Boys to Men: Building Resilience in Young Black Male Students Stuart Rhoden Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, 2013 Will J. Jordan, Ph.D. Chair The main purpose of this research was to help identify persistence as reported by Black male college students who were the inaugural graduates of the Class of 2011 from a predominantly Black, all-male Charter High School in the Mid-Atlantic region. Examining this population of students was significant because too often Black male educational choices have been examined through the lens of deficit models. This study adds to the growing body of data which has begun to identify positive attributes of Black male role models at the secondary and postsecondary level. Identifying relevant factors which helped Black male students successfully navigate through high school despite these traditional challenges and achieve academically, has the potential to give educators strategies to help increase the likelihood of more Black males attaining higher educational achievement. One of the ways young Black males countered the toxicity of negative influences and expectations was through persistence. Thus, despite the fact that these young Black males often had to navigate through a history of racial discrimination in this country, challenges in family structure, low income, and in many cases, extremely violent neighborhoods, communities and schools, they had still experienced positive supports and maintained positive attitudes that carried them through to positive academic achievement. Central to this persistence and positive attitude was trust. In order to create more positive educational outcomes, it is critical to examine why some young Black males succeed in the face of adversity while many of their peers do not. This study was conducted qualitatively through interviewing ten graduates of a predominantly Black, all-male charter high school in the mid-Atlantic region of the country. Interviews focused on subjects background experiences growing up, their high school experiences while at DuBois Charter High School (pseudonym) and their experiences either currently attending or formerly attending college. A group interview with two key administrators, the CEO and the College Counselor at DuBois Charter high school also took place. These interviews provided contextual background information on the participants' high school experience. The significant actors who helped these young Black males achieve and attain positive academic outcomes are threefold; parent(s), peers who attended their high school, teachers and administrators of their high school. Some of the actions these mentors took to help them achieve college attendance included; teaching them how to seek academic assistance when needed, helping them become self-advocates, showing them how to learn from setbacks and move forward, helping them to present themselves in a manner that was both authentic to their culture, as well as to their academic abilities, teaching them to rise above perceived expectations of what it meant to be Black and male, and guiding them through the navigation process in a new, unfamiliar environment and being successful. Conclusions drawn from this study included; 1. Trust was essential to overcoming perceived and real structural inequalities. Educational resilience can only be demonstrated when institutions are willing to provide a safe, nurturing environment which allows for failure to contribute to positive growth. 2. Seeking academic and social assistance from peers and adults was constructive in contributing to increased positive academic achievement. 3. Cultural capital and exposure to an expansive array of experiences can help minimize the negative effects of poverty if done purposefully and reflectively. 4. Family, peers, and individual agency were critical in sustaining persistence throughout the identity development which resulted in the demonstration of resilience. 5. Understanding and nurturing the social-emotional, racial and gender identity of young Black men was an essential component to positive academic and social achievement. / Urban Education

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

This project will expand and extend the current concept of homeplace, as offered by cultural critic and scholar bell hooks. In doing so, it will assess the various ways that home has been constructed by persons of African descent, and suggests that homeplace is a form of maroonage that is manifested both physically and psychologically. In addition to conceptually theorizing on homeplace, this project will also introduce Homeplace Theory, a theoretical prescriptive to the issue of diminished and erased cultural consciousness amongst persons of African descent. Additionally, this project will explain the historical and socio-cultural role the Africana woman plays in the creation and maintenance of homeplace. By privileging Afrocentricity as the primary theoretical thrust, Homeplace Theory finds an intellectual home within the Afrocentric Paradigm with the addition of Afrocentric principles in the creation and explanation of Homeplace Theory. Afrocentricity also validates the subjective inquiry of African derived phenomena. In this regard, this project fortifies the intellectual subjective investigation of the Afrocentric enterprise within the discipline of Africology/Africana Studies/African American Studies. / African American Studies

Black Lives Matter gained elevated levels of support following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department. Despite temporary elevated levels of support, large segments of the populous are still reluctant and critical of the movement. This work aims to assess what role notions of respectability politics play in Black American support of Black Lives Matter. Respectability politics is consistently weaponized against members of oppressed groups including racial minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, and their related social movements. Analyzing the role of respectability politics in this context is a needed addition to the scholarly literature regarding social movement mobilization, as well as the interdisciplinary literature that has previously examined respectability in myriad forms. I hypothesize that unwillingness to support Black Lives Matter will be dependent on respectability politics as it relates to the perceived comportment and behavior police violence victims. This work included experimental analysis of the perceived respectability of a police brutality victim's "respectable" behavior being varied in the experimental treatment. I found support for my primary hypotheses that adherence to respectability politics correlated with diminished support for Black Lives Matter.

