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Perpetuating African ancestral customs, Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans avoid the African American identity crises illuminated by the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. The poetry of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Waring Cuney incorporate W.E.B. DuBois’ double-consciousness theory to reveal the identity issues and ancestral alienation plaguing African Americans at the turn of the twentieth-century. In comparison, unique political and social circumstances in New Orleans allowed enslaved Africans to practice their ancestral customs weekly. The preservation of this heritage fostered a black community in New Orleans rich in traditions, pride and self-conviction. The development of Mardi Gras Indian culture and the allusions to Africa in Harlem poetry reveal the power of ancestry to establish identity.

Jook is a spirited collection of historical persona poems situated in the vibrant rent party scene of 1920s Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance of New York was a decade of black innovation, artistry, and cultural expansion spanning 1920-1930. During this post-Emancipation, Great Migration era, black families leaving the South moved north only to encounter new forms of oppression. They were fleeing the lynchings, racism, and segregation that they experienced back home. In Harlem, black families earned disproportionately lower wages and paid much higher rents for subpar housing conditions compared to white families. To supplement their low incomes and to make the rent for the month, tenants hosted house-rent parties, also called social whist parties, in their apartments. They offered southern food, jazz and blues music (often live), and bootlegged liquor. Party guests paid a modest cover fee of 25 or 30 cents to enjoy the amusements, thus helping the hosts to pay their rent. The resistance work of this black joy in the face of economic, environmental, and social racism fascinates me and led me to research and uplift these narratives via persona poetry. The central figure in these poems is a 20-year-old Georgia migrant named Mae Lynne King. Mae has moved north with her older sister Maddy. The daughters of a southern preacher and a seamstress, the women find their footing in New York in very different ways. Mae works as a domestic and takes in laundry and sewing on the side while 24-year-old Maddy Jane becomes a streetwalker. The two young women live together and quickly become immersed in the rent party phenomenon while working to build a life away from the strict religious upbringing they knew back home. Mae and Maddy struggle against racism, sexism, and poverty discovering their roles as lovers, friends, and members of a new black Harlem. Mae’s journey through Harlem is one of revelation and awakening, and Maddy’s is one of self-actualization, autonomy, reclamation. Both women embody the womanist attitudes and practices, blackness, and sexual fluidity that are central to my work overall and that were highly visible during the Renaissance. While swaths of literature celebrate the art, music, and culture of the Harlem Renaissance, no contemporary collections of poetry contend with the oppression that African American people who migrated from the racially segregated South to Harlem faced. Jook is an offering of history, memory, language, and research to bridge that gap. This collection draws from Langston Hughes’ poetry and autobiography The Big Sea, Zora Neale Hurston’s novels and dramas, all of Harlem’s “negro literati,” jazz and swing music, photography, and archival materials from The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Yale University. Jook traverses free verse and formal boundaries while championing persona and a unique Harlemese vernacular in order to celebrate the fierce subversion that African Americans in 1920s Harlem engaged in via their rent party gatherings. I enter these poems with music and memory at the fore of my creative process and craft employments. I call on forms such as Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Gigan, the jazz sonnet, contrapuntal, and the ghazal to illustrate the simultaneous artistry and travailing that defined the Renaissance for African American people. I also borrow from the narrative elements of fiction to explore a specific arc within the lives of a cadre of imagined personas. The aim of this project is to recover and celebrate the unexplored stories of rent parties and to acknowledge the suffering and striving that these gatherings were born out of.

The cultural and historical construction of African American identity in the United States has been closely tied to the dialectical relationship formed between sound and silence. This thesis examines the modernist and postmodernist representation of sound and silence in the African American novels Passing (1929), by Nella Larsen, and Jazz (1992), by Toni Morrison, as indicators of African American identity and racial oppression during the Harlem Renaissance. I analyze the soundscapes of both texts to expose the mobility of language, power, and space, especially as these soundscapes relate to the production of sound (both musical and non-musical) by African Americans, and the surveillance of these sounds by white audiences. Through my analysis of repetitive sound-images and embodied silence in Passing and Jazz, as well as textual representations of oral performance, I argue that there is harm in restricting African American voices to approved modes of audibility and/or limiting African American voices to one a singular narrative. This thesis introduces critics and theories from the disciplines of sound studies and African American studies, and applies the widely known theory of double consciousness, established by critic and author W.E.B. Du Bois, as the foundation for my literary and cultural analysis of sound in print. / Graduation date: 2013

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)