When in 1928 Alain Locke coined the phrase "social document fiction" to describe W.E.B. DuBois' 1911 novel Quest of the Silver Fleece, he magnified a tenuous interplay between aesthetics, politics, and social science that underpins nineteenth and early twentieth century black intellectual activity. For Locke, social document fiction describes the small body of literature that, although important as "sociological" treatises, had yet to achieve the aesthetic sophistication that writers of the Harlem Renaissance would master. Even in his dismissal, Locke's phrasing suggests that black authors had succeeded in connecting two representational forms that continue to be positioned as polar opposites: those that use objective observation to index social life (surveys, statistics, photographs, and catalogs) and the imaginative realm of fiction. Indeed, in Quest of the Silver Fleece, DuBois combines technical analyses of agriculture, Southern economy, and Post-Reconstruction education with tales of magic cottonseed in order to convey a social world that remained opaque to positivist analysis. Belonging to neither the sphere of slave narratives, domestic family romance, or Realism, social document fiction combines formal innovation with scientific discourse to produce racial knowledge that exceeds the nineteenth century's emergent regimes of truth. This understudied genre of literature invites us to consider a simple but fraught question: what does it mean to think of social document fiction as a tool for the study of black life? This dissertation answers this question by reconstructing African Americans' responses to key moments between 1850 and the late 1920s when visual technology, like the microscope, the photograph, and film, joined with emerging fields of natural history, sociology, and anthropology to render black subjects as intelligible objects of scientific inquiry. Immersed in this "racial data revolution," blacks grappled to identify a strategy for transmitting new "facts of blackness." I consider social document fiction as an important strategy for reassembling racial epistemologies and reorienting the public's racialized gaze. I extend this genre beyond the work of DuBois to consider how literature by Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston each manifest a struggle to articulate a poetics and politics in relationship social science.

"Imagining a Black Pacific" traces a literary history of political and cultural interaction between African Americans and Koreans from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that black and Korean authors explored literary modes of antiracial solidarity against the Japanese and U.S. empires. Building on diverse archives of U.S. missionary and Korean Christian texts, State Department records, and military documents, as well as literary works, periodicals, and jazz songs, this dissertation examines the mediums and modalities of Afro-Asian aesthetic connection that invoked human freedom and liberation in transnational and multilingual contexts. Black intellectuals and Korean writers drew a parallel between the racialized U.S. and colonized Korea to contest the racial formations of the Japanese empire in an Asian cultural space until the end of the Pacific War. This cross-racial comparison challenged the imperialistic imposition of U.S. politics upon the Pacific Rim during the Cold War era. "Imagining a Black Pacific" is an interdisciplinary project that explores three facets of "Afro-Korean" connectedness: the trans-Pacific literary trajectories of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Eslanda and Paul Robeson, and J. B. Lenoir; the enduring elaborations of black radicalism by Korean writers such as Yun Chi-ho, Han Heuk-gu, and Bae In-cheol in Korea; and U.S. missionaries' intervention in cultural exchanges between African Americans and Koreans. Examining these three distinctive transcultural encounters, my work brings into focus the complicated configurations of an Afro-Asian alliance. It highlights the self-reflexive disorientation of so-called Afro-Orientalism and explores the experimental commensurabilities between U.S. racism and East Asian colonialism, facilitated by Afro-Korean critical inquiries into two forms of imperialism in Korea, namely, Japan's colonization of Korea and U.S. military intervention in Korea. While scholars have focused critical attention on the political alliance between African Americans and Asians, Korea has gone long unexplored in Afro-Asian conjunctures. By extending the scope of Afro-Asian convergences, this dissertation not only fills in Korea's absence in previous studies but also reconstructs lost legacies of black internationalism in the Pacific. In particular, it reconsiders Afro-Orientalism by exploring Koreans' deployment of African American cultural sources to engender anticolonial discourses. At the same time, it uncovers black intellectuals' investigations of racism in Asian and U.S.-Asian contexts. Afro-Korean connections, or the interplay between African Americans' antiracial sensibility and Koreans' anticolonial consciousness, made sensible the hidden forms of racism in the Japanese and U.S. empires beyond the black-white racial binary. By bridging the long-standing gulf between black and Korean cultures, this study opens up new scholarly terrain in the fields of African American literature and culture, comparative race studies, and Asian/Pacific studies.

