Thesis (M.A.)--Marshall University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Includes abstract. Document formatted into pages: contains v, 106 p. Includes bibliographical references p. 97-104.

An evil spiritual being, often called the devil, is an antagonist in several religious traditions. The religious ideology among enslaved Africans in America allowed for the devil to play an important, and sometimes ambiguous, role in their lives. Through the examination of conversion narratives, this research intends to argue that their conversion experiences are heavily impacted by and mirrored the reality of slavery. Therefore, the enslaved people’s accounts of the devil are influenced by the power and honor attributed to the institution of slavery. The data from gathered from the narratives will be interpreted through a poststructuralist lens of power and honor. Poststructuralist theories of power and honor will reveal the significance of the devil in conversion narratives and unearth an African American understanding of the devil that is created and sustained by the systems of power and honor in American slavery.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Notre Dame, 2003. / Thesis directed by Antonette Irving for the Department of English. "September 2003." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-37).

This dissertation is a study of how slave rebellions continue to exert a profound political, affective and cultural influence on postcolonial writers. These writers claim histories and memories of such rebellions as strategic allegories, which enable both articulations of contemporary concerns about neocolonial and neoliberal forms of governmentality, as well as the resistances to such. Through an examination of texts by Ghanaian playwright Mohammed Ben Abdallah, Haitian poet and novelist Évelyne Trouillot, Canadian-Caribbean writer Dionne Brand, and Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, I argue that these narratives demonstrate that our present moment of globalized capital and its accompanying forms of expropriation, though seemingly disembodied and all-pervasive, bear suggestive resemblances to the ethical and political questions raised by the global machinery of slavery. Memories of slave rebellions operate as vital forms of oppositional narratives in these texts, providing writers with an imaginary of a foundational class struggle which threatens the existing status quo. While such narrativizations remobilize the cultural memories of earlier radicalisms, they also point out the failures of such radical imaginaries to move beyond a privileging of certain forms of heroic and heteronormative revolutionary black masculinity. By foregrounding women within the spaces of the slave rebellions, these texts de-masculinize the dominant masculinisms of slave rebellion narratives of previous eras. In doing so, they complicate the notion of racialized class struggles as theaters of supremacy between two classes of men, and challenges the reduction of enslaved women into passive allegories of family, community and nation. / text

This thesis asserts that the slave narratives are a significant resource for philosophers. Following Lewis Gordon, I argue that the slave narratives should not be understood merely as experiential evidence by which to validate Western thought. Instead, the narratives should be read as moments in which Black narrators shared their unique insights on the Western world. In line with Angela Davis, I argue that these critiques are still relevant to philosophers of this day and age. However, I argue that Davis' Marxist reading of Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is still vulnerable to Gordon's criticism. Using the narrative Olaudah Equiano, I demonstrate that by reading the slave narratives as expressing unique thoughts, philosophers can discover new resources to invigorate their philosophical inquiries.

Slave narratives influenced nineteenth-century American religious culture and history; through the slave narrative, modern readers experience the African-American struggle for freedom and personhood in the antebellum South. While the slave narrative stimulated identity- formation, once identity was formed a narrator fought for authority and control of that identity throughout their narrative. This struggle for control is present in the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner. Due to each slave’s religious allusions, African-American literary scholars repeatedly link Douglass and Turner to biblical books such as Jonah and Ezekiel. However, this thesis will examine Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, Written by Himself, and Thomas R. Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner through the lens of the Book of Job. By examining Douglass’s and Turner’s pursuit of knowledge through correlations within the Book of Job, both scriptural authority and authenticity emerges within each narrative.

In the wake of a disturbing decades-long trend in both print and visual media—the appropriation of Black history and culture—another trend is observed in works of African American fiction: the reclamation of the appropriated imagery, in both neo-slave narratives and works of Afrofuturism. The image focused on specifically in this paper is that of the ship, which I argue serves at least two identifiable functions in Black fiction: first, to address the historical treatment of Africans and their American descendants, and secondly, to demonstrate Black progress and potential. Through an exploration of three works of African American fiction, works that take their Black protagonists beyond the ship's dreadful hold, the reader can see the important themes being channeled: Charles Johnson's Middle Passage sets a course on how to arrive at true freedom, enacting a process of Black liberation that begins with learning how to survive "in the wake," a concept derived Christina Sharpe's work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts demonstrates not only the effects of "the hold," but how the hold itself has evolved from its origins on the slave ship; as new holds are constructed and demanded by society, rebellion is often necessary to dismantle them. Lastly, Octavia Butler's Dawn exposes the threat of neocolonialism, as well as the methodology under which subjection and enslavement is often justified. In each text, the protagonists exercise their empowerment to demonstrate that Black individuals possess the ability to change not only our nation, not only our world, but our entire universe. By tracking the evolution of ship in African American literature, a transformation is witnessed as the ship shifts from being an image of despair to an image of progress.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010. / Title from screen (viewed on July 19, 2010). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Susan C. Shepherd, Frederick J. DiCamilla, Stephen L. Fox. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-50).

