The criminal Black male stereotype, cemented in early American literature, has been perpetuated in movies, TV shows, and now on mainstream radio. For this study, Billboard song lyrics were analyzed for three main themes—violence, misogyny, and drugs/alcohol. Billboard song rankings are based on digital download sales, radio airplay, and Internet streaming. The researcher found that the songs played on hip hop and rap genre radio stations con-tained lyrics that strongly correlated with the three themes. The researcher also examined whether a relationship existed between artist’s race and lyrics about violence, misogyny, and drugs/alcohol. Black artists comprised 48% of the artists studied; compared to White artists’ lyrics, Black artists’ lyrics contained the majority of instances of each theme. The Federal Communications Commission does not restrict vulgar lyrical content played on hip hop and rap radio stations. In addition, according to studies of media influence on the social perceptions of racial groups and history of the Black male’s role in entertainment, the mainstream radio industry selects Black artists whose lyri-cal themes show a prevalence of violence, misogyny, and drugs/alcohol.

Each year thousands of children are removed from their homes and placed in foster care where they lose connections with their family, community, and friends. Coakley (2007) points out that children of color are overly represented within the child welfare system, and there is a lack of research on Black fathers and their involvement when their children become a part of the system. Studies have suggested that most families that encounter the child welfare system have adult males who are actively involved with their families, however, child welfare workers do not engage these men (Coady, Hoy, & Cameron, 2013). The purpose of this study was to examine the lived experiences of Black fathers who were previously involved in the child welfare system. Semi-structured interviews were completed with four Black fathers who were previously involved with the child welfare system. Five major themes emerged during the process of data analysis that illuminated the fathers’ experiences and gave meaning to their stories, including case worker attitude, services overload, intergenerational child welfare involvement, feelings of helplessness and willingness to comply. There were also several sub-themes for three of the larger themes. The findings are discussed in light of current literature about father involvement in child welfare, and Black fathers in particular. Implications of the findings are discussed for the field of family therapy, future research and practice. It is my hope that the information obtained from this study will help inform current practices within child welfare and the field of marriage and family therapy to more effectively engage Black fathers in the child welfare system.

This research effort is based on the life and development process which the author has experienced and is currently experiencing. This effort for all intents and purposes, is an individual self-study. "Critical Incidents" have been utilized to develop a sense of understanding for the reader. In reading this paper, one can see that at times negative social and cultural situations would cause the author an unusually high level of inner stress, which was not always apparent to the outside world.

This study focuses on the rhetoric of racial politics and the ideology of exclusion it produces. This study analyzes the political rhetoric constructed by David Duke, white supremacist, disavowed neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan member, and former Louisiana State Representative. The topics of affirmative action, reverse discrimination, immigration, and welfare were chosen for analysis. Using ideological criticism, this study reveals the role Duke pays in America's increasingly exclusionary political environment. Specifically, this study uses the concepts employed by Louisa Martin Rojo in exploring the rhetorical process of demonization which is used to turn someone or something into an enemy. The process needed to demonize an enemy involves two rhetorical strategies: division and rejection. Division establishes the opposing categories in the conflict, manifesting itself as an arguments between "us verses them" or "good verses evil." Rejection further demonizes the enemy by rhetorically marginalizing, segregating, or creating a negative image about them. Through his rhetoric, Duke strives to provoke feelings of resentment by utilizing demonization to reject and divide whites from minorities. In his rhetoric, Duke excludes people of color from society by portraying affirmative action as minority special privilege, reverse discrimination as white exclusion, welfare as a bastion of illegitimacy, and immigration as the downfall of American culture. Attempting to exclude minorities from society, Duke moves beyond Rojo's concept of demonization and uses scapegoating to blame minorities for America's social ills. By using people of color as a scapegoat, Duke effectively excludes them from participating in the debate over social concerns.

