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This study explores creative expression as a form and function of activism, self-determination, self-actualization, community transformation, and cultural resilience/survival. Initiating this probe into the vast topic, the study begins with the following set of research questions: What is the highest responsibility of African artists? Is it to the work of art itself—to pursue an object perceived as an island of form and symbol with little or no reference to other life experiences that lends itself to urgent, relevant social interpretation; is it to identify and promote one’s self as an individual seeking self-glorification and or commendation, to prove humanity and/or worthiness to others, or to intensify the advancement toward the total liberation of all African people? This decidedly theoretical endeavor primarily concerns itself with African creative expressions (literary creations, cultural performance, visual and musical expressions) within the constructed boundaries of the United States of America that included not only a historical overview of the earliest extant Black cultural creations, but also an evaluation of the socio-historical and political context in which African artists—with distinctive attention on musicians and visual artists—flourished within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including those contemporary artists who continue to thrive in the twenty-first century. Among other issues, this treatise specifically ponders relative to the moral and ethical obligation of African artists’ is the challenge African creatives face in making political and creative expressions synonymous. / African American Studies

This dissertation analyzes and broadens the discourse regarding the impact of culture and the emergence of the social movement by focusing on some of the links between culture and social movements. Drawing upon the idea of cycle of protests this work explains how African Americans were able to materialize, communicate, and ultimately sustain separate identities under antagonistic social conditions. Critical to the understanding of this work is the role the "free space" had in shaping the identity of both African Americans and the movement which occurred as a result of their attitudes. The free space can be described as a protected area, haven, or a small-scale setting which provides activist autonomy from dominant groups where they can nurture oppositional movement identities. This study is a multifaceted account of the Black Greek-letter organizations that explains the creation of these organizations within the Black community. There are four steps or levels which were examined in order to understand the rise or the establishment of the Black organization as a means of social protest. They are: 1) mediating factors or social grievances within a community, 2) the creation of the cultural free space, 3) the framing of the organization in relation to other social movements, 4) the personal orientation or cultural affiliation (African agency) of the organizations' members. Subsequently, this study analyzed how internal conflicts, hostile social and political environments, the creation of new organizations, and the dissemination of community grievances combine to create an atmosphere which allowed the African American community to create its own separate conscious identity. By dissecting the anatomy of the social movement and the interrelated patterns that define them one will be able to recognize and ultimately predict the rise of future social movements. / African American Studies

This research investigates the role of Afrocentric consciousness within African Aesthetics as it relates to liberation for African American communities, more specifically young black millennials. “Welsh-Asante’s Nzuri Model of Aesthetics” is utilized as a theoretical guide to evaluate Hip-Hop artist’s Afrocentric location or lack thereof. Kendrick Lamar’s album titled “To Pimp a Butterfly” is closely examined in this thesis for its lyricism, aesthetics shown in cover illustration, and music production. This close analysis of “To Pimp a Butterfly” serves as an archetype or manifestation of Welsh-Asante’s “Nzuri” model in Hip Hop form. This thesis analyzes “To Pimp a Butterfly” to assert the notion of spirituality as the key component to black liberation. Other Hip-Hop artists such as Kanye West, NWA, Tupac Shakur, and DMX are critiqued and measured for its Afrocentric location; determining whether the artistic production of these artists upholds an Afrocentric consciousness. Ultimately, this thesis argues that in order for African art to liberate African (American) communities, the art must have spirituality at the center of its artistic production. Because Afrocentricity is used to place African culture, values, and ideologies at the center of its own reality, an Afrocentric consciousness can be used as a tool to evoke a conscious transformation that aids in decolonizing European thought. Ultimately, this research adds to the conversation of Hip Hop music as an art that can be spiritually healing in its process of awakening one’s African consciousness in the wake of cognitive hiatus. / African American Studies

Properly understood, Africana Studies is a stand-alone "discipline." One that goes beyond, and disengages the normative boundaries and understandings of Western disciplinarity. This work is premised on such an understanding of autonomy. It reifies such a proposition by compiling scholarly literature on the subject of Africana intellectual traditions as a point of departure for articulating a rationale for viewing Africana Studies' disciplinary history as inclusive of the expansive tradition of Africana intellectual thought. It posits several generations of thinkers associated broadly with what can be referred to as Africana Studies have determined that African intellectual traditions should influence and often provide the methodological direction for disciplinary Africana Studies. It assembles much of the literature that attempts to contextualize disciplinarity firstly, and then those that theorize connections of Africana Studies disciplinary work to intellectual traditions arising out of the African experience. Through a process of culling the intellectual commitments of Western structures of knowledge from general intellectual historical texts and other disciplinary histories, this work situates its development of communities of thought and their academic and ideological legacies. From there it assesses how Africana thinkers understood these knowledge formations, a process Cedric Robinson considers to be the beginnings of a Black intelligentsia. The combination of all these reviewed literatures will be analyzed to reveal why and how, if at all, Africana thinkers have developed work that contributes to the construction of its own disciplinary space--with its concomitant methodological considerations. / African American Studies

