Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2006. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Robert Rydell. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 156-162).

Thesis (M. Div. with Concentration: Christian Care and Counseling)--Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 46-47).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Ann Reynolds. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 1946. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-104). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (M.A.)--Baylor University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 23-25).

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 44-50).

Thesis (M.A.)--Kent State University, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Oct. 26, 2009). Advisor: Max Grubb. Keywords: African-Americans; framing; media; newspapers; representation; agenda setting. Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-77).

Charles Chesnutt is perhaps best known for his short stories; he also, over the course of his relatively short publishing career, produced three novels, which have been less well represented in the critical community. This neglect is due to some oversimplified readings in the past. My readings offer a revised view of Chesnutt's work, which I have opened up by using the critical lens of liminality, and by drawing on Chesnutt's own natural deconstructionist tendencies to do deconstructive readings of the novels. I draw on Victor Turner's definition of liminality, which comes from Turner's rites of passage studies. I show that Chesnutt's characters frequently attain liminal status in his work--they take on the "betwixt and between" characteristics that Turner defines as essential to the liminal state. But far from attaining the final assimilation that comes at the end of liminality, Chesnutt's characters end up as marginals--Turner's term for permanent outcasts. Thus, Chesnutt, in his typically ironic way, has described the status of black Americans at the turn of the 19$\sp{\rm th}$ century in America. Chesnutt's novels are, when looked at as a continuum, a brooding meditation on the despair of black existence following Reconstruction. In the first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt shows the liminal quality of passing, an option which he chose not to exercise. In the second (and most successful) book, The Marrow of Tradition, he shows the liminal nature of the racial space occupied by a professional black man, who tries to be all things to all people, and who ends up utterly unable to express himself. And in the third, and final, novel, The Colonel's Dream, Chesnutt shows the failure of a white man who tried to go back to his hometown in the South and change the course of its future by combining what he perceives to be the best of the past with the best of the present. But in the frozen landscape of the post-Reconstructionist South, all dreams have become nightmares. Thus, because of his prophetic voice, Chesnutt deserves more appreciative readings in the present.

This dissertation examines the "Negro market" and consumer activism within the context of the black freedom movement in New York City from 1930 to 1965. The "Negro market," a term used by the advertising industry to indicate a racially defined consumer market that was separate from the mainstream one, first emerged during the Great Depression. It expanded during World War II when the government gave more attention to racial matters and actively supported corporate attention to black consumers. In its first three decades, "Negro market" advertisers sought to reach African Americans without alienating whites, and strategies were shaped by advertising agencies, corporations, black media, and black marketing experts. During these years "Negro market" campaigns were conducted solely in black media. Although this reinforced the segregation of the consumer market, it did result in positive advertising images of blacks in the black press. Black protests in the early 1960s resulted in the integration of a small number of ads in mainstream media, changing the exclusively segregated approach of advertisers. Black New Yorkers used their consumer power as a tool in the black freedom movement, a movement that included campaigns for employment, integration, and positive black cultural portrayals. They also worked for consumer rights such as integrated commercial spaces, fair prices, and quality merchandise, and understood these rights as an important part of their struggle for racial equality. Groups from a variety of political perspectives---including housewives leagues, the NAACP, CORE, the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, and the National Negro Congress---took part in these activities. Consumer weapons such as picketing and boycotts were only one aspect of black rights campaigns, and were often very effective. But there were limits to the usefulness of consumer action. By looking at business trade journals, the black press, advertisements, and the records of civil rights organizations, advertising agencies, corporations, and governmental agencies, this study traces the early history of the "Negro market," demonstrates the importance of consumer rights to black New Yorkers, and also shows the limitations of consumption as a method for achieving racial equality.

This dissertation examines slave narratives, neo-slave narratives, and histories of slavery. Using critical race theory, narrative theory, and philosophical critiques of objectivity, I trace how academic histories, such as U. B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery, developed a grammar of white supremacy that excluded African-Americans from equal citizenship. These texts claimed to present a “transparent” view of the past by highlighting the perceived (through physical, documentable evidence) and eliding the role of perceiver and of language in the creation of narrative history. In order to write themselves into history, I argue, both fugitive slaves and contemporary novelists have drawn on the oral conjure and trickster tales that enslaved African-Americans told as a means of subverting the masters' authority. Both conjure and trickster narratives deny that narrative can present a transparent description of the past, and yet they work in contradictory, sometimes antagonistic ways. To counter the grammar of white supremacy and its Cartesian claim to a “universal,” disembodied perspective, conjure narratives emphasize the embodied perceiver, while trickster narratives emphasize language, as the mediums through which we know both history and identity. Conjure narratives such as Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chesnutt's conjure tales, Bontemps's Black Thunder, and Morrison's Beloved depict the dominant discourse as a “magic” rhetoric that transforms reality while claiming to simply describe it. Invoking magic and ancestral spirits, conjure discourse disrupts mechanistic assumptions about reality, reunites body, mind, and spirit, and creates a communal, participatory history. In contrast, trickster narratives such as Bibb's Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, Chesnutt's “The Dumb Witness,” Reed's Flight to Canada , and Johnson's Oxherding Tale present the master narrative as a set of generic conventions that we have been duped into accepting as reality. Through anachronism, parody, mixed genres, and linguistic “sleight of hand,” trickster narratives disrupt teleological history, erase distinctions between slave and free, black and white, past and present, and remind readers that narrative constructs both history and identity. Finally, I examine Johnson's Middle Passage, which integrates trickster and conjure narrative to explore the tension between self and community.