This thesis explores the role of translation in the production and manipulation of identities in the contemporary Americas as exemplified in the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Underscoring the instrumentality of borders vis-à-vis dominant constructions of identity and in connection with questions of language, race, and citizenship, I argue that translation not only functions as an agent of hegemonic superiority and oppression, but also as a locus of plurivocity and hybridization. Drawing from the concepts “continuous variation” (Deleuze and Guattari [1987] 2004), “coloniality of power” (Mignolo 2000), and “hybridization” (García-Canclini 1995), I discuss the connection of translation with three main topics: monolingualism, globalization, and racial hybridity. First, I discuss the influence that the dominant ideology of the nation-state has exerted on the way translation has been conceptualized since translation studies emerged as a field. Then I turn to colonial legacies in the Americas and the role of translation in situations of language hegemony as shaped by forces of assimilation and diversification. Finally, I look at translation as a crucial agent for the production and legitimization of Latin American identity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Viewing translation as a performative and transformative activity, I critique a number of contemporary approaches to translation and I point to new understandings of translation as a cluster concept (Tymoczko 2007) in order to expand translation theory and practice beyond Western paradigms.

Since the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and his subsequent election to the presidency in 1994, South Africa certainly has not achieved the hopes and dreams of its people or for the rest of the continent. But despite bleak conditions, there are many who still have hope for their country. One of those people is Zakes Mda, and his hope is reflected in his novels. Yet, his novels remain complex. They do not provide all-encompassing solutions or answers to the problems that face the nation. But they do address questions with possibilities, suggestions, and innovation. The South Africa he creates, both in the past and the present, embodies what the real South Africa is and isn’t, and what it has the potential to be. Mda is not afraid to be critical of his own people, he is not afraid to face the history of his country with an equally critical lens, and even more importantly, he is not afraid to face the future of his country with that same critical gaze. This open approach to the people of his country, to its history, and current policies opens up his narrative to imagination, allowing his characters to re-envision themselves more completely and form a more complete and encompassing cultural identity that was previously denied to them.

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

The intent of this thesis is to discuss the manner in which four black newspapers covered the U.S. Masters Tournament, hosted annually at the Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia, from 1994 through 2001. The four black newspapers include two from the North, the New Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, and two from the South, the Atlanta Voice and the Birmingham Times. It is my contention that U.S. Masters coverage in the aforementioned black papers is dependent upon the presence of Tiger Woods. Without Woods' participation at the Masters, coverage of the event would be diminished in the four black newspapers. The years 1994 through 2001 (excluding the Birmingham Times which was only microfilmed to 1999) have been analyzed in each of the four newspapers in order to present my case. The thesis proves that to the four black newspapers Tiger Woods is the deciding factor in its Masters coverage.

This study analyzes the rhetoric of William "Parson" Brownlow during the Civil War era. Within the pages of the Whig, Brownlow's famous newspaper, he created a fixed image of African Americans. Brownlow argued that when removed from slavery, people of African descent naturally became barbaric, and thus slavery was needed to ensure the safety of the white population. Despite this consistency in racial thought, Brownlow, through the course of the 1850s shifted from defending slavery as a necessary evil to promoting slavery as an unqualified blessing in the years before the Civil War. Furthermore, during Brownlow's governorship of Tennessee during Reconstruction, Brownlow argued that slavery was economically deleterious to poor white farmers. These findings have important implications for the history of Appalachia. Most specifically, Brownlow's racist rhetoric suggests that race perceptions in East Tennessee were not significantly separable from the race sentiments of the larger South.

This study examines recurring motifs and personas in hip-hop. Interviews with influential hip-hop scholars, writers and music industry personnel were conducted and analyzed using qualitative methods. Interview subjects were selected based on their insider knowledge as music critics, hip-hop scholars, ethnomusicologists, publicists, and music industry positions. The vast majority of constructed imagery in hip-hop is based on a single persona, the gangsta. This qualitative analysis reveals why gangsta personas and motifs have become the de facto imagery of hip-hop. Gangsta imagery is repeatedly presented because it sells, it is the most readily-available role, and because of music industry pressures. This study is significant because gangsta imagery impacts African American social knowledge and the generalized perception of blackness. Gangsta imagery has also served to alienate black culture and has caused rifts in the African American community.