Submitted by Debora Spacini Nakanishi null (deh_cini@hotmail.com) on 2018-02-22T22:19:58Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Débora Spacini Nakanishi.pdf: 2719206 bytes, checksum: b020074fb308a0b2610fc3ba2f00959f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Elza Mitiko Sato null (elzasato@ibilce.unesp.br) on 2018-02-26T17:49:27Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 nakanishi_ds_me_sjrp.pdf: 2719206 bytes, checksum: b020074fb308a0b2610fc3ba2f00959f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-02-26T17:49:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 nakanishi_ds_me_sjrp.pdf: 2719206 bytes, checksum: b020074fb308a0b2610fc3ba2f00959f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-02-16 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) / Este trabalho de pesquisa tem como objetivo refletir sobre 12 anos de escravidão, em duas vertentes: o livro de Solomon Northup (1853) e a adaptação cinematográfica de Steve McQueen (2013). Entendemos, assim, as duas obras como representações do sistema escravagista e da vida do escravo, no caso, especificamente, de Northup, servindo como mediadoras do trauma cultural na sociedade norte-americana e influenciando a forma como a identidade do afro-americano é construída. Pretendemos estudar o gênero narrativas de escravos, contextualizando a autobiografia de Northup, com o intuito de analisá-la especificamente. Utilizaremos, então, autores como Olney (1984), Lingold (2013), Pope (2014), Roy (2015), entre outros. Faremos, doravante, um exame sobre filmes comerciais com o tema escravidão, com o intuito de apontar como cada um deles dialoga com a sociedade na época de sua produção, tornando-se contradiscursos ao pensamento vigente. Basearemo-nos em Sklar (1978), Kellner (2001), Mascarello (2006) e Rosenstone (2015). Passaremos à análise do filme de McQueen, procurando indícios de uma nova abordagem do tema escravidão no cinema, apontando, também, como, em diversos momentos, livro e filme se relacionam, seja na semelhança ou na diferença. A seguir, propomos uma reflexão sobre como as duas obras influenciaram e influenciam a construção da identidade do afro-americano, levando em consideração o trauma cultural legado pelo sistema escravagista na sociedade estadunidense. Apoiaremo-nos em textos de Cartmell e Hunter (2001), Browne e Kreiser Jr. (2004), Wilt e Shull (2004), Levine (2010), Ross (2010), Dubey (2010), Keizer (2010), Nigro (2011), Romney (2014), além dos de Eyerman (2001, 2011) e Pederson (2014), que falam especificamente sobre trauma cultural. Finalmente, faremos um breve levantamento de fatos e obras importantes que acontecem após o lançamento do filme, a fim de ressaltar a importância e relevância de 12 anos de escravidão para a continuação da discussão sobre a instituição peculiar norte-americana. / This research aims to reflect on 12 Years a Slave, regarding two media: the Solomon Northup novel (1853) and the Steve McQueen film adaptation (2013). Therefore, the two works are considered as representations of the slavery system and slave life, in Northup’s case, specifically, serving as cultural trauma mediators in the North-American society and influencing the way African-American identity is built. We intend to study the slave narrative genre, contextualizing Northup's autobiography, aiming to analyze it specifically. We will draw on authors such as Olney (1984), Lingold (2013), Pope (2014), Roy (2015), and others. Henceforth, we will examine commercial, slavery-themed movies, with the goal of pointing out how each of them dialogs with the society at the time of its production, becoming counter-discourses to the valid thinking then. We will be supported by Sklar (1978), Kellner (2001), Mascarello (2006), and Rosenstone (2015). We will carry on to the analysis of McQueen's movie, searching for indications of a new approach to the slavery theme in film, also pointing out how, in several moments, the novel and the movie relate to each other, whether in similarities or differences. After, we propose a reflection on how the two works have influenced the African-American identity construction, taking into consideration the cultural trauma left by the slavery system in the American society. We will draw on research conducted by Cartmell e Hunter (2001), Browne e Kreiser Jr. (2004), Wilt and Shull (2004), Levine (2010), Dubey (2010), Keizer (2010), Nigro (2011), Romney (2014), besides the ones of Eyerman (2001, 2011), and Pederson (2014), which specifically talk about cultural trauma. Finally, we will briefly yield data on important facts and works that happened after the movie launching, aiming to highlight the importance and relevance of 12 Years a Slave to the continuing of the discussion on this peculiar North-American institution.

This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of American slavery, radically revising how we remember that "peculiar institution." These fictional works disrupt the form and content of slave autobiography, suggesting that the conventions of Enlightenment rationalism to which antebellum texts were bound could not adequately represent the experience of enslavement. Scholarship on the genre has thus tended to focus on the way it undermines the rationalizing impulse of Enlightenment discourse, which in the U.S. as well as in Europe was determined by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. But while the scholarly attention to Protestantism has yielded valuable insights regarding the contemporary slave narrative’s critique of the "unreason" of slavery, it cannot account for the striking presence of the Catholic themes and images at the margins of these texts that this dissertation uncovers, nor for the way that the religion is imaginatively linked to radical moments of historical revision. I argue that Catholicism undergirds the imaginative ways the genre expresses the inexpressible horror of enslavement and the legacy of those horrors in the present day. Because of its historical association with irrationality, superstition, and an aberrant supernaturalism, Catholicism is thus marshaled—with justified political hesitation—in the contemporary slave narrative as an oppositional category of discourse through which African American authors break with the historiographical methods of the Enlightenment and, in particular, with the rationalization of slavery characterizing the period. Chapter One analyzes two novels by Toni Morrison, Beloved and A Mercy, and her concept of "rememory." In Chapter Two, I examine the trope of spirit possession in Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Leon Forrest’s Two Wings to Veil My Face. My final two chapters address temporal disjuncture in contemporary narratives of slavery: Chapter Three comprises readings of Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, while in Chapter Four I focus on Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. / 2017-11-18T00:00:00Z