theory, and critical geography with interviews and participant observation, I show how New Orleans authors, theatre makers, and teachers have drawn on "second-line" knowledges and geographies to encourage urban residents to recognize each other as "divided subjects" whose very divisions are the key to keeping our social and political systems from stabilizing and fixing borders and ethics in a way that shuts down possibilities for dissent, flux, and movement. Building on diverse scholarly arguments that make a case both for New Orleans's exceptionalism and its position, especially in recent years, as a model for neoliberal urban reform, this study also shows how the call and response aesthetics of community-based artists in New Orleans have influenced and benefited from the rise of global democratic performance and media forms. This dual focus on local cultures of resistance and New Orleans's role in the production of national and transnational social justice movements enables me to evaluate New Orleans's enduring central role in the production of U.S. and transnational constructs of African diasporic identity and radical democratic politics and aesthetics. Chapter One, "Second Line Knowledges and the Re-Spatialization of Resistance in New Orleans," synthesizes academic and grassroots analyses and descriptions of second lines, Mardi Gras Indian performances, and related practices in New Orleans through the lenses of critical geography and democratic theory to analyze the democratic dreams and blues approaches to history and geography that have been expressed in dynamic ways in the public spaces of New Orleans since the era of Congo Square. My second chapter, "'We Are Black Mind Jockeys': Tom Dent, The Free Southern Theater, and the Search for a Second Line Literary Aesthetic," explores the unique encounter in New Orleans between the city's working-class African American cultural traditions and the national Black Arts movement. I argue that poet and activist Tom Dent's interest in black working-class cultural traditions in New Orleans allowed him to use his three-year directorship of the Free Southern Theater to produce new and lasting interconnections between African American street performances and African American theatre and literature in the city. Chapter Three, "Story Circles, Educational Resistance, and the Students at the Center Program Before and After Hurricane Katrina," outlines how Students at the Center (SAC), a writing and digital media program in the New Orleans public schools, worked in the years just before Hurricane Katrina to re-make public schools as places that facilitated the collaborative sounding and expression of second-line knowledges and geographies and engaged youth and families in dis-privileged local neighborhoods in generating new democratic visions for the city. This chapter contrasts SAC's pre-Katrina work with their post-Katrina struggles to reformulate their philosophies in the face of the privatization of New Orleans's public schools in order to highlight the role that educational organizing in New Orleans has played in rising conversations throughout the US about the impact of neo-liberal school reform on urban social formations, public memory, and possibilities for organized resistance. Chapter Four, "'Running and Jumping to Join the Parade': Race and Gender in Post-Katrina Second Line Literature" shows how authors during the post-Katrina crisis era sought to manipulate mass market publication methods in order to critically reflect on, advocate for, and spread second-line knowledges. My analysis of the fiction of Tom Piazza and Mike Molina, the non-fiction work of Dan Baum, and the grassroots publications of the Neighborhood Story Project asks how these authors' divergent interrogations of the novel and non-fiction book forms with the form of the second line parade enable them to question, with varying degrees of success, the role of white patriarchy on shaping prevailing media and literary forms for imagining and narrating the city. Finally, Chapter Five, "Cross-Racial Storytelling and Second-Line Theatre Making After the Deluge," analyzes how New Orleans's community-based theatre makers have drawn on second-line knowledges and geographies to build a theatre-based racial healing movement in the post-Katrina city. Because they were unable and unwilling, after the Flood, to continue to "do" theatre in privatized sites removed from the lives and daily spatial practices of local residents, the network of theater companies and community centers whose work I describe (such as John O'Neal's Junebug Productions, Mondo Bizarro Productions, ArtSpot Productions, and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center) have made New Orleans's theatrical landscape into a central site for trans-national scholarly and practitioner dialogues about the relationship of community-engaged theatre making to the construction of just and sustainable urban democracies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-202). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-202). Also available on the Internet.

In this thesis, I examine Gwendolyn Brooks’s diptych poems “Two Dedications” from her 1968 collection In the Mecca. Critical accounts of “Two Dedications” cast the poems as fixed oppositions between “frivolous” Western art and inspiring, communal black art. I propose that such binaries are reductive and overlook the intellectual benefits Brooks locates in abstract modernist art. Using Ezra Pound’s theories of modernist difficulty, Walter Benjamin’s concept of artistic “aura,” and the Black Arts Movement (BAM) manifestoes of Ron Karenga and Larry Neal, I argue that Brooks’s poems demonstrate the benefits of both abstract Western art and representational BAM art. Specifically, Brooks suggests that both types of art provide avenues for self-determination and liberation from institutional conventions.

Poet and professor Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989) played a significant role in the birth of black literary and cultural studies through his literary and academic careers. Brown helped to establish a new wave of black cultural and folklore studies during his time as the “Director of Negro Affairs” for the Federal Writers’ Project. As a professor at Howard University, Brown influenced black literary studies through his literary criticisms and seminars and his role as a mentor to literary figures of the next generations. Through letters to and from Sterling Brown and manuscripts, this thesis argues that Brown’s poetry, publications and folk studies in the nineteen twenties and thirties where the groundwork for his most prolific role of teacher-mentor.

This dissertation examines the work of concert dance artists within the Black Arts Movement (1965-75) in order to situate the impact of their work in the present. I use a method of diaspora citation to comprehend their choreographic strategies in articulating forms and critiques of belonging that continue to resonate today. My method builds on Brent Hayes Edwards’ theorization of diaspora as an articulated, or joined, structure of belonging (Edwards, 2003). This necessitates attending to décalage, or the incommensurable gaps in experience and differentiations of power across lines of nation, class, language, gender, sexuality, etc. My development of diaspora citation departs from Edwards’ provocative concept metaphor of “articulated joints” as a way to envision diaspora—as the joint is both a place of connection and is necessarily comprises the gaps which allow for movement. I propose that concert dance choreographers in the Black Arts Movement worked through the articulated joints of choreographic intertexts to build critiques and offer alternative structures of diasporic belonging. I define diaspora citation as a choreographic strategy that critiques the terms for belonging to the figure of the ‘human,’ conceived in Western modernity through property in the person, as white, Western, heteropatriarchal, propertied Man. Simultaneously, this choreographic strategy works to index, create and affirm alternative forms of belonging, articulated in/as diaspora, that operate on distinct terms. One way in which the practice of diaspora citation occurs is through Signifyin’ or ‘reading,’ a strategy of indirection and critique developed in African American social contexts. Rather than conceiving of movement as a form of property (on the terms of property in the person) these artists are driven by a sense of connection, motivated by the forms of assembly and structures of belonging enabled by bodies in motion. In their refusals of the terms for belonging to the ‘human’ (i.e. normative subjectivity), the dance artists of the Black Arts Movement examined in this dissertation announce a queer capacity to desire differently. Half a century after the historical Black Arts Movement, this project turns to its manifestations in concert dance as a usable past. The structure of the dissertation moves from 1964 into the present in order to consider the resonances of this past today. Through oral history interviews, performance and archival analysis, and participant observation, this project moves between historical, cultural analysis and embodied knowledge to pursue the choreographic uses of citation developed in Black Arts Movement concert dance contexts that imagined new ways of being human (together) in the world. / Dance