Bildungsroman in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction is a study of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Both of these writers implement a newer version of the genre of Bildungsroman to reveal the complexities involved in coming of age for a young woman of color. Both novels have protagonists that struggle with racism, sexism, and classism as barriers to their identity formation. This study aims to reveal the ways in which multiple layers of oppression inhibit the progress of contemporary African-American female heroines in modem Bildungsroman. / Graduation date: 2002

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

La thèse s’attache à démontrer comment l’utilisation du folklore, en tant que discipline et que matériau, agit de façon subversive dans les travaux de Zora Neale Hurston et Toni Morrison. Un questionnement autour du folklore (nature et origine des objets d’étude, délimitation et positionnement de la discipline) donne un nouvel éclairage sur des problématiques porteuses dans le domaine littéraire, comme la définition des identités ou la mise en place des relations de pouvoir. Une approche transdisciplinaire permet, en plus de convoquer différents champs du savoir, d’observer de quelle manière ils peuvent s’infléchir entre eux. Par son double statut d’anthropologue et d’auteure de fiction, Hurston incarne une relation d’interdépendance et de dialogue entre matériau littéraire et folklorique. Son œuvre polymorphe, qui entremêle fiction et folklore, langue vernaculaire et écriture poétique, met en relief des enjeux épistémologiques, politiques et littéraires centraux dans l’œuvre de Morrison et permettent de mieux comprendre sa construction d’un discours orienté vers la pluralité et la performance. L’oralité, dans sa relation avec la littérature, constitue le point d’entrée de la recherche. La dynamique de variation, centrale à toute étude de la tradition orale est largement utilisée dans ces œuvres et va dans le sens d’une esthétique de la plasticité et de la polyphonie. La seconde partie s’intéresse au surnaturel et à la croyance qui, dans leur prise en charge, fonctionnent comme outil de subversion par la revalorisation des « savoirs discrédités ». Le positionnement de Hurston dans l’évolution du folklore en tant que discipline encourage à reconsidérer l’appellation de réalisme magique pour les romans de Morrison. Enfin, la mise en place d’un système d’interprétations alternatives et de sous-textes concurrents, en particulier en relation à la religion et aux contes, promeut la pluralité des possibilités herméneutiques qui agit pour la réhabilitation de discours minorés par des discriminations de classe, de race, de genre et de statut institutionnel. / The present work seeks to demonstrate how the use of folklore, both as a discipline and as objects, leads to subversion in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. A questioning of folklore (nature and origin of the items, definition of the discipline) sheds new light on literary issues such as identity formation and assignation or power relationships. In a transdiciplinary approach that goes beyond using resources from separate fields, this study aims at assessing how much they modify one another. Because she was both an anthropologist and a fiction writer, Hurston embodies the interaction between literary and folkloric materials. Her polymorphic work blends fiction with folklore and vernacular with poetic language. The epistemological, political and literary issues it reveals are crucial to Morrison’s writing and allow a better understanding of her crafting of a discourse oriented towards plurality and performance. The study of the interplay between orality and literature shows that variation, central to the oral tradition, infuses the corpus, promoting plurality and polyphony. The second part focuses on beliefs and the supernatural: their endorsement challenges a hierarchical order by giving value back to « discredited knowledge. » Hurston’s positioning within folklore as a discipline and its evolution leads to a reexamination of the concept of « magical realism » used for Morrison’s novels. Finally, a system of alternate interpretation and competing subtexts, especially concerning religion and folktales, supports multiplicity in the interpretative possibilities and enables the rehabilitation of forms of discourse depreciated because of social, racial, gender and institutional discriminations.

Beginning with reclamation projects in the western U.S., the heavy construction industry helped the federal government grow in size and sophistication in the twentieth century. The Morrison-­Knudsen Corporation throughout the twentieth century represented one of the federal government's favored contractors. Following western reclamation projects, the U.S. federal government then used contractors to help move the U.S. economy out of the Depression, prepare for World War II, wage the Cold War at home and abroad, and win the space race. Thus, at key stages in United States history we observe the necessity of the U.S. federal government partnering with the heavy construction industry to achieve its policy objectives at home and abroad. Morrison-Knudsen was once the largest heavy contractor in the United States, participating in the construction of Hoover Dam, Pacific Naval Air Bases, Hanford Engineering Works, the U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missile System, and the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center.

