Ce mémoire analyse l’histoire et le développement des relations franco-africaines du colonialisme au XXIe siècle. Je montre comment, à chaque étape de ces relations, que ce soit pendant le colonialisme, la décolonisation, la Françafrique ou "l'amitié" de Macron, l'objectif de l'État français n'a pas changé : préserver l'Afrique comme le pré carré de la France. Je soutiens qu'au XXIe siècle, alors que le continent africain se mondialise de plus en plus, l'État français cherche désespérément à renforcer ses liens avec ses anciennes colonies, notamment par l'éducation, la langue et la culture. Bien qu'Emmanuel Macron déclare que la Françafrique est terminée, sa stratégie visant à faire appel à la jeunesse africaine fait écho à la tactique de la « mission civilisatrice » du colonialisme français. Je soutiens donc que des questions concernant l'héritage colonial français, et leur impact sur l’identité africaine, restent essentielles même au XXIe siècle.

In Is Spirituality an Intelligence? Motivation, Cognition, and the concern of Psychology of Ultimate Concern, Robert Emmons develops a case for spirituality as a form of intelligence. His thesis claims that spiritual intelligence is a “set of capacities and abilities that enable people to solve problems and attain goals in their everyday lives”: “the capacity for transcendence; the ability to enter into heightened spiritual states of consciousness; the ability to invest everyday activities, events, and relationships with a sense of the sacred; the ability to utilize spiritual resources to solve problems in living; and the capacity to engage in virtuous behavior. I use spiritual intelligence and these frameworks throughout to address these common themes within the Black community beginning in the Second Great Awakening. I use these five components to illuminate the rise of the revolutionary streams of Spiritual Intelligence within unique works of two Black activists: David Walker and Maria Stewart. I then contextualize these developments in the experiences of my family and my own experiences as a Black activist. I argue for the recognition of religious thinking and illustrate the structural embodiment of this form of spiritual intelligence through multiple generations of Black Activism. I argue that Spiritual Intelligence is one way this particular community fights adversity in greater America society. In valuing religion through understanding these actions of resistance black activism is realized in the larger epistemic landscape. Particularly arguing against the secularization of resistance and activism.

“The Ground On Which I Stand” Healing Queer Trauma through Performance: Crafting a Solo Performance through the investigation of Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum. By: Ashley W. Grantham A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Performance Pedagogy at Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University April 16th, 2019 Thesis Adjudicator: Dr. Tawnya Pettiford-Wates Committee: Dr. Keith Byron Kirk, Director of Graduate Studies and Karen Kopryanski, Head of Voice and Speech How does this method of Ritual Poetic Drama within the African Continuum, by extension, solo performance, uncover, heal queer trauma through witnessing and performance practice? How do these methods give us an intersectional approach to talking about race, identity, gender and bridge those divides? How does this devised work of solo performance allow the author as practitioner to claim the ground on which they stand and surrender to their own healing? This thesis attempts excavation of the foundational theories in regard to performance structure, and to discover how healing trauma through theoretical techniques achieves liberation through their enacted practice. This is an allowance of ourselves as artists and facilitators to claim our traumatic bodies as worthy sites of invention.

The goal of this thesis is to explain the nature of ethnic humor in American society. This will be achieved through three different processes. First, this thesis will explain the history of African American humor and recount it’s development into it’s own brand of comedy. Second, it will explain the nature of African American humor and how it is a tool used to revolt against the oppressive and hegemonic nature of western society. Additionally, this paper aims to prove that African American humor is a coping mechanism for African Americans. This thesis will also discuss the duality of African American humor as both comedy and social critique. Another aspect this work will explore is how comedians deal with unintended stereotype perpetuation and also how different audiences respond to the racial jokes of the comedians. Finally, this thesis will outline how to better present jokes so that the perpetuation of racism and stereotypes does not happen. As a coping mechanism, African American humor takes stereotypes about African Americans, both positive and negative, and converts them into humorous topics that can make the stereotypes positive (Daube, 2010). This play on stereotypes, although it can be incredibly funny and also makes for great social commentary, is also very dangerous (Apte, 1987). Without proper context and understanding of the joke, it is possible that the intended social critique is not conveyed to the audience and instead the humor unintentionally perpetuates negative stereotypes. The value of African American humor as both entertainment and a coping mechanism is immeasurable (Cater, May, & Bird, 2012)

Representations of natural disasters in Black Southern literature identify social location as the greatest indicator of risk vulnerability. Moreover, they can expose the precarious subjectivity of the Black female reproductive body, as addressed through characters Lulu in Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside,” Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Jesmyn Ward’s Esch in Salvage the Bones. Together, these female characters share a legacy of social marginalization and Black female resistance that is (re)shaped through their experiences with ecological catastrophe. This thesis considers these three texts together as an ongoing testimony and as a means to bear witness to a socio-historical record of disaster oppression and Black female resistance.

