Among the Dahomey of West Africa, the spirit Legba presides over all transitions, and African-American blues and jazz musicians can be considered his "children," or followers, since their music provides a link between the physical and spiritual worlds, the past and the present, and between cultures. Chapter one provides a cross-cultural perspective on the role of the musician in various societies, with the emphasis on Western Europe and West Africa, including a description of the special status of female musicians. Chapter two considers how the derogatory stereotypes of black musicians created by the nineteenth-century minstrel show allowed performers to cross the racial, sexual, and class boundaries of American society. Only if we recognize the paradox of freedom offered by this vestige of slavery will we be able to make sense of the fact that black performers adapted the minstrel roles after the Civil War. The third chapter describes the social role of the black musician of the jazz age, beginning with the controversy surrounding jazz in the early twenties, and tracing the survival of African musical practices and beliefs in jazz and the blues. The careers of many musicians are analyzed to demonstrate the range of opportunities open to black performers in the period. Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown wrote poetry inspired by the blues, adopting the persona of the musician in order to speak with an authentic folk voice. Chapter four considers how musicians are represented in their writing and compares their blues poems to the recordings of contemporary blues performers. The great jazz musicians of the twenties and thirties fired the imaginations of many modern African-American writers by providing a living link to African spiritual traditions and a new model of what history can be when it breaks free from the academy. Chapter five examines the representations of blues and jazz musicians in novels by Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed, showing that all three writers assume the role of improvising historian by adapting the narrative techniques of the West African griot and the repetition with variation of the jazz musician.

This dissertation, a study of one strand of French exoticism, discusses the representation and reception of the Black African and Caribbean Other, both of whom the French called the “nègre,” from the Great War until 1930. Using a wide array of sources (novels, travelogues, advertisements, and photographs), I argue that representations of the nègre, from French West Africa and the Antilles were constructed ambivalently in the French social imagination to define boundaries of the French self and to mediate cultural changes and social anxieties that World War I had furthered. In Part I, I demonstrate how the Black African came to be represented as a grand enfant in popular culture during and after the Great War. This representation set the stage for the emergence of négrophilisme in the 1920s and for some romantic mixed-race relationships. But the grand enfant was a contested representation, and this dissertation shows that a battle to define the post-war “Black soul” broke out after René Maran, a Black Frenchman, published his novel, Batouala (1921). In Part II, I analyze how the French depicted the Black African as the Other in “ethnographic” exhibitions, photographs, and advertisements. In the 1920s, the French represented the Black African as an exotic, primitive “type” in efforts to define post-war moral and social identities. In Part III, I examine three French travelers to Africa. Writers Lucie Cousturier and André Gide demonstrate a limited French conception of extending fraternity to the Other and a reluctance to embrace the “oceanic” in Africa. Popular response to La Croisière noire, an automobile expedition through Africa, serves as the basis of my analysis of heroic exoticism. Last, I examine French exoticist desires at the Bal nègre, a dance hall where ethno-eroticism and carnivalesque mixing of races flourished. Some contemporary observers, like writer Paul Morand, feared fluidity across the color line. Morand's exoticism is invoked to demonstrate how négrophilisme and négrophobisme became intertwined in the French social imagination in the 1920s. Thus this dissertation offers a complex account of French history that problematizes the myth of a non-racist France.

