Select members of the Congressional Black Caucus through their votes, speeches, arrests and nonviolent forms of protest practice a renewed kind of nonviolent resistance against a neoconservative political agenda advanced by the executive branch of the U.S. government in the past six years. Their practices are nonviolent according to the definition of nonviolence discussed by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1962 New York Times Magazine article: "we will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act...We will try to persuade with our words---but if our words fail we will try to persuade with our acts." Nonviolent resistance according to this quote means first trying to persuade with words then trying to persuade with direct action. This study will compare nonviolent methods of direct action between 2001 and 2007 and those between 1955 and 1963. The nonviolent methods between 2001 and 2007 resist the neoconservative policies that are based on the same assumptions as those in the civil rights movements between 1955 and 1963. The identification of five comparisons in particular proves a continuing tradition of nonviolent protest identified as a 'surviving legacy' of resistance against neoconservative policies. First, Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat on a city bus is comparable to U.S. Representative Barbara Lee's refusal to support the military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, Daisy Bates's commitment to ensuring a quality public education for the Little Rock Nine is comparable to U.S. Representative Chaka Fattah's efforts to improve the Philadelphia public school system. Third, the organizing work of Ella Baker in creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 is comparable to the organizing work of Maxine Waters in creating the Out of Iraq caucus in 2005. Fourth, the appeals to the U.S. Constitution of James Farmer and the Freedom Riders serves as a foundation for John Conyers' appeal to the U.S. Constitution in his lawsuit against George W. Bush. Fifth, the strategy of getting arrested to call attention to unjust foreign policies within the past five years is comparable to the "jail, no bail" strategy during 1962 and 1963. The major point of this thesis is to argue the existence of a concerted strategy of nonviolent resistance practiced by specific Congressional Black Caucus members. The thesis will compare nonviolent resistance in the 21st century to that of the early 1960s.

abstract: This study provides a rhetorical analysis of how Black nationalist protest rhetors have employed apocalyptic discourse in order to call into question the ideological underpinnings of the hegemonic white American nation building project and to imagine new alternatives to replace them. Previous studies by Howard-Pitney (2005), Harrell (2011), and Murphy (2009) have explored how African American abolitionist and civil rights jeremiahs such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. have employed appeals to American civil religion in order to mobilize their audiences to seek liberal reforms to racial injustices by appealing to established values and institutions. While apocalyptic rhetoric also constructs its audience as a chosen people, it tends to take a much more skeptical stance toward the established social order. African American apocalypticists such as David Walker, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party rejected the notion of American chosenness that underpins much Black and white American jeremiadic speech, and employed a Burkean perspective by incongruity in order to draw attention to the inaccuracy of white supremacist and American exceptionalist representations of the social world. The end result of this history is the nation's imminent destruction, which has been envisioned as a divine intervention in the case of traditional sacred apocalyptics, such as David Walker or the early Malcolm X, or as a revolutionary uprising of the oppressed, as in the secular apocalyptics of the later Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. African American apocalyptic rhetoric is prophetic in that it invokes a vision of the national past, present, and future defined by a set of values that are at odds with those of the established social order. African American apocalypticism invites its audience to disidentify themselves from hegemonic white American formulations of Black and white identities and to identify themselves instead with radical alternatives. To the extent that an audience is persuaded by apocalyptic narratives of the American nation, new possibilities for action become available to their consciousness, typically involving either withdrawal from a corrupt society or militant resistance involving measures more radical than the nonviolent direct action and moral suasion advocated by liberal African American jeremiahs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

In the aftermath of King Philip's War, Puritan Mary Rowlandson recorded her experiences as an Indian captive. In a vivid story that recollects the details of these events, Rowlandson attempts to impart a message to her community through the use of a variety of literary techniques. The genre of the Indian captivity narrative is a literary construct that she develops out of the following literary forms that existed at the time of her writing. These are the spiritual autobiography, a documentary method meant to archive spiritual and emotional growth through a record of daily activities; the conversion narrative, which made public one's theological assurance of God's grace; and the jeremiad, a sermon form designed to remind Puritans of their Covenant with God. To her contemporaries, Rowlandson served as an example of God's Providence. To later generations and specifically twenty-first century scholars, she represents America's first female literary prose voice.

