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Word coding can be traced to the ancient Kemetic practice of steganography (referring to hiding place or hidden message). Unless the reader is aware of the meaning, the Coded Word can often appear as just art. Afrocentric scholarship however, also incorporates the idea of functionality. Aesthetics, throughout African history, and to this day, serve a purpose. The beautiful quilts sewn by enslaved Black women served dual functions, as bed coverings and as symbols of resistance and liberation. The decorative wrought-ironwork found on gates and doors throughout the United States serves as a Sankofic reminder and protector. The highly coded language in the aesthetics of the Black Power/Black Arts Movement, shifted paradigms. Though the practice of word coding remains an active part of contemporary Black culture, there is a disconnection between the action and the aim (or function); a direct result of the destructive efforts of colonization. Today’s racially charged and oftentimes dangerous climate calls for a reexamination of word coding as a liberatory tool. I created the theory of the Coded Word to analyze three novels by Black women who are unique in their forms of word coding, just as they are characteristically distinct in their forms of expression. The findings for the three novels have resulted in the first three entries into the Glossary of the Coded Word, a resource to be used by Black people in resistance to oppression and in the struggle for liberation of all Black people. / African American Studies

This paper focuses on mysteries written by the Afro-American women authors Barbara Neely and Valerie Wilson Wesley. Both authors place a black woman in the role of the detective - an innovative feature not only in the realm of female detective literature of the past two decades but also with regard to the current discourse about race and class in US-American society.<br><br> This discourse is important because detective novels are considered popular literature and thus a mass product designed to favor commercial instead of literary claims. Thus, the focus is placed on the development of the two protagonists, on their lives as detectives and as black women, in order to find out whether or not and how the genre influences the depiction of Afro-American experiences. It appears that both of these detective series represent Afro-American culture in different ways, which confirms a heterogenic development of this ethnic group. However, the protagonist's search for identity and their relationships to white people could be identified as a major unifying claim of Afro-American literature.<br><br> With differing intensity, the authors Neely and Wesley provide the white or mainstream reader with insight into their culture and confront the reader&#39;s ignorance of black culture. In light of this, it is a great achievement that Neely and Wesley have reached not only a black audience but also a growing number of white readers. / Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit stehen die Detektivserien der afroamerikanischen Autorinnen Barbara Neely und Valerie Wilson Wesley. Die Blanche White Mysteries von Neely und die Tamara Hayle Mysteries von Wesley repräsentieren mit der Einführung der schwarzen Hausangestellten Blanche White als Amateurdetektivin und der schwarzen Privatdetektivin Tamara Hayle nicht nur hinsichtlich der innerhalb der letzten zwanzig Jahre erschienen Welle von Kriminalautorinnen mit weiblichen Detektiven eine Innovation, sondern auch bezüglich der mit diesen Hauptfiguren verbundenen Auseinandersetzungen mit Klassenstatus und Rassismus.<br><br> Die bisher erschienen Detektivromane beider Serien werden in dieser Arbeit im Hinblick auf ihre Präsentation der Erfahrungen der Afroamerikaner in den USA der 1990er Jahre untersucht. Da Detektivromane der Populärliteratur zugerechnet werden und entsprechend ihrer Befriedigung von Massenansprüchen &quot;produziert&quot; werden, war die Fragestellung, ob in den genannten Detektivserien diese Hinwendung zur Mainstreamkultur mit einer verringerten Darstellung der afroamerikanischen Probleme und Lebensweise verbunden ist. Bei der Analyse der Serien wurde deshalb der Entwicklung der Protagonistinnen als Detektivinnen und als schwarze Frauen sowie der Wirkung ihrer Erzählerstimme besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt.<br><br> Die beiden Serien repräsentieren die afroamerikanische Kultur auf unterschiedlichen Erfahrungsstufen, woran erkennbar ist, dass die afroamerikanische Bevölkerung in den USA keine homogene Gruppe darstellt. Ausschlaggebend für das Erreichen des Anspruchs der Afroamerikaner an ihre Literatur scheint die Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen der Identitätsfindung der schwarzen Protagonistinnen und der Beziehungen zwischen Schwarzen und Weißen zu sein. Den Autorinnen gelingt es in unterschiedlichem Maße den weißen und somit Mainstream-Lesern nicht nur einen Einblick in ihre Kultur zu vermitteln, sondern vielmehr, sie direkt mit ihrer Ignoranz gegenüber dieser schwarzen Kultur zu konfrontieren. Neelys und Wesleys große Leistung ist, dass die Stimmen ihrer Protagonistinnen sowohl ein zahlreiches schwarzes als auch ein wachsendes weißes Publikum erreichen.

