This research explores Louis Armstrong’s artistic choices and their impact directly and indirectly on the African-American literary, visual and performing arts between 1923 and 1930 during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. This research uses analyses of musical transcriptions and examples of the period’s literary and visual arts to verify the significance of Armstrong’s influence(s). This research also analyzes the early nineteenth century West-African musical practices evident in Congo Square that were present in the traditional jazz and cultural behaviors that Armstrong heard and experienced growing up in New Orleans. Additionally, through a discourse analysis approach, this research examines the impact of Armstrong’s art on the philosophical debate regarding the purpose of the period’s art. Specifically, W.E.B. Du Bois’s desire for the period’s art to be used as propaganda and Alain Locke’s admonitions that period African-American artists not produce works with the plight of blacks in America as the sole theme.

This research explores Louis Armstrong’s artistic choices and their impact directly and indirectly on the African-American literary, visual and performing arts between 1923 and 1930 during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. This research uses analyses of musical transcriptions and examples of the period’s literary and visual arts to verify the significance of Armstrong’s influence(s). This research also analyzes the early nineteenth century West-African musical practices evident in Congo Square that were present in the traditional jazz and cultural behaviors that Armstrong heard and experienced growing up in New Orleans. Additionally, through a discourse analysis approach, this research examines the impact of Armstrong’s art on the philosophical debate regarding the purpose of the period’s art. Specifically, W.E.B. Du Bois’s desire for the period’s art to be used as propaganda and Alain Locke’s admonitions that period African-American artists not produce works with the plight of Blacks in America as the sole theme.

The aim of the study is to investigate how double-consciousness operates through contrastive color imagery in Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand. A focal point of the analysis is to show how Larsen thematizes the ability to benefit from bright colors and how color choice determines the quality and level of freedom in life. Together with W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness, a few other literary works by writers of the Harlem Renaissance have been considered in order to further support my arguments. I link these other writers’ perspectives to Quicksand and to the novel’s theme of color as a path to freedom. In Quicksand, a broader path of colors, more bright than dull, leads to freedom, as is made evident through the novel’s connection of bright colors with Harlem’s freedom of expression. Furthermore, a narrow path of colors is contrastively figured as the course towards tragedy, which is clearly seen in the novel through the example of the protagonist Helga’s “sinking” due to an absence of color.

Master of Urban and Regional Planning

This thesis enters the developing conversation in the linguistic domain about the culture and struggles of the Black community. It explores the collectivist perspective of the Black community in the 20th and 21st century through the umbrella of Linguistics and its subfields. Collectively, the literary and musical works in this study demonstrates the frustrations of the Black community—including its correlation to antebellum slavery—the lamentations of oppression, which showcases in a collection of poems and their syntactical aspects, and the Black pride emulating from the societies. Despite the clear correlation between Hip-Hop culture and literary works from the early 20th century, a lack of connection between the two remains. This thesis explores the linguistic connections between narratives of art, specifically Harlem Renaissance literary works (i.e., poetry, novels, etc.) and Hip-Hip culture. The bridge between Harlem Renaissance poetry and Hip-Hop music is nuanced in the Linguistics field and it warrants further research.

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The central aim of this study is to explore what I term urban ethnic subjectivity, that is, the subjectivity of ethnic urbanites. Of all the ethnic groups in the United States, the majority of African Americans had their origins in the rural countryside, but they later migrated to cities. Although urban living had its advantages, it was soon realized that it did not resolve the matters of institutional racism, discrimination and poverty. As a result, the subjectivity of urban African Americans is uniquely influenced by their cosmopolitan identities. New York City's ethnic community of Harlem continues to function as the geographic center of African-American urban culture. This study examines how six post-World War II novels --Sapphire's PUSH, Julian Mayfield's The Hit, Brian Keith Jackson's The Queen of Harlem, Charles Wright's The Wig, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was a Number Runner-- address the issues of race, identity, individuality and community within Harlem and the megalopolis of New York City. Further, this study investigates concepts of urbanism, blackness, ethnicity and subjectivity as they relate to the characters' identities and self-perceptions. This study is original in its attempt to ascertain the connections between megalopolitan urbanism, ethnicity, subjectivity and African-American fiction. / English

This thesis explores how government and society are invariably against the racial sharing of spaces. It examines how impoverished Black communities are created, sustained and perpetuated. The thesis is concerned with two main theories about race repression, race castes and racialization of space, both of which posit race as the main factor shaping the existing power relations. The work first draws upon the era of de jure segregation to highlight features of castes and racialized space. The first chapter looks at how housing discrimination caused Harlem to develop into a ghetto space. In the post-de jure era, the second chapter examines how the economics of racialized space access continued to inform a national framework defined by race-neutrality. It examines how, against the wake of Civil Rights era and community rioting, politicians discursively campaigned by demonizing and criminalizing Black rioters and Black culture. The War on Drugs, which emerged against the backdrop of Rights activism, called for crime control in Black communities. By targeting Blacks already isolated in “ghetto” spaces, politicians ensure that they over-compensate White communities with the public benefits and economic resources that are taken away from Blacks spaces. In media as well as in politics, our nation continuously fails to contextualize the costs of the War on Drugs on Black communities. The final chapter examines a film to show how popular depictions of Black ghettos and misconceptions about the War on Drugs, continue to feed our ideological and actual understandings of racialized space and privileged access.