This study explores, describes, explains, and analyzes the experiences of African-American women with breast cancer. The study gives 'voice to African-American' women through the use of oral narratives. Starting from an 'informant as expert' position, nine African-American women with breast cancer tell their stories about their illness episode from the time of their diagnosis to the post treatment period. African-American women in this study have diverse responses to a breast cancer diagnosis, and they seek help for such a diagnosis through informal and formal networks. Religious and spiritual activities in the lives of these women were central to their treatment experience. Critical commonalities, such as help-seeking and caregiving, are described, and the unique experiences related to breast cancer are discussed. The breast cancer experience is thus analyzed using womanist and developmental positions which help to create a larger narrative about African-American women and illness. Implications for social work practice in the areas of policy, education, research, and direct practice are also discussed / acase@tulane.edu

The Jazz Age witnessed a convergence of social and aesthetic changes that informed the political, social and literary relationships between African-Americans and Jews. Coming into close contact with each other for the first time, African-Americans and Jews struggled to comprehend and represent the other group as their own perceptions and representations of themselves and the other group began to inform representations of 'the other' in popular culture I see the Jazz Age as a transitional period where artists, particularly Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie Hurst, struggle with their own sense of identity politics as the attempt to 'create' and represent themselves and 'the other' to a wide audience. It is my assertion that the 'New Negro' ethos and continued Jewish assimilation allowed these writers to enter a 'third space' of representation that, unlike W. E. B. DuBois' notion of the 'color-line,' does not 'fix' either the artist of 'the other's' identity, but rather allows for multiple movements that challenged these representations. The patronage system that allowed Hughes and Hurston to survive financially while writing in their early years, also restricted their artistic goals, as did conflicting notions of what constituted 'legitimate' African-American art. In their differing representations of Jews both as a social symbol and a religious group, Hughes and Hurston attempted to work out their own identity politics and, in Hurst's case, engage in a project of 'hybridizing' Judeo-Christian and African/Caribbean originary myths For novelist Fannie Hurst, ambivalent about her own identity as an assimilated Jew, representations of immigrant Jews and African-Americans allowed her to 'write' herself away from being identified too closely with stereotypes of Jews in order to be seen as more 'American.' In exploring these writer's representations and interpretations of 'the other,' I hope to interrogate notions of national and cultural identity and posit the Jazz Age as a time when possible representations of 'the other' informed each group's creation of itself / acase@tulane.edu

My dissertation is a foray into blues music's intricate web of racial taxonomies, an aspect that has been neglected by most existing studies of the genre. In particular, I am interested in significant changes that took place in the 1960s under which blues was reconfigured from "black" to "white" in its production and reception while simultaneously retaining a notion of authenticity that remained deeply connected with constructions of "blackness." In the larger context of the Civil Rights Movement and the burgeoning counterculture, audiences for blues music became increasingly "white" and European. In their romantic embrace of a poverty of choice, "white" audiences and performers engaged in discourses of authenticity and in the commodification, racialization and gendering of sounds and images as well as in the confluence of blues music's class origins. I argue that as "white" people started to listen to "black" blues, essentialist notions about "race" remained unchallenged and were even solidified in the process. By the end of the 1960s, moments of cross-racial communication and a more flexible approach to racialized sounds had been thwarted by nostalgia for and a reification of essentialist categories. This marked the emergence of a conservative blues culture that has continued into the present. Individual chapters focus on key figures, events and institutions that exemplify blues music's racial politics and transnational movements of the 1960s.

The Aaron Douglas Collection of works of art in the Amistad Research Center, now at Tulane University, includes works of art little known to scholars of American art. It is a collection of two hundred and seventy examples by black and minority artists, most dating from 1925 to 1954. Fifty-two of this number have been illustrated with several in color. There is no published catalog. Though individual works have been shown in specialized exhibitions, virtually none of this group has been included in standard survey books used in courses teaching American art history. The vitality of these works of art, the message they convey, should be included with the discipline of American art history The Aaron Douglas Collection represents a portion of a larger assemblage made by the Harmon Foundation of New York City. The details of the Collection's history are discussed in Chapter One Chapters Two and Three of this thesis provide a necessary foundation to the appreciation of the artists and their works. Several of these artists have slipped into obscurity. For that reason, background information about their times, the 20s and 30s, will perhaps serve to fill in some of the inherent gaps. Chapter Four gives a basic profile of each artist highlighting, whenever possible, pertinent information about them. The end of each profile contains catalog information for each of their pieces in the Collection / acase@tulane.edu

The jazz aesthetic presented in this study constitutes an open, dialogic critical approach to African-American and Afro-Caribbean literature, particularly by contemporary women writers. It attempts to bring to light and play with differences, contradictions, and irresolvabilities within and between texts. It demonstrates how that fiction constitutes an Afrocentric discourse/performance whose aim is to write/right the history of African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities and how it plays a healing function for the protagonists, the author and the participatory audience, stressing the importance of knowing one's past and learning from one's matrilineage. Using jazz's theme-and-variations mode of composition, together with call-and-response patterns, such novels achieve wholeness behind a mask of fragmentation and vibrate with the tension between oraliture and literature. To show how varied the application of the jazz aesthetic can be, I examine Toni Morrison's Jazz, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven / acase@tulane.edu

