Retention, persistence and graduation rates are not new issues in higher education. Early research by Tinto (1975), Bean (1980), and Pascarella (1980) illustrated the importance of retention and the different methods by which it can be analyzed. These theories, although widely cited and read, account for less than 30% of the variance in departure rates (Astin, 1993). Much of the retention research on African American students has focused on utilizing dominant retention theories to investigate Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in attempts to explain or explore the relationship between these students and the institutions (Cabrera, Nora et al., 1999; Person, 1990; Person and Christensen, 1996). The purpose of this study is to push the boundaries of the understanding of African American student retention. The expansion of these boundaries is accomplished in three ways: (1) providing institutions information to help facilitate the graduation of African American students, (2) providing a cross-sectional analysis of demographic characteristics of students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities versus Predominantly White Institutions, and (3) offering new perspectives on retention of African American students utilizing the institution as the unit of analysis. The goals of this project were accomplished by utilizing African American student culture as a lens for viewing the results of this research, a current retention model applied to African American students from a unique set of matched institutions.

<p> The musical traditions of New Orleans are largely patriarchal. As the predominant sonic signifier of New Orleans, the brass band amplifies this gender bias more than any other musical tradition in the city. Brass band song lyrics can at times revolve around the subjugation and objectification of women, which renders the brass band canon tricky to access for female musicians. These symbolic issues become socially reified in the male control of instruments and the barriers to professionalization experienced by female musicians. Indeed, female brass band musicians are in the minority, constituting few more than ten musicians in a city with somewhere in the vicinity of fifty bands, all of which feature about ten musicians. The available literature on brass bands has thus far focused almost exclusively on black men and, mostly due to the relative absence of women in brass bands, neglects to view gender as a category of analysis, reflecting the gender bias of the scene at large. Using black feminist theory, this thesis seeks to introduce gender as a key element to brass band research by studying the only current exception to male dominance in New Orleans&rsquo; brass band community, an all-female brass band named the Original Pinettes Brass Band. Their example forces us to reconsider the domain of brass band music not only as one where brass band instruments articulate power, but where gender is a primary element in the construction and consolidation of this power.</p>

<p> It is often that during their academic pursuits, to become successful, low-income African-American women must learn to navigate an upstream current through higher education, where the established order in the academy is based on Western European values that often conflict with African-American values (Harper, Patton &amp; Wooden, 2009; Phinney, Ong and Madden, 2000). Because many lack preparation and tools for success in higher education, without immediate intervention, low-income college students tend to experience academic failure during their first semester at the university level (Acevedo and Herrera, 2002). </p><p> The present study analyzed eight interview transcripts of African American women, all of whom had been mentored through Hunt's Inclusive Community Building Ellison Model (The Ellison Model) (Hunt, 1994). The data described the participants' experiences in higher education and their perceptions of The Ellison Model and its role in assisting them to overcome the "glass ceiling" in higher education. Analysis of the transcripts involved: (a) <i>emergent</i> coding wherein a preliminary review of the data revealed themes, including (a) mentoring/support, (b) dialogue between mentor and mentee, (c) conflict resolution, (d) The Ellison Model values, and (e) living two lives. Further, categories were created to examine the data more closely. </p><p> Findings of the data showed a consensus among the perceptions of these women from low-income background of the existence of a glass ceiling as they pursued higher education. This glass ceiling was perceived variously: (a) an external glass ceiling, (b) a self-imposed glass ceiling, and (c) a lowered glass ceiling. Moreover, the study showed that the women perceived mentoring as an effective means for assisting low-income African American navigate between home and university space, "living two lives" (Hoyt, 2003). Finally, the study showed the profundity of The Ellison Mentoring Model, specifically, as a viable approach to helping low-income African American women overcome the glass ceiling as they pursue higher education. This study has implications for higher education institutions in their efforts to recruit, retain, and graduate more ethnic and gendered minority students, and confirms the benefit of a mentoring component as a major part of student service programs at higher education institutions.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of a selected group of 15 black males to identify the perceived internal and external aspects that have influenced their economic and academic success. A qualitative phenomenological study was chosen as the methodology that would be most applicable. The interview process allowed for an in-depth exploration of the perceived factors contributing to the successes in each participant&rsquo;s life. This qualitative study identified diverse categories and themes; the perceptions shared of the effect of numerous internal and external factors were identified and explored. The major themes included parental and familial influences; teachers and male role models of all kinds were perceived to have had a direct impact on the success of many of the participants. Internal factors were also perceived to have had a major influence on the respondents&rsquo; success; themes such as an internal drive, a sense of resilience, and fears of poverty substantially stimulated the behaviors of the interviewees. Recommendations for further study are provided and include more in depth interviews or case studies to explore further the influence of additional internal and external factors. In addition, a larger sample could be assessed with a quantitative study to determine which factors are the most common across a more significantly sized sample. Recommendations for programs and application of the data gathered were included; programs to enhance the teacher/parent relationship and providing more mentoring opportunities for the disadvantaged were among the suggested applications.</p>