The autobiographies of the nineteenth-century black women evangelists, along with the petition of their strongly African eighteenth-century precursor Belinda, have never been examined collectively as a genre changing considerably throughout the nineteenth-century, and developing in a chiasmic return throughout the twentieth-century to give rise to contemporary African American women's literary forms. Through close readings of primary texts, I examine the ways in which the evangelists employ discourses produced by socio-economic determinants such as race, gender and class to create a complex black female narrative economy, with its own unique figurations and forms. These figurations and forms--for example the cult of the "unnatural" woman, the quest for community, the trope of trial, or the valorisation of the sermonic mode--develop and change over time. This changing black female spiritual narrative economy is indicative of an important line in the ongoing traditions of black women's writing which has only now begun to be reclaimed and validated. In their texts, evangelist autobiographers such as Rebecca Jackson, Sojourner Truth or Julia Foote maintained African traditions (for example, orality), and African American ways of being and telling (such as the preacheriy, or the performance of the blues) which were signified upon in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, and· are still of utmost importance to many African American women writers today. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are two of the most famous African-American activists in American history. The purpose of this study is to analyze the similarities and differences between how King and X approached and conceptualized questions of violence, politics, and religion, while challenging the simple dichotomization of their thought and work as they pertained to these themes. Pointing out flaws in how they have been commonly remembered in American history, this qualitative study thematically analyzes King's and X's autobiographies and a selection of their speeches, placing them in a conversation with one another. This research thereby unravels some prevailing misconceptions about King and X, such as the idea that King defended an exclusively non-violent approach to social change and that he aimed, merely, at the inclusion of Black Americans into US society, while X was his direct opposite. This research is important because the flawed narratives commonly repeated about King and X, I contend, has created an artificial and simplified division in Black politics, weakening its analytical and political power. A recognition of how King and X have more in common can strengthen Black politics by centering the diverse traditions of Black radical thought and organizing that, nonetheless, all aligned in their struggle for Black people's freedom and equality. / Master of Arts / This thesis explores the similarities and differences amongst two of the influential African American figures in American history. King and X are most notable for their differences and this thesis explores the ramifications of that. It sets out to paint a picture of the implications of King and X being compared. How do these similarities and differences affect block politics today? These research findings conclude that there are far more connections between King and X that common notations assume.

The aim of this critical interpretive work is to demonstrate the leadership, guidance, and guardianship of Harriet Tubman as factual productions of historical memory as a soldier, Underground Railroad conductor, organization founder, and Women’s rights campaigner. Thus, this study is a meta-interpretation and historical narrative account based on a montage of common facts about Tubman’s life as re-examined in an Africological frame. By surveying the historical and social data related to Tubman’s life this work lays the ground for an authentic account of the role Harriet Tubman played as an agent, in the Afrocentric sense, as she carried forward her self-given obligations to liberate her people. Using many of the commonly known experiences of Tubman’s life I applied cosmological, epistemological, aesthetics, and axiological canons to reveal the critical core of an interpretive memorial narrative of Tubman as a social movement leader. / Africology and African American Studies

ABSTRACTThis study investigated the extent to which Miles Davis’s recordings Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, and Doo-Bop were 1) reflective of a Black aesthetic, 2) reflective of Davis’s resistance to a Eurocentric aesthetic, and 3) reflective of tenets of Afrofuturism. This study also critiqued literature related to jazz historiography from the music’s earlier formation to assess the extent to which that literature was written from an Afrocentric or Eurocentric perspective. The methodology for this study utilized the Afrocentric paradigm to examine and analyze data from structured interviews, archived interviews, archival data such as album cover liner notes, and album cover artwork. Findings supported my hypotheses that recordings were reflective of a Black aesthetic and reflective of tenets of Afrofuturism, but did not support my hypothesis that Davis was resisting a Eurocentric aesthetic. Instead, findings indicated that Davis was unconcerned with a Eurocentric aesthetic and was only concerned with creating his own aesthetic. Implications of this study consists of educators, historiographers, and music critics constructing an Afrocentric narrative of jazz historiography that places Black people at the center of analysis as active agents rather than passive spectators. The result will yield a historiography that corrects a historically Eurocentric narrative that marginalized Black musicians’ role in jazz history. Another key implication of this study is to demonstrate the importance of oral history projects where the stories of Black people are told from their perspective, which is critically needed. / Africology and African American Studies