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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.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, The Divinity School, December 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1995. / Typescript. "Bibliography of publications by 70 African American women writers in New Jersey": leaves 209-227. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-166).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-202). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-202). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, May 2010. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 17, 2010). "Department of English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-162).