Calls to protect Black women have garnered national attention, drawing attention to the axes of racialized and gendered violence that are central to this dissertation project: the intersecting mis/recognition of Black women’s vulnerability and affect within and outside of their own racial communities constrains their possibilities to seek repair and justice for harm. Baltimore community members used social media platforms to call attention to gendered violence, joining movements like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s #SayHerName and Tarana Burke’s #MeToo Movement to address the erasure of violent experiences of Black women and girls; yet the mis/recognition of their affective experiences persists through the societal focus on Black male vulnerability. Through careful ethnographic study with Baltimorean anti-gendered violence activists, Black gendered violence survivors, and Black community healers, this dissertation analyzes how these women and non-binary people mobilize emotions to construct memorial spaces, community-based movements, and their own lives in the midst of pervasive state and interpersonal violence. I investigate the affective and political processes of Black urban place-making, self-making, and memorialization to answer: How do Black women define their own subjectivity at the intersections of antiblack and gendered violence? How does their political mobilization of emotions such as fear and grief transform gendered and racialized understandings of affect? To answer these questions, I use a Black feminist care practice to examine the themes of haunting, violence, home, and care and to conceptualize new analytic tools for writing about violence against Black women. The first chapter of my dissertation undertakes a Black feminist reading of ethnographic interview data, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), examining themes of reproduction, violence, and slavery’s afterlife that ripple from the novels’ pages to my and my interlocutors’ lives. I locate the haunting inside and outside of the Black female body, and I discuss the particular way that Black trans life illuminates that haunting. In my second chapter, I explore the (im)possibility of gendered Black affect through a Black feminist mapping of the myriad practices Black people use to create home as a transitory, affective, symbolic, and metamorphic place. This chapter employs autoethnography and interlocutor photographs of emotional sites as analytical and methodological tools to answer its driving questions. The third chapter discusses Black gendered memorialization practices for victims of state-sanctioned and interpersonal violence. I develop my conceptualization of imagined (after)life and self power using ethnographic and archival data, using the aftermath of Korryn Gaines’s and Breonna Taylor’s state-sanctioned murders as primary texts. The fourth and final chapter of my dissertation focuses on Black anti-gendered violence activism and its challenges and failures in Baltimore. By examining the lived experiences of Black activist-organizers, I highlight the complexities inherent in the pursuit of Black liberation. Using a Black feminist abolitionist framework, I analyze photographs, art, and poetry from local artist-activists to illustrate how (after)lives of interpersonal violence survivors can be made radical. My analysis of the affective experiences of Black women and nonbinary people in Baltimore and the gendered politics of grievability in Black anti-violence movements ultimately demonstrates how these movements re-entrench white supremacist patriarchal norms that undermine the pursuit of Black liberation. Thus, we must turn to Black feminist abolitionist praxis to achieve liberation for all Black people.

In my dissertation, "Narrative Representations (of Time) in the 20th Century Novel" I examine the way in which depictions of time intersect with narrative representation in the modern and postmodern novel. I specifically focus on the use of parentheses as a way to capture differing types of chronology in narrative. The parenthesis, in a purely visual sense, physically disrupts the act of reading by creating a type of barrier around one text, separating it from the main narrative. I argue that it is with this disruption that 20th century authors were able to experiment with depictions of time and the disruption of linear narrative. Borrowing Gerard Genette's phrase "temporal ellipses" I examine how authors in the 20th century used the "temporal parentheses" in order to convey different temporal experiences in narrative. For Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the parenthesis works as a way of presenting simultaneity of experiences when spatially separated. For William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, the parenthesis creates a kind of compressed time, so that the past becomes a heavy burden upon the present, as represented by the way a narrative experience can be extended within parentheses. In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children the parenthesis is used to bridge and create a dialogue between the present moment of the telling and the past moment of the story. In Toni Morrison's Sula, the parenthesis calls attention to physical placement, representing the way in which personal identity is linked to physical place and the rejection of permanence in the novel.

