Abstract not available.

Charles Chesnutt is perhaps best known for his short stories; he also, over the course of his relatively short publishing career, produced three novels, which have been less well represented in the critical community. This neglect is due to some oversimplified readings in the past. My readings offer a revised view of Chesnutt's work, which I have opened up by using the critical lens of liminality, and by drawing on Chesnutt's own natural deconstructionist tendencies to do deconstructive readings of the novels. I draw on Victor Turner's definition of liminality, which comes from Turner's rites of passage studies. I show that Chesnutt's characters frequently attain liminal status in his work--they take on the "betwixt and between" characteristics that Turner defines as essential to the liminal state. But far from attaining the final assimilation that comes at the end of liminality, Chesnutt's characters end up as marginals--Turner's term for permanent outcasts. Thus, Chesnutt, in his typically ironic way, has described the status of black Americans at the turn of the 19$\sp{\rm th}$ century in America. Chesnutt's novels are, when looked at as a continuum, a brooding meditation on the despair of black existence following Reconstruction. In the first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt shows the liminal quality of passing, an option which he chose not to exercise. In the second (and most successful) book, The Marrow of Tradition, he shows the liminal nature of the racial space occupied by a professional black man, who tries to be all things to all people, and who ends up utterly unable to express himself. And in the third, and final, novel, The Colonel's Dream, Chesnutt shows the failure of a white man who tried to go back to his hometown in the South and change the course of its future by combining what he perceives to be the best of the past with the best of the present. But in the frozen landscape of the post-Reconstructionist South, all dreams have become nightmares. Thus, because of his prophetic voice, Chesnutt deserves more appreciative readings in the present.

The main goal of this dissertation consists in the elaboration and application of a number of theoretical approaches to all the works, fictional and extra-fictional, of the Cape Verdean novelist Germano Almeida. This study attempts to integrate the several theoretical approaches so as to reach a new analytical vision of Almeida's oeuvre in the context of the world in which it was produced. I start by using conventional literary theories—post-colonialism, post-modernism, and (post)-feminism, as well as psychoanalytical theories. I conclude by subjecting these several theoretical constructs to a number of principles derived from the natural sciences. The purpose of doing so is to determine the possibilities and limitations of traditional literary theory. Moreover, it is the purpose of this dissertation to expand the theoretical context in order to account for the many innovations—structural and thematic—that inform the works of this Lusophone African writer. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This dissertation examines slave narratives, neo-slave narratives, and histories of slavery. Using critical race theory, narrative theory, and philosophical critiques of objectivity, I trace how academic histories, such as U. B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery, developed a grammar of white supremacy that excluded African-Americans from equal citizenship. These texts claimed to present a “transparent” view of the past by highlighting the perceived (through physical, documentable evidence) and eliding the role of perceiver and of language in the creation of narrative history. In order to write themselves into history, I argue, both fugitive slaves and contemporary novelists have drawn on the oral conjure and trickster tales that enslaved African-Americans told as a means of subverting the masters' authority. Both conjure and trickster narratives deny that narrative can present a transparent description of the past, and yet they work in contradictory, sometimes antagonistic ways. To counter the grammar of white supremacy and its Cartesian claim to a “universal,” disembodied perspective, conjure narratives emphasize the embodied perceiver, while trickster narratives emphasize language, as the mediums through which we know both history and identity. Conjure narratives such as Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chesnutt's conjure tales, Bontemps's Black Thunder, and Morrison's Beloved depict the dominant discourse as a “magic” rhetoric that transforms reality while claiming to simply describe it. Invoking magic and ancestral spirits, conjure discourse disrupts mechanistic assumptions about reality, reunites body, mind, and spirit, and creates a communal, participatory history. In contrast, trickster narratives such as Bibb's Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, Chesnutt's “The Dumb Witness,” Reed's Flight to Canada , and Johnson's Oxherding Tale present the master narrative as a set of generic conventions that we have been duped into accepting as reality. Through anachronism, parody, mixed genres, and linguistic “sleight of hand,” trickster narratives disrupt teleological history, erase distinctions between slave and free, black and white, past and present, and remind readers that narrative constructs both history and identity. Finally, I examine Johnson's Middle Passage, which integrates trickster and conjure narrative to explore the tension between self and community.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2010. / "Graduate Program in Comparative Literature." Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-288).

In this study I provide close textual analysis of the novels of three women writers whose work displays a consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and examine the ways in which their racial representations interplay with their depictions of gender and sexuality. Writing from a consciously gendered and racialized position, I combine personal narrative with theoretical discussion as I trace common racial themes, such as racial violence, cross-racial couples, and the denial or erasure of race. In an examination of other critics who have employed personal narrative as a form of literary analysis, I affirm the value of teaching and reading literary texts as a mode of activism. I also examine the depiction of white male protagonists, exploring the ways in which such depictions require a transracial, cross-gender performance on the part of the woman writer. Recurring patterns of racial dynamics emerge in the larger body of each author's work. A West Indian female racial identity emerges in Rhys' work as, consciously and unconsciously, her white heroines identify with black slave women, and seek another form of "blackness" through alcoholic oblivion. Gordimer's white women seek to slough off the racial privilege they are only too aware of, but Gordimer creates narratives in which white female identity merges textually with black male identity and black female identity, linguistically and through shared political action. Morrison's black women, doubly othered by race and by gender, seek to transcend all boundaries through wildly transgressive behavior, enacted boldly or imagined through language. In my final chapter, I explore the ambiguities and struggles of the construction of female racial identity in American, South African and Caribbean contexts, with particular attention to moments of textual rupture which signal the possibility of fluid identity. I demonstrate how Morrison, Gordimer, and Rhys employ a variety of narrative forms which allow readers to enter an in-between space, a starting point for the transformation of consciousness and of society. Literature is an ideal vehicle for entering the in-between space imaginatively, and dwelling there longer and longer as we rid ourselves of preconceived notions of race and gender.

