This thesis aims to provide a history of African American working class and Leftist activism in Atlanta, Georgia during the early 1970s. It places a series of wildcat strikes within the context of political and social transition, and charges unequal economic conditions and a racially charged discriminatory environment as primary causes. The legacies of both the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left are identified as key contributing factors to this wave of labor unrest. One path taken by former Civil Right activists was to focus on poor peoples’ movements, and one course taken by the 1960s-era New Left activists was to join forces with the working class in an attempt to build a New Communist movement. In Atlanta, these two forces converged and generated a notable force against some of city’s most prominent employers.

The study critically investigated the concept of ―Double Consciousness‖ in selected African-American autobiographies. In view of the latter, W.E.B. Du Bois defined double consciousness as a condition of being both black and American which he perceived as the reason black people were/are being discriminated in America. The study demonstrated that creative works such as Harriet Jacobs‘ Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl: Told by Herself, Frederick Douglass‘ The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois‘ The Souls of Black Folk, Booker T. Washington‘s Up from Slavery, Langston Hughes‘ The Big Sea, Zora Neale Hurston Dust Tracks on a Road, Malcolm X‘s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Maya Angelou‘s All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, Cornel West‘s Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud and bell hooks‘ Bone Black affirm double consciousness as well as critiqued the concept, revealing new layers of identities and contested sites of struggle in African-American society. The study used a qualitative method to analyse and argue that there are ideological shifts that manifest in the creative representation of the idea of double consciousness since slavery. Some relevant critical voices were used to support, complicate and question the notion of double consciousness as represented in selected autobiographies. The study argued that there are many identities in the African-American communities which need attention equal to that of race. The study further argued that double consciousness has been modified and by virtue of this, authors suggested multiple forms of consciousness. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

This paper examines the correspondence, manuscripts, and speeches of ex-mental patient activists. I chronicle the activities of the emergent psychiatric survivors movement from its beginnings in the early 1970’s focusing on the work of the Boston based activist, Judi Chamberlin (1944-2010). This paper examines how mental patients in post-war America began to organize in order to have their voices included in the process of their own recovery. I present Chamberlin’s experience as a mental patient as being representative of the “rootlessness” that many post-war women experienced. Chamberlin’s work as an ex-patient activist presented one aspect of the overall struggle on the part of mental patients to claim their place in a wider society. I also pay attention to interdisciplinary scholarly analyses of madness to investigate how discussion of the subject influenced ex-patient activists, as well as whether or not the ex-patients’ narrative reciprocally influenced the scholarly discussion about madness. In the final chapters, I also look at how the successes of this social movement ironically led to the prevalence of today’s diagnostic models of treatment that rely heavily on pharmacological methods and highly regimented evidence-based psychotherapies while still excluding patients’ voices. The voices of mental patients both in the asylum era and today have been excluded from the treatment process.

Adding something new to the understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), which is considered a twentieth-century classic, would be nearly impossible if not for the outlook of new historicism. Through a new historicist analysis of Harper Lee’s literary text parallel to non-fictional texts relating to the American justice system and civil rights, this essay explores how race affects U.S. institutions and society. Lee’s novel is contextualized by delving into the American South of the 1930s, American society and politics in the1960s and the racial landscape in America today, connecting them through the experiences of racial bias within the justice system and the civil rights movement. The essay explores the racial and cultural norms that governed the American justice system at the set time of the story. It analyzes the time of publication and the American society in which the novel made such an impact on the racial debate. Finally, it looks at the impact of the novel and its connection to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Black Lives Matter movement and readers today. In the spirit of new historicism, the mechanisms of racism and how they affect the population, both the oppressors and the oppressed, is highlighted showing parallels between Lee’s fictional world and American society over time. Through the experiences of the characters, the structures of racism translate to a time and place where the Black Lives Matter movement has infused new life to the civil rights movement worldwide. Looking at retellings of the historical Scottsboro trials, which inspired the story unfolding in To Kill a Mockingbird in light of the justice system, Maycomb county and its inhabitants serves as guides into the racial norms that is ingrained in American society and politics. The results reveal a society where racial segregation is constantly reinforced by legal, economical, and social barriers, despite constitutional efforts to level the playing field for all American citizens.

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This thesis deals with the depiction of racial and ethnic stereotypes in American animated cartoons particularly from the first half of the twentieth century. It studies the relationship between animation and American culture and examines how animation reflects and shapes American identity in terms of race and how it critiques and promotes American values and attitudes regarding race and ethnicity in particular. Considering the historical, political, legal and cultural background of the contemporary eras of American animation, the thesis analyses the portrayal of racial and ethnic features in animated cartoons from the 1920s to the 1960s. Such stereotypes represent, in my opinion, significant aspects of societal and cultural changes in American society of the examined eras of animation. The beginnings of the entertainment industry affected the booming era of animation by implementing commonly recognised literary stereotypes of the African-Americans into animated cartoons. This thesis strives to study the development of animated features of the racial stereotypes throughout the contemporary eras. It provides a brief systematic overview of the main eras that have significantly highlighted the start of animation as markers of race and ethnicity. Simultaneously, it discusses the problematic...