In Beyond the Negro Problem, I explore the engagement between black literature, black expressive culture, and sociology from the 1890s to the 1930s in order to consider the possibilities for imagining black social life that emerge through discoursive innovation during a time period of violent constraint. During this period, which followed Emancipation and the failure of Reconstruction, the struggle for black life or assimilation into American society was consolidated, examined, and contemplated as the so-called Negro problem. The Negro problem was a pervasive reality and metaphor that both black authors and social scientists grappled with. I argue that black leaders and intellectuals use different forms of sociology in their writing to respond directly to narratives of black social pathology and to imagine black life beyond the status of being a problem. In each chapter I explore a different engagement of sociology and literary production and each time find that the formations of black possibility that emerge are predicated on issues of gender and sexuality because the predominating foreclosing narratives about black social life tend to gravitate toward these same issues. Moreover, the racial knowledge about African American culture produced by sociology at the onset of modernity is acutely gendered. As my project details, a major consequence of these authors dismantling that racial knowledge is that they envision gendered possibilities that exceed the Negro problem itself.

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This dissertation analyzes literary and filmic representations of marriage in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Marriage is an important topos and serves as a crucial narrative device because it provides a space to address issues of identity on several levels: personal, religious, social, political and national. I elaborate on the complexity of identity as it relates to marriage. I particularly consider the role of women and men in marriage and how these roles are shaped by culture In the first chapter, I illustrate how marriage and gender politics are represented and how they relate to identity formation. Chapter Two analyzes how marriage and religion operate as a complex but coherent entity. It also considers the dynamics between marriage, religion, the social order and the ways in which religion is used by patriarchy to sustain the social privileges of the male. Chapter Three explores the relation between marriage, metissage and identity by examining marriage in an intercultural and interracial setting. Finally, in Chapter Four, I contextualize the relation between marriage and national identity. I argue that the nation and the family are closely related and influence one another. In that regard, the limited role of women in marriage is reflected at the national level, and women become second class citizens in the national sphere. My conclusion revisits the link between the various chapters and stresses the necessity for women to create their own space within the marriage bond / acase@tulane.edu