The Universal theme of Water, both the Sea as well as the Rain in literature reaches a dimension of Cult in Cape Verdean literature and it is an important part of the Cape Verdean identity. Water is of the utmost importance at several levels for Cape Verde: an archipelago surrounded by water and yet about half of its population has to immigrate due to the lack of rain. These two facts play an important role in the complex bi-polar Cape Verdean identity struggling between the desire to emigrate connoted with the Sea and the desire to stay connoted with the Rain. The present study aims to analyze, compare and contrast the major literary works of Cape Verdean Literature from the Claridade period (1936) to Post-Colonial period (1975) and extends until 1990 with the publication of Germano Almeida first novel O Testamento do Sr. Napumoceno da Silva Araújo which coincides with the end of the mono party system in Cape Verde. The other authors and works focused on this study are: Jorge Barbosa: Arquipélago (1935), Ambiente (1941), Caderno de um Ilhéu (1956); Manuel Lopes: Poemas de quem ficou (1949), Crioulo e outros poemas (1964), Chuva Braba (1956), Os Flagelados do Vento Leste (1960), Galo Cantou na Baía (1959); Corsino Fortes: Pão & Fonema (1974), Árvore & Tambor (1986), Pedras de Sol & Substância (2001); Baltasar Lopes: Chiquinho (1947), Os Trabalhos e os Dias (1987). This study also makes references to four authors before the Claridade period: Eugénio Tavares, Pedro Monteiro Cardoso, Januário Leite and José Lopes.

The cinematic adaptation of West African Francophone literature offers an impetus to focus on African culture. This study begins with an overview of the development of West African Francophone literature followed by a discussion of cinema from this region. Furthermore, it examines the techniques of how West African Francophone directors adapt the novel or short story to the screen. To appreciate this craft, a detailed analysis of both the characteristics and procedures of adaptation is offered. / The study is divided into five parts. The Introduction is followed by three chapters. Each chapter presents the filmmaker's work(s) along with its literary source. Chapter One analyzes three films by Ousmane Sembene: La Noire de ..., Le Mandat, and Xala. Chapter Two examines Daniel Kamwa's Boubou-Cravate. Chapter Three investigates films directed by Momar Thiam: Sarzan, La Malle de Maka-Koli, and Karim. The final section comprises the conclusion. / Each film and its literary source are analyzed according to its point of view, themes and tone taking into account various cinematographic techniques used by the filmmaker who translates the literary text to the screen. Thus, we will discover not only which approach to adaptation (literal or creative) the director employed but also what impact the oral tradition had on the filmmaker's interpretation of the literary work thereby ascertaining how he develops a new artistic creation. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 2943. / Major Professor: Victor Carrabino. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

<p> The objective of this work is to present the identities of two traditional African societies: Agni and Bakongo. It is imperative to note that the initiation allegory and the initiation ritual practiced in traditional African society are the two methods of initiation used to analyze the respective identities of two characters: Prince M&eacute;l&eacute;douman in Jean-Marie Adiaffi's <i> La Carte d'identit&eacute;</i> and King Mani Kongo in Mweze Ngangura's <i> Pi&egrave;ces d'identit&eacute;s</i>. Not only does this approach establish a study of these heroes, but also of their people. </p><p> Thus, the ancestral practices, and the cultural and religious values that M&eacute;l&eacute;douman discovers in his quest, are those that express his identity and that of his community. Additionally, the symbols that Mani Kongo wears bestow on him his identity and present his DNA. That is, it signals his belonging to his ethnic group. Moreover, the lived experiences of Prince M&eacute;l&eacute;douman and King Mani Kongo, in the course of their prospective initiation voyages, can be defined as an initiation allegory whereby the neophyte, M&eacute;l&eacute;douman, on one hand, goes to be reestablished in his rights and Mani Kongo, on the other hand, becomes convinced of the limits of his traditions. Likewise, the practice of the <i>Comian</i> illustrates a type of initiation ritual, which expresses a unique identifying value among the Agni people in the Ivory Coast. </p><p> This study aims to reconstruct and to revalorize the identity of two peoples. It is evident that the cultural symbols, values, and other ancestral practices are in the process of disappearing due, certainly, to the domination of Western values of which francophone African peoples are the victims. Finally, this particular identity, constructed through history, myths, practices, and belief, translates, as well as defines, the worldview of these two traditional francophone African societies.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct. 6, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-02, Section: A, page: 0649. Advisers: John H. McDowell; Hasan M. El-Shamy.