<p> This mixed method research investigated the question: What elements do African American charter school parents in a Southern California community identify as important in their children's charter schools? Twenty-three African American families who had enrolled their children in charter schools in a Southern California community responded to a survey. Five respondents were randomly selected for semi-structured interviews. </p><p> The history of African American parents and children in this country has been one of limited access and choice. Early African American educators proposed education as the means by which African Americans could improve their lives and pursue the American dream (Dubois, 1989; Washington, 1901; Woodson, 1933). After centuries of being in traditional public schools the majority of African American children are not being successfully educated (Johnson, 2002; Haycock, 2009). As a result of widespread dissatisfaction with public schools, an increasing number of African American parents are choosing charter schools as an alternative to traditional public schools (Zimmer et al., 2003, 2009). </p><p> The African American families in this study shared the following six elements that influenced their decision to enroll their children in charter schools: academic achievement/ curriculum, parental engagement, quality of teaching, class/school size, safety/ security, and extra activities. Implications from this research and future research are included.</p>

<p> African American grandmothers raising grandchildren is a rapidly increasing phenomenon that merits further exploration. This phenomenological research study examined the lived experiences of 10 single, low-income, African American grandmothers raising grandchildren. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the personal experiences of this population from the perspective of the grandmothers. The results from this study provide professional working with this population additional insight into the challenges and needs African American grandmother caregivers encounter. Through the use of semi-structured, open-ended conversational interviews, data was gathered to provided in-depth information about the complexities and distinctive needs of this family unit. Using a step-by-step phenomenological data analysis process, five themes emerged: Loss of Personal Self, Main Supporter: Church, Cognitive Dissonance, Second Chance Feelings, and Psychosocial Stressors. The findings from this study provide additional knowledge for mental health professionals, public policy makers and academicians working with this population to help decrease service barriers.</p>

<p> This dissertation analyzes the narrative use of sound, the rhetorical appeal to be heard and the trope of listening in African American literature as well as Hollywood and international cinema. Contributing to the burgeoning fields of film sound and listening studies, Chapter One explores the relationship between the first experiments with synchronous sound recording technology and the construction of subjectivity along the lines of ethnicity, religion and gender in early talkies such as Al Jolson's <i>The Jazz Singer</i> and Alfred Hitchcock's <i>Blackmail.</i> Chapter Two surveys a range of abolitionist texts and select essays from the Civil Rights movement&mdash;particularly David Walker's <i>Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,</i> Frederick Douglass's first autobiography <i> Narrative of the Life</i> and his novella "The Heroic Slave," W. E. B. Du Bois's <i>The Souls of Black Folk</i> and Richard Wright's <i> White Man, Listen!</i>&ndash;in order to review the role of listening across racial divides in the United States. Chapter Three analyzes the multiple ways in which listening functions for narrative purposes in Wright's best-selling novel, <i>Native Son;</i> and Chapter Four addresses the trouble with listening in Wright's posthumous novel <i>A Father's Law</i> and Hitchcock's first color film, <i>Rope.</i> </p><p> Contributing to film studies, gender studies, and critical race theory, this thesis argues that the act of listening comes to function figuratively as a trope, signifying not only a means of recognition, interpellation and subjugation of an Other but also an instrument of justice; a matter of politics; a means of education; a potential remedy for alienation, while at the same time working as a tool of oppression; a formative act in familial and other social relations; a governing form of surveillance; an audial gaze, so to speak; a way to frighten, or more generally, evoke emotion; a part of the therapeutic process; an indication of trust or confidence; a manifestation of (sexual) desire; and, last but certainly not least, an age old form of entertainment forever transformed by sound technology of the industrial age. </p>