The goals of this dissertation project are to demonstrate how Paul Robeson utilized Shakespeare’s Othello in the broader struggle for African American equality and how the three productions with which he was associated shed light on contemporary political issues. First, it will document Robeson’s three performances as Othello: in London (1930), on Broadway (1942-45) and in Stratford-upon-Avon (1959). Secondly, it will examine Robeson’s political endeavors and theoretical positions at these three historical junctures, which will also elucidate corresponding international political developments (i.e. the spread of fascism across Europe, World War II and the Cold War). The role of Othello will be conceptualized, then, not just as the most important character in Robeson’s theatrical career but also as a means to explore the way in which Robeson’s artistry offered commentary upon or illuminated specific political issues like segregation and anti-fascism. First, chapter one synthesizes relevant background material on Shakespeare’s play and the stage history of Othello prior to Robeson. Chapters two and three focus on Robeson’s time abroad, primarily in Great Britain, in the 1930s. The second chapter focuses on Robeson’s portrayal of Othello in London in 1930 and the chapter three analyses Robeson’s political development during that period. The fourth chapter details the historic 1942-45 production of Othello that was directed by Margaret Webster and became the longest running Shakespearean play on Broadway. Chapter five outlines Robeson’s corresponding political involvement during the WWII and immediate post-war periods. Next, the sixth chapter examines Robeson’s political endeavors as his artistic career nearly grinds to a halt in the face of anti-communist hysteria. This chapter argues that Othello became even more closely associated with Robeson through these oppressive years as he maintained Othello’s final monologue in his repertoire and aptly titled his recording/publishing venture Othello Associates, Inc. The final chapter concentrates on his triumphant return to the stage as Othello at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959. This production provided an important forum for audiences to affirm their support not only for Robeson’s artistry, but also for his political views and his victory in the passport case.

This dissertation is an attempt to portray the revolutionary character of the American Civil War through a comparative methodology utilizing the French Revolution as both point of influence and as a parallel example. Within this novel context, subtle trends in the ideological development of the Republican Party’s Radical wing undertake new meaning and an alternative revolutionary heritage takes shape around an idealization of the universalism of the French and Haitian Revolutions of the 1790s. The work argues that through a diffusion of ideas and knowledge of events from the streets of Paris into the fields of Haiti and onto the shores of the American coast, a small faction of militant abolitionists latched onto the ideal of the Haitian Revolution as their own legacy. By the late 1830s, this radical edge of the antislavery movement embarked onto two courses, both derived from and influenced by their newfound ideology. The first was towards violent direct action against slavery while the second aimed at legitimizing radical new legal theories and creating the political structure necessary to bring about their enforcement. While on the one hand John Brown and Gerrit Smith pursued militant action, on the other Alvan Stewart and Salmon P. Chase sought a political and legal redefinition of American society through the Liberty and eventually Republican parties. With the coming of war in the 1860s, these two trends, violence and radical politics, converged in the Union war effort. In the midst of the Civil War and the early fight for Reconstruction, Radical Republicans and their allies in the Union Army displayed themselves as American Jacobins. Through a set of comparisons with French Revolutionary events and political debates, this thesis argues that the result of the ideological development between the American Revolution and the Civil War Era in the United States was the creation of a revolutionary ideology parallel to that of French Jacobinism. By the time of their fall from power, the Radical Republicans had seen their ideals both lambasted as the radical edge of politics and then transformed into the status quo, helping to prepare the nation for modernity.

As a political, social, and cultural ideology, Pan-Africanism has been a complex movement attempting to ameliorate the dehumanizing effects of “the global Eurocentric colonial/modern capitalist model of power,” which Anibal Quijano (2000) refers to as “the coloniality of power.” The destructive forces of the coloniality of power—beginning with the transatlantic slave trade—that led to the dispersal and displacement of millions of Africans subsequently facilitated the creation of Pan-African political and cultural consciousness. Thus, this dissertation examines diverse articulations of Pan-African politics of cultural struggle as a response to racist and sexist oppression and economic exploitation of Afro-descendants. I am specifically interested in the formation of international politico-cultural movements, such as the Black Arts movement, Négritude, and the Pan-African Cultural Revolution and their ideological alignments to political liberation struggles for the emancipation of people of African descent. With varying degrees of revolutionary commitment, intellectuals in each of these movements utilized literary and cultural production to raise the political consciousness of Africans and Afro-descendants to combat forces that oppressed their communities. To demonstrate this, my dissertation historicizes and analyzes the numerous Pan-African festivals, congresses, and conferences, which occurred between 1965 and 1977, while interrogating the specific manifestations of “translocal” contacts and linkages between movement intellectuals. I chose to focus on these years because they roughly correspond with the historical time period known as the Black Arts movement in North America (1965-1975), which had a vibrant, yet understudied Pan-African worldview. Moreover, while Pan-Africanism gained considerable traction after World War II, it was particularly between 1966 and 1977 that intellectuals aligned with Négritude and Pan-African Marxism competed for ideological hegemony of the movement on the African continent and in the African Diaspora.