Men who are arrested for battering are usually mandated to intervention programs. Black men are overrepresented in arrest for domestic violence in the majority of urban areas and are, therefore, also overrepresented in batterers' intervention programs in those areas. Most states have identified standards for these programs that utilize a profeminist curriculum (such as The Duluth Model), but do not specifically require that the programs include a cultural component. The current approach to batterers' intervention is often described as color-blind and one-size-fits-all. However, the research literature does not provide empirical support to reject the profeminist curriculum in favor of creating racially-homogeneous programs or culturally-focused curricula This qualitative study utilizes a feminist perspective and a phenomenological approach with a womanist emphasis to determine if the current profeminist curriculum represents the experience of violence in relationships between Black women and Black men. The premise of this study is that determining the answer to this question begins with a phenomenological analysis of the essence of violence in Black dyads from the perspective of battered Black women. This study presents the experiences of battering related by ten Black women The focus of the data reduction was to identify the behavioral antecedents and the tactics of violence discussed by the participants. Coding the behavioral antecedents resulted in the development of three themes: threat to the relationship (actual or perceived), threat to his physical or emotional well-being (actual or perceived), and threat to his perception of gender roles: Ten themes emerged from the acts of physical, psychological, or sexual violence that were identified in this data. These themes mirrored the tactics that comprise the Power and Control Wheel that is utilized in the Duluth curriculum. Therefore, the findings of this research suggest that the profeminist curriculum does reflect the experience of battering from the perspective of battered Black women and is, therefore, consistent with the womanist perspective of domestic violence. Subsequently, batterers' intervention programs that utilize this curriculum will most likely be appropriate for Black participants / acase@tulane.edu

This study examines the relationship between ethnic consumers' reactions to advertising appeals and their acculturation mode. A model of acculturation was tested that proposes the existence of four acculturation modes based on combinations of American and ethnic cultural identification levels. An experiment was conducted using a two (advertising appeals: American and ethnic) X four (acculturation modes: assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization) X two repeated measures (products: beverage and phone) design. Subjects' ad affect and ad cue recognition responses were analyzed. The hypotheses predicted that subjects' responses to the American and ethnic appeals would vary by acculturation orientation. / The sample consisted of 220 African-American college students. The sample's distribution of American and ethnic cultural identification scores represented two of the four possible acculturation modes--the Integration-oriented (HI-American, HI-Ethnic ID) and the Separation-oriented (LO-American, HI-Ethnic ID) modes. The MANCOVA and ANOVA results indicated significant product effects. Overall, the findings showed that both acculturation groups had higher ad affect and correctly recognized more cues for the ethnic ads than for the American ads. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3224. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

As a project located in the academic field of the study of African American religion, this dissertation examines the black body in four critical moments of the Nation of Islam (NOI), represented by the ministries of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammed, and Louis Farrakhan. Defined as the material locus of the self and the site of the symbolization of a given collective culture and cosmology, the project argues that the body was the central concern in all four moments in their religious efforts to re-imagine, reform, and re-present bodies that they perceived had been distorted, disfigured, and devalued by racist violence, discourses, and oppression in America. The research contends that the NOI was only partially "successful" in its reformative efforts to reconstitute and valorize black bodies. Utilizing the hermeneutical frameworks of critical social theory, which includes psychoanalysis, philosophy of embodiment (phenomenology) and race, and a theory and method based approach to the study of religion in its analysis and interpretation, the project suggests that the NOI may have internalized many of the dynamics and values of white supremacy and, as a consequence, re-produced and re-deployed its own system of intra-"race" marginalization and hierarchical classification within the NOI and in the greater African American community. Such discrimination was predicated upon an ideal black bodily economy that ranked bodies based on indicators such as gender, sexuality, and skin complexion. As a result of having co-opted middle-class American and African American values and practices, the research concludes that the NOI converted problematic issues of "race" into an ambiguous and indeterminate class system in their response to the exigencies of the conditions of existence for African Americans. The research suggests both the need for greater attention to the body in African American religious studies, analyses of the co-constitutive elements of class, gender, race, and sexuality, and for reflexive consideration of the ways in which systems of domination may be socially reproduced and/or disrupted by marginalized collectivities.

Relationships Between Political Competition and Socioeconomic Status in the United States

<p>This dissertation investigates the social, emotional, and ethical implications of looking at the suffering and death of African Americans. Drawing on film theory, visual studies, literary criticism, and semiotics, the study addresses events and images from 1834 to 2000 in which the humanity of the black body was called into question. The events discussed include: a nineteenth-century riot over the abuse of slaves; the mass media depiction of Hurricane Katrina survivors; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's 1935 antilynching art exhibition; James Allen's 2000 exhibition of lynching photography; the Emmett Till case; and the Spike Lee-directed film Bamboozled (2000). The project ultimately argues for a nuanced appreciation of looking relations that takes into account the ethics of the look, especially when that look is directed toward bodies that cannot speak for and in defense of themselves.</p> / Dissertation