<p>During the civil rights era, the two African American political traditions Black conservatism and Black nationalism substantively overlapped. Surveying the literature on Black radicalism and the long civil rights movement, however, mention of this, let alone of a well-articulated strain of conservatism within the African American community during the period, is few and far between. Understanding why Black conservatism has been left out of these conversations comprises my research question. I argue that it is the significant differences between the two ideologies that largely explain this. Namely, Black conservatives’ practice of condemning Blackness, whether during the civil rights era or today, answers why they are left out of the scholarship on Black nationalism and civil rights. It draws a sharp line between Black conservatives, not only from Black nationalists, but mainstream African American identity, too.</p>

<p dir="ltr"><i>Conjure, Care, Calls, and Cauls</i> centers the histories of Black and southern conjuring midwives in life, lore, and literature. I argue that these conjuring midwives are practitioners of wholistic care who employ conjure work as a method to access wholeness. This avenue to access Black wholeness was intentionally disrupted by 20^th century physicians across the United States and the South. These physicians espoused <i>disabling racist rhetoric</i> to attack Black midwives’ bodies and beliefs as dangerous, casting them as unreliable and unsafe caregivers. Widely circulated in US medical journals, physicians articulated a national and regional “midwife problem” that led to the overwhelming removal of Black midwives from US medical care. This successful displacement of Black midwives by Western medicine and its physicians created and perpetuated what I name the <i>crazy conjure lady trope</i>, the disabling stereotype that considers the Black folk health practitioner or believer as crazy, insane, or otherwise unwell in Black women’s literature and lives. Using Black feminist literary criticism and a Black feminist disability framework, I consider Toni Cade Bambara’s <i>The Salt Eaters </i>(1981), Gloria Naylor’s <i>Mama Day </i>(1988), and Jesmyn Ward’s <i>Sing, Unburied, Sing </i>(2017) alongside Black midwives’ ethnographies and autobiographies to center and consider the Black southern conjuring midwife in Black women’s literature and US history.</p>

<p>This work looks at the intersections of nature, race, and spirituality in Black communities primarily situated in the United States from the early 20th century to the present day. These communties stories are interpreted through the Black women that lived in them, and their stories denote that Black folks' relationship with and amongst nature could not be had without spiritual praxes in their day-to-day lives. </p>

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation analyzes the sixty-four (64) page handwritten ledger of Mrs. Goldleana Harris (also known as Mrs. Mosley Abraham Gibbs, 1920–1986), kept between 1944 and 1960. Harris is a Black woman born in Longstreet, Louisiana DeSoto Parish. She lived in Shreveport, Louisiana from 1949–1986. Using a case study approach and close reading analysis of Mrs. Goldleana’s writings, I document a Black woman’s lived experience and the historical significance of Hollywood, a segregated Black neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana and related gathering spaces within the Deep South region of the United States between 1944 and 1960. These spaces include five areas of significant and overlapping importance: The Family House, The School House, The Church House, The Labor (Work) House, & The Play (Leisure) House. </p>

<p dir="ltr">Disability and Deaf Studies scholars have documented how United States Deaf culture developed in the nineteenth century partially through Deaf schools teaching a common sign language, American Sign Language (ASL). These scholars focus on the development of a broader United States Deaf culture and its long-term struggle against teaching oralism (lip reading), without much discussion about the variability of cultural identities within the Deaf community. This paper fills that gap by examining two historical Deaf subcultures, the Deaf community founded around hereditary Deafness and isolated on Martha’s Vineyard, and Black Deaf communities formed in racially segregated Deaf schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how each case differed from the broader Deaf experience, resulting in diverse experiences from which Deaf subcultures with distinct ASL dialects emerged. Through comparative analysis, this paper argues that separation from the broader Deaf community resulted in the development of each community as unique Deaf subcultures that resisted oppression through cultural, community, and language development. By understanding how these groups lived, this paper further shows that there is diversity within Deaf experiences rather than one shared experience.</p>

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation is a Black feminist qualitative inquiry of the interconnections between Black women, literary activity, community, activism, and restoration and healing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and the Black feminist movement converged to create one of the richest periods in Black women’s history. Black women came together in community, through the text, and through various literary spaces–often despite or even because of their differences–to build an archive that articulates a multivocal Black women’s standpoint which many believed to be monotonously singular. During this period, for example, Black women writer-activists wrote more novels, plays, and poetry in these two decades than in any period prior while also establishing new literary traditions. These traditions included the recovery of previously published yet out of print Black women writers, the development of the Black Women Anthology era, the creation of Black women writer-activist collectives, the founding of bookstores, as well as the development of Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist literary criticism in the academy. In the dissertation, these traditions are intrinsically tied to the articulation and definition of the theoretical concept of literary kinship. Conceptually, relationally, and materially literary kinship is the connection generated by the intergenerational literary activity between Black women and girls. In the dissertation, I use literary activity in slightly different ways including to denote community-engaged oral practices, publication, relationships defined around literary sites, and the practice of reading. Literary kinship provides access to community based on and derived from a connection to the literary that is often marked by intergenerational activity. I argue that Black women writer-activists during the period of the BWLR articulate and define literary kinship as a practice of communal restoration and healing for individuals and the collective.</p><p dir="ltr">Literary kinship is explored in four interrelated, yet distinct ways in the dissertation. In chapter two, literary kinship is located in and operationalized through Black women’s literary kinship “networks” founded during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance. In chapter three, the focus is on the Black Women’s Anthology era that begins in 1970 and becomes a pipeline for the development of the interdisciplinary field of Black Women’s Studies in the 1980s. The fourth and fifth chapters shift the impact of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance to the 21st century and examines how literary kinship is rearticulated or re-visioned a generation later. The fourth chapter, in this vein, uses autoethnography and literary analysis to illuminate the interconnections between Black girlhood, geography, and my concept of literary kinship. The chapter explores my experience of literary kinship at the kitchen table, in public libraries, and in secondary and higher education as transformative opportunities that fostered my love for reading, engaging in literary community, and developing reading as a restorative and healing practice. In the final chapter, the rapid reemergence of Black women booksellers and their bookstores in the last five years (2018-2023) become integral to a contemporary rearticulation of literary kinship.</p><p dir="ltr">The Black Women’s Literary Renaissance is a significant period of literary output by Black women writer-activists that has had intergenerational impact in the lives of Black women. During the Renaissance, Black women writer-activists were catalysts for critical and necessary literary interventions, strategies, and methods that supported their sociopolitical activism, the development of a rich Black feminist and literary archive, and that manifested community functional practices of restoration and healing. Black women’s articulation, definition, and utilization of literary kinship in the 20th and 21st centuries has supported their literary labors as activists, as intellectuals, and as community members, and is therefore a practice of community restoration and healing.</p>