During the nineteenth century, both black women and white women were at the mercy of the white patriarchy, albeit at differing degrees to and natures in which they experienced bondage, marginality, and empowerment. In Minnie's Sacrifice, Frances E. W. Harper addresses the roles these women played in confronting and defeating the patriarchy. We first encounter Camilla Le Croix, the daughter of a white slave owner. Her actions parallel and reflect the evolving role of the nineteenth-century female in America: Camilla moves from the domestic sphere into the public sphere, becoming the author of a new moral code. Bernard Le Croix, Camilla's father, tries to silence Camilla's voice when she pleads to place the young orphaned slave, Louis, in their home, but Camilla prevails. Because of her involvement in their world, she witnesses the slaves' survival techniques. Drawing strength from her experiences, Camilla creates a new world for herself and her two slaves, Miriam and her grandson Louis, who is actually Camilla's step-brother. Camilla and Miriam unite to forge a new society. While Louis is being groomed by these two women for entrance into the public sphere, his future wife, Minnie, is being prepared for the same by her mother, Ellen, "the beautiful quadroon." Ellen begins her bid for empowerment when she presents her mulatto daughter, fathered by her master to visiting Northern guests. Fully aware of the physical similarities between Minnie and the slave owner's other daughter, Marie, Ellen places Minnie in a prominent position dressed so as to reveal the girls' likenesses. When the slave mistress demands that Minnie be sold, Ellen prevails in her appeals to the master. She gains freedom for Minnie, who is sent North to live as a white child, only to be reunited much later with her mother, at which time, Minnie sacrifices her rights as a white woman and embraces her black heritage. She later marries Louis, who has gained his freedom and rightful inheritance. Together, they represent a new order, one won by the works of two women, one white, one black.

Male authors intent on critiquing American racism, specifically William Faulkner and Richard Wright, have been more successful in defining the parameters surrounding the discussion of violence in American society than have their female counterparts. Intent to illuminate the connections between racial oppression and violent reactions to social marginalization, these authors assert that violence ensues in the lives of male protagonists as implicit responses to the social injustice that their protagonists face. Their pornographic representations of violence effectively erase the subjectivity of female victims and subvert attempts to critique violence against women. Whereas the male authors focus only on racism as the cause of male violence, Hurston begins the project of revising this vision. She highlights the power relations that exist in intraracial contexts---both white and black---that contribute to violence against women. Hurston shows that violence directed toward women is often the result of patriarchal oppression, connected to other forms of oppression because the structures of oppression (sexism and racism) are mutually supporting. Using the construct of sadomasochistic theory, I illustrate the imbricated nature of oppression and its effect on female identity and subjectivity. Where Faulkner, Wright, and Hurston have focused primarily on acts of physical violence, Jones' text, Eva's Man, adds the dimension of discursive violence to this discussion. Eva Medina Canada both internalizes negative images of womanhood and transforms those representations into models of female empowerment and resistance. Eva's signifying gesture offers women an avenue of reclamation, a way of preserving their autonomy in a hostile environment. Finally, Morrison brings together the various forms of violence discussed in previous chapters. She creates a text which illustrates both material and discursive violence, a text that illuminates the connection between social and individual expressions of violence. Rather than prioritize one form of violence over another, Morrison engages both black feminism and black nationalism to critique sexism and racism in American society. Her model of imbricated critique and analysis of "disinterested violence" offers a model to feminism for effective social intervention and transformation.

This dissertation investigates twentieth-century African American and Chicano/a novels that privilege childhood play as a site for defining the self through or against an array of social norms and dominant ideologies. Although narratives of children at play are a neglected category in literary criticism, the playing child often functions as a central literary figure for conveying the conflicted processes of self-definition for children on society's margins. In conversation with theories of play, I argue that a range of Chicano/a and African American texts predicate adult possibilities for either resistance or capitulation to conventional expectations on what transpires during childhood play. The writers in this study respond, in part, to the ideology of the early twentieth-century playground movement and its aim of instilling a sense of civic duty in the children of European immigrants. While playgrounds may have been designed to integrate certain children into U.S. society, they also excluded other children---in particular, children viewed as racial others---through segregation. Even though the children of both Mexican Americans and African Americans were not included in the play movement's goals and have continued to be excluded throughout the twentieth century, the child characters in the novels that I examine frequently contend with unsettling issues of national identity during play. Unlike the proponents of the play movement who viewed assimilation through play as a form of progress, the writers in my project often show that play is a site where capitulation to dominant values is neither progressive nor desirable for their child characters. Chapter one investigates childhood play as a key factor in determining how Chicano masculinities will be lived in relation to women, class, ethnicity, and national identity. Chapter two examines childhood play as a stage for rehearsing gender-specific adult identities that empower Chicanos but disempower Chicanas. Chapter three foregrounds childhood play as a crucial arena for working out the tensions caused by racism and sexism in relationships between African American women and girls.