This dissertation examines the circumstances created by colonial encroachments in the American Upper Ohio Valley and the South African Eastern Cape. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth and lasting well into the mid-nineteenth century, American Indians and Africans in the two areas faced increasing intrusions by people of European origin. Colonialism, the encounter between alien cultures, infringements on homelands, violence, dispossession, decimation, cultural invasion, removal, accommodation, revitalization, and survival led to rapidly changing worlds for local populations and white colonizers. My comparative study highlights the similarities and differences between historical developments in the two regions, with a particular focus on the creations of colonial racial orders in the United States and South Africa. Comparative history is a valuable method for examining phenomena of cross-cultural significance while subverting any notions about an area's historical uniqueness. It is an especially helpful approach in understanding the significant roles that the institutionalization of colonial expansion, racism and racial domination played in the United States and South Africa. The Upper Ohio Valley and the Eastern Cape functioned in many ways as testing grounds for American and British expansion. Developments in each place contributed to the making of colonial racial systems in the larger United States and greater southern Africa. While the scenarios in the Upper Ohio Valley and the Eastern Cape did not repeat themselves identically in other locations, comparable patterns would emerge in later years as the United States expanded westward and Britain expanded into southern and eastern Africa. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century in the Upper Ohio Valley and the South African Cape, systems of racial exclusiveness became entrenched through increasingly close ties between settlers and the state. In both places, settlers, indigenous groups, missionaries and humanitarians attempted to influence the emerging colonial racial orders with varying success. Yet ultimately, it was the power of the state with its ability to defeat indigenous groups militarily, to dispossess and move, and to legislate, which shaped the two regions' colonial racial orders.

This dissertation articulates the ways in which black (e)migration to the territorial frontier challenges the master frontier narratives as well as African American migration narratives, and to capture how black frontier settlers and settlements are represented in three contemporary novels. I explore through the lens of cultural geography the racialized landscapes of the real and symbolic American South and the real, symbolic and imaginary black territorial frontier. Borrowing perspectives from cultural and critical race studies, I aim to show the theoretical and practical significance of contemporary literary representations of an almost forgotten historical past. Chapter I traces the sites of history, memory and imagination in migration and frontier narratives of enslaved and newly freed black people in the Oklahoma Territory. Chapter II addresses an oppositional narrative of masculinity in frontier narratives depicted in Standing at the Scratch Line by Guy Johnson. Chapter III examines how the black frontier landscape can be created and recreated across three generations who endure racial threats, violence and the razing of Greenwood during the Tulsa Riot of 1921 in Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Chapter IV scrutinizes the construction of black frontier subjects and exclusive black communities in Paradise by Toni Morrison. My dissertation seeks to add to and expand the literary studies of migration and frontier narratives, taking into account two popular novels alongside a more academically recognized novel. The selected novels mobilize very different resources, but collectively offer insights into black frontier identities and settlements as sites of a past, present and future African American collective consciousness.

Based on the research questions employed in this study, the Nigerian immigrant community first began with student sojourners and is currently more effective within the African-American context. This community would perhaps have been much slower in evolving but for the crisis of institutional instability back in the Nigerian homeland as well as the policies of two American presidents. The major features of the Nigerian immigrant community with varying degrees of influences in America are: the Nigerian offspring, the Nigerian church, the Nigerian community media, the Nigeria women association, the Nigerian attorneys and physicians. The Nigerian offspring represent a conciliatory generation to Black America, the Nigerian homeland, Euro-America, and the most favorable orbit of incorporating Nigerian indices into the American mosaic. Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta exhibit one of the strongest evidences of the Southern typology of Nigerian immigrants in the U.S. Within this same setting, the generational and socio-cultural experiences of Nigerians and African-Americans are closely related. Both in their American agenda as well as aspirations toward the homelands, Nigerians are replaying the generational schemes of Black America. Analyses of the relationships between the generations of forced migration and voluntary migration in the Nigerian-U.S. based community media conform to a greater degree of understanding than misunderstanding. The benefits derived from the two historic migrations of black Africans to the U.S. are lopsided. Predisposed to neither assimilation nor integration, the Nigerian diaspora in particular exhibit a carefully selective pattern of socioeconomic identification which corresponds with segregated incorporation into society. Generally, the incorporation of the African diaspora in America favors a north to-east to-south thrust of the races of Africa. Africans from West and Central Africa, where a majority of the forced migrants were taken, are more likely to occupy an unfavorable orbit of American incorporation. Due mostly to American slavery, the Nigerian-African variable represents the most distinctive phase of reactive-global migration into the U.S. after decolonization. The predicted problem of "color line in the twentieth century" also corresponded with the reactive patterns of cross-cultural migrations particularly of the races of color and mostly at the intersection of the fifth wave of global migration. Sustained exchanges between Nigeria and the U.S. after colonialism therefore began with the fifth wave of reactive global migration. This marks an important new phase in the development and integration of Nigerian-African indices into the modern world.

