Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 439-457).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2009. / Directed by Hephzibah Roskelly; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed May 13, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-212).

Thesis (Ph. D. in Religion)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2008. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

In the 1928 romance novel, Dark Princess, W. E. B. Du Bois used the form of a love letter to ask "the first question of our world-work: What are you and I trying to do in this world?" Structured around this vexed notion of "world-work," "'Our World-Work': Gender and Labor in African Diasporic Literatures" takes seriously this communal question of what “you and I”—or we—are "trying to do." I extend Du Bois’s idea to locate the boundaries of the "we" in the face of variations in labor and gender. Thinking world and work together, I consider the grounds of collective narration and social organization on a broad scale, one structured by gender even as anti-sexism is evoked, such as in the case of Du Bois, who is often called a feminist by contemporary scholars. "'Our World-Work'" covers a range of twentieth-century writing, focusing on how figures and figurations of the "black woman," often at the site of the domestic, came to embody some of the urgent issues raised by the globalization of capital. Reading multi-genre works by Du Bois, Alice Childress, Ousmane Sembène, Paule Marshall, and others, "'Our World-Work'" explores how black writers and intellectuals were thinking, writing, and critiquing the world—and worlds—through their encounters with labor and gender during the middle of the last century. Attention to gender in this dissertation illuminates how modes of affiliation also contain exclusions. "'Our World-Work'" contributes to scholarship on accounts of worlding, intervening in critical debates around race, gender, and labor in the fields of black, feminist, postcolonial, and comparative literary studies.

Can unfree people make themselves free? Some people are unfree because of the social and political conditions in which they find themselves. To become freer would require changing those conditions; yet changing them requires the exercise of freedom. So it seems like they must already be free in order to become free. Drawing on John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and B.R. Ambedkar, I argue that the unfree can make themselves free. Unfreedom involves external constraints and how those constraints shape people’s agency. Becoming freer involves coming to know, from the inside, how our agency has been shaped. We can change that shaping and in turn the social conditions. The problem of unfreedom is a vicious cycle. Social conditions constrain agency, which in turn further entrenches the social conditions. A virtuous cycle is possible. Agents can change their conditions, reducing the constraint on their agency, in turn enabling greater change. Conditions are unstable, and agents can take advantage of that instability.

“Sites of Inscription” argues that creative works allow us to trace black epistemologies of space and time in the United States. Reading works of literature and art from the 19th century to the present, I trace how black people have creatively mis-used, reimagined, and transformed the spatial technologies of the plantation and its geographic afterlife. My project specifically asks how the “literary” in black literary geographies reveals and preserves black spatial praxes in ways that exceed the capacities of dominant modes of Western spatial representation such as conventional maps, blueprints or land surveys. Each chapter considers literary form in particular to be intimately related to the production and representation of space by black people—both as ways of expressing the experience of living under spatial technologies of racialized management, enclosure and exploitation, and as ways of expressing resistance to these technologies and the underwriting epistemologies they reproduce. Employing a palimpsestic practice of reading, I gather texts written across periods but which cohere around a single spatial formation that stages the tensions of (post)plantation geographies—fences, city blocks, apartments, and rooftops. Reading works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston, I consider the relationship between writing and enclosure in the South during and immediately after slavery. Moving North and into the 20th century, I consider representations of the city block in work by Romare Bearden, Tonya Foster, and Langston Hughes. The art of apartment living in Chicago is explored through readings of Kerry James Marshall and Gwendolyn Brooks. I conclude on the rooftop, where Claude Brown, Piri Thomas, and Faith Ringgold document its creative re-production. All four chapters explore the impact of these radical acts of counter-planning, and efforts to represent them, on literary form and genre—concluding that formal experimentations are precisely what allow literature and visual art to archive these fugitive and fleeting engagements with space.

What would it mean to take philosophy of education seriously, and why should we care about doing so now? This dissertation explores how John Dewey conceived of re-orienting philosophy to address contemporary challenges (such as the failings of democracies, estrangement between individuals and groups, experiences of routine and drudgery) by making education a central philosophical issue. My new reading of Dewey suggests that for him, philosophy of education wasn’t just a minor subfield of philosophy. To take philosophy of education seriously would mean to re-orient philosophy, placing questions about human development (and about the shape of human experience that emerges under the different arrangements, formal and informal, that educate us) at the center of philosophy. I argue that in his concern about this, Dewey belongs to the tradition of thought in which we might also include Du Bois, Plato and Rousseau, among others. Although recent scholarship contains significant and valuable contributions to our thinking about education, philosophy of education still remains outside what is seen as the “core” of the discipline. I hope to show that engaging carefully with Dewey’s thought can help us appreciate the promise of a subject that is often treated as if it were of secondary importance.