This thesis examines how Black queer men and transmasculine individuals navigate Black heteronormative and White queer spaces in New Orleans. Over the last few decades, articles, including anthropological and sociological, have focused on the relationship between race, gender performance, sexuality, and emotional expression among men such as Christian (2005), which analyzed how Black queer men expressed their masculinity within queer spaces (Christian 2005). This thesis builds on this literature to explore how societal and cultural pressures of masculinity can hinder Black queer men institutionally, socially, and romantically.

The general problem of this study was to investigate and analyze selected social, political, and economic factors in Ethiopia that affect the continuation and development of education by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The specific purpose of this research was to develop from this analysis of Ethiopia those alternatives and recommendations which would aid Seventh-Day Adventist leaders in the development of plans for educational work in that country. The basic question was: Can the Seventh-Day Adventists system of education plan for the social, political, and economic changes taking place in Ethiopia?

A collection of poems exploring ghosted ancestors, folktales, the queer black body, gender, and magical realism.

Jook is a spirited collection of historical persona poems situated in the vibrant rent party scene of 1920s Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance of New York was a decade of black innovation, artistry, and cultural expansion spanning 1920-1930. During this post-Emancipation, Great Migration era, black families leaving the South moved north only to encounter new forms of oppression. They were fleeing the lynchings, racism, and segregation that they experienced back home. In Harlem, black families earned disproportionately lower wages and paid much higher rents for subpar housing conditions compared to white families. To supplement their low incomes and to make the rent for the month, tenants hosted house-rent parties, also called social whist parties, in their apartments. They offered southern food, jazz and blues music (often live), and bootlegged liquor. Party guests paid a modest cover fee of 25 or 30 cents to enjoy the amusements, thus helping the hosts to pay their rent. The resistance work of this black joy in the face of economic, environmental, and social racism fascinates me and led me to research and uplift these narratives via persona poetry. The central figure in these poems is a 20-year-old Georgia migrant named Mae Lynne King. Mae has moved north with her older sister Maddy. The daughters of a southern preacher and a seamstress, the women find their footing in New York in very different ways. Mae works as a domestic and takes in laundry and sewing on the side while 24-year-old Maddy Jane becomes a streetwalker. The two young women live together and quickly become immersed in the rent party phenomenon while working to build a life away from the strict religious upbringing they knew back home. Mae and Maddy struggle against racism, sexism, and poverty discovering their roles as lovers, friends, and members of a new black Harlem. Mae’s journey through Harlem is one of revelation and awakening, and Maddy’s is one of self-actualization, autonomy, reclamation. Both women embody the womanist attitudes and practices, blackness, and sexual fluidity that are central to my work overall and that were highly visible during the Renaissance. While swaths of literature celebrate the art, music, and culture of the Harlem Renaissance, no contemporary collections of poetry contend with the oppression that African American people who migrated from the racially segregated South to Harlem faced. Jook is an offering of history, memory, language, and research to bridge that gap. This collection draws from Langston Hughes’ poetry and autobiography The Big Sea, Zora Neale Hurston’s novels and dramas, all of Harlem’s “negro literati,” jazz and swing music, photography, and archival materials from The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Yale University. Jook traverses free verse and formal boundaries while championing persona and a unique Harlemese vernacular in order to celebrate the fierce subversion that African Americans in 1920s Harlem engaged in via their rent party gatherings. I enter these poems with music and memory at the fore of my creative process and craft employments. I call on forms such as Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Gigan, the jazz sonnet, contrapuntal, and the ghazal to illustrate the simultaneous artistry and travailing that defined the Renaissance for African American people. I also borrow from the narrative elements of fiction to explore a specific arc within the lives of a cadre of imagined personas. The aim of this project is to recover and celebrate the unexplored stories of rent parties and to acknowledge the suffering and striving that these gatherings were born out of.

As long as disparities persist in the way women are treated as compared to their male counterparts, the issue of gender will continue to call forth literary productions. For this reason, female writers are on a mission to dismantle the stereotypes that keep women confined to societal roles. Grounded in a feminist framework, this study focuses on the gender disparity theme in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. The aim is to examine how these writers represent the trauma of women living in an African patriarchal system. The traumatic experiences of the female characters in both texts for this study are analyzed using Judith Herman’s Psychological trauma and Bessel Van der Kolk’s trauma theory to explain women’s struggles and their responses to traumatic experiences. A content analysis of the novels shows that resilience and agency are achievable and that one way to achieve agency is through interdependence which is a crucial dimension often overlooked in existing scholarly engagements.