This dissertation assesses rage and its utility for fictional Black girls and adolescents in asserting their humanity, accessing their voices, and developing strategies of resistance that contribute to their identity formation. Through analyses of six novels: 1) God Bless the Child, 2) Breath, Eyes, Memory, 3) The Hate U Give, 4) The Bluest Eye, 5) Daddy Was a Number Runner, and 6) The Poet X, this research presents rage as a canonical theme in Black women’s coming-of-age narratives and presents connections between rage, rights, and resistance. The connections, revealed through stimuli and adaptations associated with rage, frame an argument for North Americas as an arbiter of anger. The novels construct an “arc of anger” that places them in conversation about Black girl rage and presents a tradition of Black women crafting Black girl protagonists who are conduits for counternarratives of rage. This dissertation also examines how history, memory, and culture contribute to Black girls’ frustrations and knowledge bases. By looking to works published between the angry decade (the 1960s) and the age of rage (the 2010s), the research presents ways Black women novelists and their characters return to rage to combat social institutions and critique social constructions of Black girlhood and womanhood.

<p dir="ltr"><i>Conjure, Care, Calls, and Cauls</i> centers the histories of Black and southern conjuring midwives in life, lore, and literature. I argue that these conjuring midwives are practitioners of wholistic care who employ conjure work as a method to access wholeness. This avenue to access Black wholeness was intentionally disrupted by 20^th century physicians across the United States and the South. These physicians espoused <i>disabling racist rhetoric</i> to attack Black midwives’ bodies and beliefs as dangerous, casting them as unreliable and unsafe caregivers. Widely circulated in US medical journals, physicians articulated a national and regional “midwife problem” that led to the overwhelming removal of Black midwives from US medical care. This successful displacement of Black midwives by Western medicine and its physicians created and perpetuated what I name the <i>crazy conjure lady trope</i>, the disabling stereotype that considers the Black folk health practitioner or believer as crazy, insane, or otherwise unwell in Black women’s literature and lives. Using Black feminist literary criticism and a Black feminist disability framework, I consider Toni Cade Bambara’s <i>The Salt Eaters </i>(1981), Gloria Naylor’s <i>Mama Day </i>(1988), and Jesmyn Ward’s <i>Sing, Unburied, Sing </i>(2017) alongside Black midwives’ ethnographies and autobiographies to center and consider the Black southern conjuring midwife in Black women’s literature and US history.</p>

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation is a Black feminist qualitative inquiry of the interconnections between Black women, literary activity, community, activism, and restoration and healing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and the Black feminist movement converged to create one of the richest periods in Black women’s history. Black women came together in community, through the text, and through various literary spaces–often despite or even because of their differences–to build an archive that articulates a multivocal Black women’s standpoint which many believed to be monotonously singular. During this period, for example, Black women writer-activists wrote more novels, plays, and poetry in these two decades than in any period prior while also establishing new literary traditions. These traditions included the recovery of previously published yet out of print Black women writers, the development of the Black Women Anthology era, the creation of Black women writer-activist collectives, the founding of bookstores, as well as the development of Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist literary criticism in the academy. In the dissertation, these traditions are intrinsically tied to the articulation and definition of the theoretical concept of literary kinship. Conceptually, relationally, and materially literary kinship is the connection generated by the intergenerational literary activity between Black women and girls. In the dissertation, I use literary activity in slightly different ways including to denote community-engaged oral practices, publication, relationships defined around literary sites, and the practice of reading. Literary kinship provides access to community based on and derived from a connection to the literary that is often marked by intergenerational activity. I argue that Black women writer-activists during the period of the BWLR articulate and define literary kinship as a practice of communal restoration and healing for individuals and the collective.</p><p dir="ltr">Literary kinship is explored in four interrelated, yet distinct ways in the dissertation. In chapter two, literary kinship is located in and operationalized through Black women’s literary kinship “networks” founded during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance. In chapter three, the focus is on the Black Women’s Anthology era that begins in 1970 and becomes a pipeline for the development of the interdisciplinary field of Black Women’s Studies in the 1980s. The fourth and fifth chapters shift the impact of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance to the 21st century and examines how literary kinship is rearticulated or re-visioned a generation later. The fourth chapter, in this vein, uses autoethnography and literary analysis to illuminate the interconnections between Black girlhood, geography, and my concept of literary kinship. The chapter explores my experience of literary kinship at the kitchen table, in public libraries, and in secondary and higher education as transformative opportunities that fostered my love for reading, engaging in literary community, and developing reading as a restorative and healing practice. In the final chapter, the rapid reemergence of Black women booksellers and their bookstores in the last five years (2018-2023) become integral to a contemporary rearticulation of literary kinship.</p><p dir="ltr">The Black Women’s Literary Renaissance is a significant period of literary output by Black women writer-activists that has had intergenerational impact in the lives of Black women. During the Renaissance, Black women writer-activists were catalysts for critical and necessary literary interventions, strategies, and methods that supported their sociopolitical activism, the development of a rich Black feminist and literary archive, and that manifested community functional practices of restoration and healing. Black women’s articulation, definition, and utilization of literary kinship in the 20th and 21st centuries has supported their literary labors as activists, as intellectuals, and as community members, and is therefore a practice of community restoration and healing.</p>