This dissertation explores the high water mark of southern resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: the five-year abolition of public education in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Through interrogating the "culture of civility" that guided this bureaucratic, legalistic strategy of defiance, it argues that both massive resistance and the unique trajectory of events in Prince Edward County are not the anomalies in Virginia history that state boosters suggest, but rather logically consistent outgrowths of a coherent political tradition known as "the Virginia Way." When blacks chose to step outside of the traditional channels of "managed race relations," white Virginians struck back in a manner consistent with their determination to maintain white supremacy without condoning a rise in vigilantism that might have threatened elites' control over the mechanisms of political power. It highlights the important role played by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in bolstering community institutions, lobbying for federal intervention in the crisis, serving the educational and social needs of the out-of-school children, and building the capacity of local community members to take on leadership roles in the struggle. It characterizes the Friends' work as providing the institutional framework for indigenous protest. By following the trajectory of AFSC involvement in the county, it weaves together the diverse narratives of massive resistance, community organizing and school desegregation into one multi-faceted struggle to control the terms of the future. Ultimately, however, the study explores the long-range consequences of abandoning, starving, or compromising public education. In tracing the Prince Edward story up to the present, it reveals the flimsiness of the safeguards guaranteed to keep private education accessible, the difficulty of reconstructing a gutted public system, and the multi-generational psychological, social, and economic impact of educational deprivation. It demonstrates the centrality of equal educational opportunities to every phase of the local freedom struggle, challenging the assumption that the school desegregation phase of the civil rights movement passed into history after 1960 without sparking sustained community campaigns for change or significantly contributing to the development of local cultures of protest.

This study of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) investigates the operations of the national office and examines its interactions with local branches, particularly in St. Louis. As the organization's president, A. Philip Randolph and members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) such as Benjamin McLaurin and T.D. McNeal are important figures in this story. African American women such as Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman ran MOWM's national office. Of particular importance to this study is Myers' tenure as executive secretary. Working out of Harlem, she corresponded with MOWM's twenty-six local chapters, spending considerable time espousing the rationale and ideology of Non-Violent Goodwill Direct Action, a trademark protest technique developed and implemented alongside Fellowship of Reconciliation members Bayard Rustin and James Farmer. As a nationally recognized African American protest organization fighting for a "Double V" against fascism and racism during the Second World War, MOWM accrued political capital by the agitation of its local affiliates. In some cases, like in Washington, D.C., volunteers lacked the ability to forge effective protests. In St. Louis, however, BSCP official T.D. McNeal led a MOWM branch that was among the nation's most active. David Grant, Thelma Maddox, Nita Blackwell, and Leyton Weston are some of the thousands joining McNeal over a three-year period to picket U.S. Cartridge and Carter Carburetor for violating the anti-discrimination clause in Executive Order 8802, lobby Southwestern Bell Telephone to expand employment opportunities for African Americans, stage a summer of sit-ins at lunch counters in the city's largest department stores, and lead a general push for a "Double V" against fascism and racism. This study of MOWM demonstrates that the structural dynamics of protest groups often include a discrepancy between policies laid out by the organization's national office and the activity of its local branches. While national officials from MOWM and National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People had an ambivalent relationship with each other, inter-organizational tension was locally muted as grassroots activists aligned themselves with whichever group appeared most effective. During the Second World War, this was often MOWM.