Despite ample research in the fields of organizational behavior and human resource management regarding employee decisions to voluntarily opt out of corporate leadership positions, there is little research exploring the personal experiences of black women in U.S. companies contemplating leaving executive positions. This research leverages a qualitative interpretative phenomenological study to explore why Black women corporate leaders in the United States are leaving corporate America before reaching the C-Suite. Two studies were conducted to understand the lived experiences of Black women executives in U.S. Fortune 500 companies; moreover, study two further explored and detangled some of the themes from Study One to understand the experiences of the black women leaders in the pipeline for senior management more deeply. The findings identify several environmental factors, explored in depth in this dissertation, that impact executives’ decision to leave corporate America. The findings provide a foundation to understand further the impact of the corporate environment resulting in the loss of top diverse talent in this understudied demographic. These findings also provide critical information for the Black woman executive currently working in corporate America as well as those who have opted to leave early and would like to better digest their experiences. / Business Administration/Human Resource Management

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This interdisciplinary study devised a Blues Methodology to investigate how a historically marginalized Black community conceives, practices and theorizes about citizenship in community-based pedagogical spaces (Douglas & Peck, 2013). Guiding questions were 1) How does a historically marginalized Black community conceive and practice citizenship? 2) How does the community’s conception and citizenship praxis compare to the dominant society’s conception? And 3) How can both conceptions inform citizenship education and citizenship research? To conduct this qualitative cultural study, I extended Clyde Woods’ Blues Epistemology and Sylvia Wynter’s theoretical construct of alterity into a methodology capable of illuminating the community’s culturally indigenous knowledge (ways of knowing) using cultural tools meaningful to them. Blues Methodology is a community-based inquiry approach employing a reflective researcher strategy that positions researcher in dialogue with community members to uncover culturally indigenous ways of knowing as well as hegemonic perspectives and community agency. The historically marginalized Black community of focus is located in “The South” where inhumane violence was routinely practiced against Africans and African Americans during and after enslavement. Terrorism was particularly brutal due to the intense labor required by the agrarian economy. Marginalization is a lasting legacy of enslavement, Jim Crow and structurally other forms of embedded racism. Twelve long term multigenerational community residents ranging in age from 17 to 80 years old, participated in this study. Two types of data were collected: oral and written. Oral data were collected from conversations and interviews with participants, written introspective data were collected from journaling. Researcher reflections also consisted of conversations with fictional characters who were constructed to protect my relationship with community participants and present childhood experiences that informed the research. Findings reveal that community conceptions of citizenship foster belonging and identity. Citizens theorized about their social economic historical political selves in the context of the local landscape. In contrast, the dominant society’s citizenship conception is an inclusion/exclusion dialectic that generically defines citizens selectively while excluding swaths of the U.S. population from curricula thus devaluing certain students and communities and relegating their knowledge to the margins at the expense of human freedom.

<p>This dissertation examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Rousing appeals to imperial patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns and postwar commemoration movement linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, coloured, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty. </p><p>To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and West Indian civilians throughout the war years. It begins by reassessing the origins of the BWIR, and then analyzes the regional campaign to recruit West Indian men for military service. Travelling with newly enlisted volunteers across the Atlantic, this study then chronicles soldiers' multi-sited campaign for equal status, pay, and standing in the British imperial armed forces. It closes by offering new perspectives on the dramatic postwar protests by BWIR soldiers in Italy in 1918 and British Honduras and Trinidad in 1919, and reflects on the trajectory of veterans' activism in the postwar era. </p><p>This study argues that the racism and discrimination soldiers experienced overseas fueled heightened claims-making in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the war, veterans mobilized collectively to garner financial support and social recognition from colonial officials. Rather than withdrawing their allegiance from the empire, ex-servicemen and civilians invoked notions of mutual obligation to argue that British officials owed a debt to West Indians for their wartime sacrifices. This study reveals the continued salience of imperial patriotism, even as veterans and their civilian allies invoked nested local, regional, and diasporic loyalties as well. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the origins of patriotism in the colonial Caribbean, while providing a historical case study for contemporary debates about "hegemonic dissolution" and popular mobilization in the region. </p><p>This dissertation draws upon a wide range of written and visual sources, including archival materials, war recruitment posters, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, and memoirs. In addition to Colonial Office records and military files, it incorporates previously untapped letters and petitions from the Jamaica Archives, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados Department of Archives, and US National Archives.</p> / Dissertation

<p><italic>Bodily Trespass</italic> situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate the spatial constriction that informs black American subjectivity from the Middle Passage up through to the contemporary carceral state. The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial crisis that is corporeal and ontological. As a literary mode, in the Todorovian sense, the fantastic identifies the real as a production of the "unreal" and calls attention to ideological and institutional apparatuses that sustain the dominant order. Taking Pauline Hopkins' turn of the twentieth-century serial <italic>Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self</italic> as a point of departure, this project examines the fantastic as a discourse of Pan-Africanism during a period Farah Griffin describes as the "nadir" of post-emancipation black life. Hopkins reaches outside of U.S. borders suturing Ethiopia to America in order to fashion a new and "rival" black geography that challenges the eradication of black legal, civic, and social space.</p><p>In the postwar years, the production of imaginative space extends to the task of recording and refuting the racial discourse that articulates urbanity. Chester Himes' <italic>The Real Cool Killers</italic>, Ann Petry's <italic>The Street</italic>, and Gwendolyn Brooks' <italic>Maud Martha</italic> depict racially encoded urban geographies as corporeally informed psychosocial "interfaces." These novels identify cartographic locution as a strategy for spatial occupation and psychic rehabilitation. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Ralph Ellison's "The King of the Bingo Game locate in the sonic a blueprint for refashioning the space of the modern metropolis according to a logic of interiority. Baldwin and Ellison identify the fantastic as a discourse of aurality that alters the texture of space by channeling what I call "scalar consciousness," a heightened awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial production. Meditations on belonging, displays of corporeal violence, discourses of Africanity, and the identification of the aural as a pathway for liberation illustrate, in all these works, the black fantastic's rootedness in spatial production, subject formation, and resistance to a dehumanizing social order.</p> / Dissertation