This dissertation brings the works of Antonio Gramsci and W.E.B. Du Bois in conversation with each other to theorize transformative hegemony as a project aiming to overcome racial capitalism despite the backlashes and resilience of this social order. The dissertation argues that racial capitalism is sustained by a strategy that divides the subalterns, the non-ruling classes, through coercion and co-optation in a way that perpetuates cycles of crises and violence. The project of transformative hegemony aims to overcome this by forming a broad passionate coalition of the subalterns around a new worldview that can offer a genuine answer to the contradiction of this socio-economic system. To form such a coalition despite the pervasive division amongst the subalterns, Gramsci and Du Bois present a strategy of war of position that is meant to empower the subalterns and destabilize the ruling coalition. They compare this strategy to a form of trench warfare because it prepares the subalterns for a long-term struggle, requires mobilizing a broad coalition from different groups with diverse needs, interests, and grievances, and creates trenches to foster transformation in different spheres of society. The dissertation develops Gramsci and Du Bois’s insight into the role of culture, leadership, science, and the organization of movements as trenches of transformation meant to empower the subalterns and destabilize the ruling coalition to bring about a transformative hegemony.

“‘Oh, Awful Power’: Energy and Modernity in African American Literature” analyzes the social and cultural meaning of energy through an examination of African American literature from the first half of the twentieth century—the era of both King Coal and Jim Crow. Situating African Americans as both makers and subjects of the history of modern energy, I argue that black writers from this period understood energy as a material substrate which moves continually across boundaries of body, space, machine, and state. Reconsidering the surface of metaphor which has masked the significant material presence of energy in African American literature--the ubiquity of the racialized descriptor of “coal-black” skin, to take one example—I show how black writers have theorized energy as a simultaneously material, social, and cultural web, at once a medium of control and a conduit for emancipation. African American literature emphasizes how intensely energy impacts not only those who come into contact with its material instantiation as fuel—convict miners, building superintendents—but also those at something of a physical remove, through the more ambient experiences of heat, landscape, and light. By attending to a variety of experiences of energy and the nuances of their literary depiction, “‘Oh, Awful Power’” shows how twentieth-century African American literature not only anticipates some of the later insights of the field now referred to as the Energy Humanities but also illustrates some ways of rethinking the limits of that discourse on interactions between energy, labor, and modernity, especially as they relate to problems of race. These insights are made especially visible, I argue, by way of experiments with literary form, particularly through play with the expectations, limitations, and affordances of genre. I identify three particular generic formations which prove vital to the African American theorization of modern energy: the picturesque, tragedy, and naturalism. In my first chapter, I examine a 1986 novel by West Virginia-born novelist and politician J. McHenry Jones, entitled Hearts of Gold, which features the rare portrayal of black life in a convict coal mine at its narrative core. The feverish episode in the mine stands out against the otherwise genteel narrative of light-skinned striving and respectability, which aligns closely with Washingtonian ideologies of progress and the aesthetic sensibilities of the picturesque. In this depiction of the convict mine, Jones both poses a challenge to the social and political ideologies which subtend the picturesque, and draws a novel link between the rise of coal and the persistence of slavery in the form of the convict lease system. Chapter two extends Jones’ critique of the racial politics of coal mining through an examination of Shirley Graham’s Dust to Earth, a play briefly produced in 1941 which depicts the interracial conflicts that arise after a deadly collapse at a coal mine in Illinois. I argue that the play represents the fulfillment of Graham’s earlier project of rewriting Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape for an all-black cast—a project that O’Neill himself swiftly vetoed. Examining Dust to Earth’s intertwined plots of descent and sabotage, I show how the play exploits the generic conventions of tragedy in order to reconfigure familiar narratives of racial domination to fit the distinctly modern space of the coal mine. My third chapter reads the presence of two relatively “minor” forms of energy—hydroelectricity and solar power—in two novels by George Schuyler and W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928) and Black Empire (193638). In each of these texts, energy is written into the narrative as a powerful force, capable of affecting social and political life on a global scale. I argue that Du Bois’ romance is better understood as an experiment in naturalism, and that through conceiving of the body as a “human motor” Du Bois is able to form a critique of progressive era hydroelectric projects as aspects of an international war for colonial control. For Schuyler, on the other hand, solar power is figured as a potentially revolutionary form of energy that, despite its roots in a recent history of imperial expansion, nonetheless carries some promise once wrested from the control of the nation-state. In my final chapter, I interpret Ann Petry’s 1946 naturalist novel The Street as a drama of thermal management—a narrative in which the cultural politics of energy are refracted primarily through various characters’ bodily experiences of temperature. I argue that the protagonist’s struggle to maintain homeostasis represents an embodied critique of the often-elided racial politics of domestic heat. Finally, with the literary history of the furnace room as a backdrop, I argue that Petry’s depiction of the space foregrounds its paradoxical status as both a crucible of atavistic degeneration and a fount of humanist inspiration.