The thesis investigates the ways in which James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison’s fictional portrayals of forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are excluded or prohibited by social norms, destabilise heteronormativity as the only legitimate option for non-harmful and pleasurable sensual and sexual expression. It aims to situate Baldwin, Walker and Morrison in a continuum of African American authors, beginning with Harlem Renaissance writer Bruce Nugent – the first African American writer to openly explore the relationship between homosexuality and Blackness – that have examined the intertwining issues of transgressive sexuality and race in increasingly explicit ways. By highlighting the ways in which Baldwin, Walker and Morrison decentre heteronormativity, the project aims to uncover how their novels expose the systems of power and knowledge by which racial forms of oppression are maintained, thereby debunking both the notion of Black “authenticity” and Black sexual stereotypes. Finally, the project hopes to show how the process of “queering” heteronormativity in these ways effectively serves to legitimise all forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are non-harmful, opening up a new trajectory for contemporary twentieth-century authors who delve into these themes. Theoretical Approach: The thesis will argue for a queer reading of Baldwin, Walker and Morrison’s novels that underscores the writers’ treatment of sexuality as a discursive construct. Specifically, this theoretical perspective looks to their legitimisation of alternative forms of love, eroticism and sexuality that are non-harmful – a process that, in each case, serves to counteract and denaturalise White heteronormativity as the only rightful option for sexual desire and practice. Through this approach, the thesis strives to reveal how by working to legitimise such taboo expressions, these writers deconstruct the idea of the “other” as aberrant, thus calling attention to the specific political and moral systems by which love, eroticism and sexuality are judged in the modern Western world. Chapter Break Down: Chapters one and two of the project situate my argument in the context of critical earlier American writing encompassing canonical fiction, including political protest and African American folklorist novels, political polemics, Puritan captivity narratives, slave narratives, political essays, and experimentalist fiction. Together, these chapters provide a detailed overview of discourses surrounding sexuality, considering what is socially determined to be sexually “perverse” as a shifting concept, the meaning of which changes in tandem with changes in social and historical context. They also extensively analyse Black cultural specificity, examining both the sociological genesis of Black sexual stereotypes that led in part to the justification of the modern slave trade and the subsequent impact of slavery on African American sexual practices. In chapter three, the literary analysis begins with a consideration of the broadened possibilities of sexual acceptability Baldwin puts forth in his anti-protest style of fiction, by examining relationships between characters that do not fit conventional racial or sexual stereotypes, their social contexts, and the narrative perspectives employed by the author. Chapter four examines how Walker’s work carries forward Baldwin’s ideas, by further opening up the spectrum of socially acceptable forms of love, eroticism and sexuality through her presentation of an even wider array of erotically transgressive characters, and her effort to write about them during sustained periods of American conservatism. In chapter five, I examine how Morrison complicates the traditional understanding of what constitutes legitimate sexuality by infusing positive elements into sensual and sexual acts that appear to be nothing other than violent, illegal or psychologically regressive, thereby exposing the impact of social and historical context on the individual, further emphasising the changing and discursive nature of sexuality. The thesis finally argues that Baldwin, Walker and Morrison’s particular depictions of alternative sexuality roll back into a bigger idea of human experience that claims as necessary a re-thinking of social norms based on ethical considerations, rather than arbitrary social codes of morality that lead to both racial and sexual discrimination. Their novels thus ultimately involve us in human issues of justice and responsibility beyond the boundaries of race and sexuality.

Male or female, young or old, the characters of this collection inhabit a liminal space of trauma and social dislocation in which elements of the real and fabulous coexist in equal measure. The ghosts that populate the stories are as much the ghosts of the living, as they are the ghosts of the dead. They represent individual conscience and an inescapable connection to the past.

This study examines trauma, particularly in the thematic contexts of the individual and the community as reflected in her novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. By utilizing the specific theoretical modes of new historicism and trauma theory, the veil of double consciousness imposed on African Americans is explicated and exposes various forms of trauma in the individual and the community. The unspoken atrocities experienced as a result of slavery, Jim Crow, and physical and sexual violence in many of Morrison’s novels, suggest the common thread of trauma. The particular traumas depicted in Morrison’s novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, damage agency, lead to detachment and paralysis in the individual. The scope of this study is limited to the novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved as they best illustrate trauma in Morrison’s characters and the damage it causes to agency, leading to detachment and paralysis in the individual. The literary theories of new historicism and psychoanalysis provide cultural and literary context for the novels and allow for a deeper rendering of the characteristics of trauma and provide the context for the term dynamic trauma. of oppression as a mean of dysfunction in the thematic These novels reveal a pathology of trauma disguised as normalcy in the African American community, which leads to disrupted lives, relationships, and communities. Morrison not only depicts these dysfunctional behaviors due to traumatic circumstances but also offers a remedy for the dysfunction—acceptance without acquiescence.

The aim of this essay is to explore motherhood in two postcolonial literary works by African American author Toni Morrison and British author Caryl Phillips, who was born in the Caribbean. The essay is based on Morrison’s award winning novel Beloved, which was published in 1987 and was inspired by the escaping African American slave Margareth Garner. It is set just after the American Civil War and the novels deals with the trauma of slavery from the perspective of Sethe, a slave who kills her own daughter to save her from slavery. The second novel on which this essay is based is Caryl Phillips’ novel Crossing the River, which was published 1993 and focused on the African diaspora from different perspectives. Crossing the River is a non-chronological narrative covering four different characters (three African American people and one white slave trader during the eighteenth century). This essay, however, only deals with the last of the four narratives depicting white British Joyce who mothers a child with African American soldier Travis. The hypothesis on which the essay is based is that the institution of American slavery has denied the female protagonists in the two novels, Sethe and Joyce, their maternal selves. The analysis revealed that both women suffer from racial domination, and race, or simply skin color, is what leads to the maternal loss of the two protagonists. Both authors depict the world of the colonizer and the colonized and they address the common pain and guilt shared by black as well as white people.