To the traditional unity of the Lusophone world I will explore its variety not only geographic, dispersed over five continents, but also linguistic, cultural, social, economical and political. As a sample I will analyse the literature of four archipelagos located in the Atlantic Ocean, representing a country and a continent or part of a country---Azores (Portugal), Cape Verde, Sao Tome e Principe, Bahia islands (Brazil). At the same time I will define the character of the islander, based on studies about Caribbean Islands, by Pedreira, Benitez Rojo, Juan Floras, etc. This analysis will study different writers and more meaningful social and political periods, such as the rising of a black conciousness and struggle for independance, or the pessimistic disillusion of the current distopia in Azores and Brazil. Conclusions will be based on marxist, anti and post-colonialist, and post-modern theories of Fanon, Margarido, Appiah, Loomba, and Pratt. Particular emphasis will be placed on the humor that characterizes islanders in its different forms, based on Bakhtin and Bergson. The idea of island leads to two opposing images/conceits---abundance and absence, hence the title 'ilhas riqueza, ilhas miseria'. So, I will analyse that contrast and one of the consequences of the islander's reality: emmigration. The massive Portuguese and the Cape-Verdian exodus to the New World in the American whale-boats started around the turn of the XIX century, which remade Azores with a 'Tenth Island' or the L(USA)landia. A short view of the human potentials of three generations will be given by the studies of Eduardo Lourenco or the Californian or East-coast scholars Eduardo Mayone Dias, Dinis Borges and Onesimo Almeida Finally we will end up concluding that the islands and islanders are unfairly subject to marginalization and explotation by the authorities and elites. If it will be democratically given a place and the chance to express itselves to all lusophone countries or regions, Lusophonia will become more than 'the world the Portuguese created' as imagined in the 30's by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, but rather a democratic project where nobody and nothing---race, colour, linguistic substracts, culture---will be lost / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation focuses on reactions to the French canon in four Francophone novels. The study examines the use of allusions to, quotations from, and parallels with French canonical works in an effort to determine how these canonical works are mobilized in the creation of a new vision. The new visions generated through the relationship with the canonical range from the creation of new philosophical systems, to political action, to the colonial encounter, to the role of literature in the indoctrination of colonized subjects Chapter I examines Cheikh Hamidou Kane's treatment of Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal in the novel L'Aventure ambigue. Parallels between the thought of Pascal and Kane's Diallobe people are discussed. What is ultimately revealed is how Descartes in particular is used to upset the credibility of the Diallobe ideological system and how his thought accompanies the arrival of a modern philosophical system Chapter II consists of a study of Ousmane Sembene's novel Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, and of his treatment of Andre Malraux's La Condition humaine in that novel. Sembene develops a new vision of the French canon and of the African characters' relationship to it. The chapter goes on to trace the process through which the French canonical text is subordinated to the values and traditions of the politically committed African characters Chapter III examines thematic and structural parallels between Amadou N'Diaye's Assoka ou les derniers fours de Koumbi and Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo. What emerges is a new vision of the colonial encounter in which the French are seen not as a civilizing force but as a tool in the hands of a monotheistic God bringing the rule of Islam to Africa The final chapter analyzes the mobilization of Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer and of the modernist poetic tradition by Daniel Maximin in his novel L'Isole soleil. After showing how Rimbaud's prose poem functions as a structural motif, the chapter looks at how Maximin re-evaluates Caribbean literature's relationship with the French texts that have had such an important influence on Caribbean writers / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation investigates the notion of bourgeoisification, the bourgeois, and the bourgeoisie in African Francophone literature of the colonial and post-colonial periods. The origins of the African bourgeoisie can be traced to the Western colonialist project. Three institutions have been especially implicated in its creation: the Western colonial educational system, commercial activities, and the modern town and the trend toward urbanization. These three came together to engender new forms of human relationships in Africa. Such relationships destabilized and tended to displace, the traditional family and communal structures, as well as the caste system. In this new society which would be marked by extreme alienation, new human types were born: the 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' The 'haves,' who constitute the center bolt of the present study, we can characterize as the African bourgeoisie My project is not intended as a critique of the bourgeoisie and its discursive practices. Rather, it is a critical analysis of the representation of the bourgeois(ie). Therefore, any less-than-positive picture of the class and/or its members that may seem to emanate from my analysis should be understood as a reflexion of a generally negative pattern of representation in the texts under consideration. My real goal is to examine the strategies used by certain novelists and playwrights in their efforts to paint a portrayal of the class and its members. Furthermore, my analysis of such strategies will help to reveal each writer's attitudes toward the class, for it is my view that representation of any universe of discourse is never an entirely innocent activity. My study will also provide a historiographical perspective not only on the origin and development of the bourgeoisie in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, but also on the evolution of its figurations in literary texts My dissertation is divided into four chapters. In Chapter I, I examine the issue of the literary invention of the African bourgeoisie and its relationship to the reality that it draws upon as well as points to. I focus mainly on the use by African writers of such devices as metaphor as a privileged instrument of representation. Chapter II considers another side of invention, that is historical invention. It focuses on the French colonial school as the birthplace of what later came to be known as the Sub-Saharan bourgeoisie. Chapter IV studies the elaboration in certain novels of what I call an African discourse of transgression. It puts into deeper perspective the bourgeoisification of lower castes in the colonial school and the impact this has on contemporary African political reality. Chapter III presents a case study of a specific bourgeois type: the arriviste. This is the type most encountered in African anti-bourgeois literature, and widely considered to be a negative presence on the African sociopolitical and economic scene. An important aspect of this chapter is the making of the bourgeois arriviste in Africa / acase@tulane.edu

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Ron Blazek, Florida State University, School of Information Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Mar. 11, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references.