This dissertation utilizes theoretical and clinical methodology to investigate the relationship between the process of identity formation/change in African-American women and the experience of 'revelation' facilitated in a group context in which members of the group read a common narrative. The novel, Ugly Ways, written by an African-American woman is the selected narrative used in this study. This study postulates a correlation between narrative shared in a group context, revelation, and identity formation/change. This study proposes and investigates narrative as a conducive structure for meaning making which facilitates African-American women recognizing, investigating and integrating information thereby availing to them, via revelation, new options to "reinterpret or transform" their historical life narratives as well as their present life situations and dilemmas. Revelation, in the context of this study, is defined as an organizing, transforming experience resulting in persons reporting a sense of unity and wholeness in their understanding of self, their relationships to others and to God. Finally, this study suggests that revelation experienced within the process of narrative shared within a group context results in increased reportings of change/growth by study participants. Concurrently this study proposes and investigates the homogenous gender group context for the discussion of the novel as a salient factor for the facilitation of narrative/group context related revelation. The theoretical expositions of Na'im Akbar's theory of natural psychology, Heinz Kohut's theory of self-development, Archie Smith Jr.'s relational self, H. Richard Niebuhr's theory of revelation, and womanist theology provide the framing upon which the hypothesis of this study and the clinical observations and results generated by this study are perceived and analyzed. Thirty study participants comprised five (5) groups, four (4) experimental and one (1) control. Reported results of this study were generated by (1) observations and interpretations of the researcher and (2) self-assessment accounts composed by each study participant at the completion of the study. Results provided support a correlation between narrative shared within a group context, revelation, and identity formation/change in African-American women. Specifically the study identifies that (1) narrative content that evolves out of or is congruent with the reader's internal history is most conducive for the experience of revelation and (2) the optimal context for the experience of revelation that facilitates identity formation/change for African-American women consists of the discussion of narrative in an all female African-American group. Also identified in the study results are specific potential inhibitors to the experience of revelation as proposed in this study, such as mixed gender groups, group size and an insufficient quantity of scheduled group meetings.

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As long as there have been Black people in the United States, they have struggled for the recognition of their full humanity. From the insurrection of slaves to the organized efforts of the Civil Rights Movement, historians have documented the ways in which Black individuals and Black organizations made a “demand on society” (Moses & Cobb, 2001) to be treated as full human beings with full human and civil rights. Young people continue the historical struggle by making demands on society today for their rights to safe housing, affordable transportation, youth jobs, and quality public education. This is a study of four young, Black men, former members of the Baltimore Algebra Project (B.A.P.), who have made a demand on society. The scholarship on Black males in education is overwhelmingly focused on documenting pathology, collectively painting a picture that is too flat, lacking the depth of “complex personhood” (Tuck, 2010). I turn to portraiture as my methodology for its nuanced focus on goodness and the complexity of the human experience to ask four questions: What role, if any, did the personal history of four Black men in the B.A.P. play in their ability and willingness to make a demand on society? What role, if any, did participation in the B.A.P. have on their ability and willingness to make a demand on society? How do these participants understand their role in society as actors on society? The study ultimately finds that the young men have the requisite skills, knowledge, dispositions, and commitment to liberation. They are organizers, teachers, philosophers, poets, mathematicians, artists, problem-solvers, fathers, partners and leaders. But they do not possess the material privileges that allow them to experiment with employment, to make mistakes, or to choose an activist lifestyle without regard for economic realities. In the absence of certain privileges, each young man is trying to find a way to live as a constitutional person, a full human being committed to the full humanness of other beings. Each is working hard to find spaces and people with whom they can experience the freedom and power of their B.A.P. days.

This study examines the works of three Harlem Renaissance authors: Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. In this study, I explore the multiplicity of identity in four of Fauset's short stories, "Emmy" (1912--3), "Mary Elizabeth" (1919), "The Sleeper Wakes" (1920), and "Double Trouble" (1923); in Nella Larsen's novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929); and in Zora Neale Hurston's autobiographical text, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). The variety of discursive genres here reflects the diverse construction of black female identity these works represent. More particularly, such variety parallels the multiplicity of identity itself and of the experiences of these women. The women represented in these works are all different in their ages, colours, classes, and backgrounds. This study focuses mainly on the multiplicity of positions from which any given woman may speak and construct her self. A picture of identity that is flexible, malleable, and ultimately unknowable in its entirety thus emerges. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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