African communities are among those most profoundly impacted by the climate crisis, even though they have contributed little to climate change (CDP, 2020). This crisis is especially felt by African youth, who are already disadvantaged and marginalized by political and economic conditions. Like elsewhere around the world, the existential threat of the climate crisis has led to a surge in youth-led climate activism in Africa. Nevertheless, less attention is paid to voices originating from the Global South, especially in Africa.This dissertation explores the plight of young African environmental activists in sub-Saharan nations by considering what strategies and tactics they have used to be seen and heard. To do so, it explores the challenges of communicating climate change, by asking how these young activists are attempting to use communication, information, and media tools to confront the region’s unfolding ecological crisis, educate the public, and challenge misconceptions about climate change while elaborating a social movement network across multiple African nations. To pursue this goal, it draws from African media studies (Madrid-Morales et al., 2021; Mano & Milton, 2021; Wasserman, 2018), media activism (Lim, 2018; Rodríguez, 2011), and ecological activism (T. Bosch, 2012; Fonseca & Castro, 2022; Gonzalez et al., 2021; O’Brien et al., 2018; Wolfe, 2008), to conduct a multi-sited ethnography of activists from eight African countries. The study is organized as case studies developed through a combination of in-depth interviews with the activists, analysis of the texts they have produced through digital platforms, and their relationships with their own communities as well as, more broadly, youth-centered climate activist networks emerging in the Global South and elsewhere. The findings indicate that African climate activists evolve through stages leading to their engagement. To speak for the environment and engage their audiences, they educate themselves and learn to creatively employ traditional and new media. In the process, they must also navigate a social and cultural landscape of racism, ageism, tokenism, and political repression through networking, self-care, and ingenuity. Their stories expand current understanding of eco-activism strategies and tactics, such as boycotts, public appearances, and disruptive social media virality, underscoring their place within ecological jeremiads that offer, in turn, new insights into the growing field of African Media Studies. / Media & Communication

The point of departure for this study is the hypothesis that the American genre of nature writing has reached an important crossroads in the way it describes the human-nature relationship. My study argues that the awareness of the large-scale environmental changes that are signaled in terms such as the Anthropocene has changed the way nature writers approach their genre. Where traditional nature writing would tend to posit a separation between pristine and humanized environments, the nature writing of the Anthropocene emerges from the awareness that environmental impacts have reached a scope where no such distinction can be made. The traditional narrative of retreat to pristine nature or the wilderness from civilization has thus been replaced in Anthropocenic nature writing with the narrative of confrontation with a natural environment impacted by humans. This is a dystopian tendency in the genre, in which descriptions of nature are increasingly characterized by the writer’s concerns over what is happening to the landscape in question, and what the future might hold in a world where industrial humanity is affecting all ecological processes. Such literature increasingly foregrounds the best available environmental science, and the texts mark a shift from the traditional focus on spiritual connections with the environment, towards more material and functional understandings of the role of humanity in the complex organic and inorganic dynamics that maintain the world’s ecosystems. This dissertation analyzes the emergence of Anthropocenic awareness in selected texts of contemporary American nature writing with reference to its five main features: scientific interest in the function of ecosystems, interest in the agency of matter rendered through what is referred to as material nature writing, the dignification of the overlooked, the environmental landscape of fear, and a turn in the genre towards matters of environmental justice. Even though what I refer to as Anthropocenic nature writing may seem dystopian, this dissertation foregrounds the various ways in which the narrative of confrontation with the human also invites activism and engagement in the hope of stimulating change and environmental justice.