This study responds to the need for an understanding of the relation of form and political critique within the sonnet form, and hopes to demonstrate that the sonnet can be used to effectively articulate the experience of racism, especially the Du Boisian concept of "double- consciousness," a sense of two-ness born of being both black and American. The fundamental structure of the sonnet (octave, volta, sestet) is dialectical; it "contests the idea it just introduced" (Caplan, Poetic Form: An Introduction 75). The sonnet's self-reflexive structure has been adopted and adapted by poets such as McKay, Cullen, Hughes, and Brooks. The formal and social characteristics of sonnets by African-Americans function synergistically: the way that the octave and the sestet respond to each other in a single poem is also similar to the "call-and- response" movement of African American oral culture. Its tendency to mix two unlike things is like Harlem itself: a compressed space where the street sweeper rubs shoulders with the business tycoon. Perhaps most importantly, the sonnet can be a Trojan horse, a genteel container that conceals a potentially subversive message. This study is constructed around related lines of questioning: First, why did African American poets, in an era usually associated with free verse, choose to adopt a traditional form? Second, how do African American poets adapt a European form as a lens into African American experience? Sonnets by African Americans reflect the complexity of a seemingly simple triangulation between the traditional requirements of form, the promise of equality, and the reality of racism. African American poets infuse "Harlem in Shakespeare," pouring black consciousness into the European form, and they raise "Shakespeare in Harlem," elevating the status of African American forms to the highest levels of literary art. At the same time, this study demonstrates the value of a prosody-based approach for examining how small formal details contribute substantially to the reader's impression of the sonnet. These poets deploy the "rules" of the sonnet ingeniously and unexpectedly. Additionally, the sonnet is a way to separate from and simultaneously be a part of the dominant culture by writing a critical message in a recognizable form. Black culture can criticize white culture, while at the same time acknowledging the mutual, inescapable relationship that binds blacks and white Americans together. Additionally, the sonnet is a way to separate from and simultaneously be a part of the dominant culture by writing a critical message in a recognizable form. Black culture can criticize white culture, while at the same time acknowledging the mutual, inescapable relationship that binds blacks and white Americans together.

My dissertation project explores the ways in which the banana exposes Americans’ interconnected imaginings of exotic food, gender, and race. Since the late nineteenth century, The United Fruit Company’s continuous supply of bananas to US retail markets has veiled the fruit’s production history, and the company’s marketing strategies and campaigns have turned the banana into an American staple food. By the time Josephine Baker and Carmen Miranda were using the banana as part of their stage and screen costumes between the 1920s and the 1940s, this imported fruit had come to represent foreignness, tropicality, and exoticism. Building upon foodways studies and affect studies, which trace how foodstuffs travel and embody memory and affect, I show how romantic imaginings of bananas have drawn attention away from the exploitative nature of a fruit trade that benefits from and reinforces the imbalanced power relationship between the US and Central America. In this project, I analyze the meaning interwoven into three forms of cultural production: banana cookbooks published by the United Fruit Company for middle-class American housewives; McKay’s dissent poetry; and the costumes and exotic transnational stage performances of Baker, Miranda, and also the United Fruit mascot, Miss Chiquita. / 2021-01-11

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