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My dissertation explores the minimizing, and often dismissal, of the evangelical conservative tradition of African-American Christianity within African-American studies. I argue that the primary cause of this development derives from the hermeneutics and methodologies employed by contemporary Black theologians and “Afrocentric-liberationist” scholars. Generally, these hermeneutics and methodologies were originally proposed by secular Black Nationalist and Black Power advocates during the Civil Rights Movement. This is seen in three areas: First, there is an interpretation of “Whiteness,” or European-Americans as completely corrupt and unredeemable. Second, there are calls for “Blackness,” or African-Americans to racially and socially segregate from Whiteness. Last, there are concepts of an “Ideal-Blackness,” a renewed or transformed Blackness created independently from Whiteness. These and other principles were employed by many contemporary Black scholars to various degrees. Furthermore, I argue that these principles sustain influential Black Nationalist/Black Power historiographies, and shape the dominant trends within the discipline. I maintain that there are two conflicting traditions within African American culture: the religious tradition of conservative evangelicalism that was established during colonialism, and the secularist tradition of Black Nationalism and Black Power which originated during the civil rights movement. These traditions opposed one another during the civil rights movement. Later, this conflict was grafted into the academy, where it continues through the scholarship of many Black theologians and Afrocentric-liberationist scholars. Finally, I discuss the theology of Jupiter Hammon, an 18th century Christian slave, as a representative of the conservative tradition of African American Christianity. I argue that it is essential that scholars explore Hammon's theology, and the conservative tradition of African-American Christianity during colonialism, for a variety of reasons: first, it is important to understand this tradition, as it has shaped African-American Christianity and the Black church more than any other; second, exploring the conservative tradition during colonialism provides the constructive theologies, and alternative conservative historiographies, that complement the Black Nationalist/Black Power historiographies advocated by many contemporary Black scholars.

Òyötùnjí: The Making of Africans in America examines the impact of self-identification with African culture and the impact it has on African identity within social and Black Nationalist movements. More so than the Civil Rights movement, the Black Nationalist movement has influenced the ways in which African Americans self identified as a group and as individuals. Comprised primarily of African nationalists, Òyötùnjí Village was considered the vanguard in re- introducing the African ideology into Santeria, and giving birth to what is now considered the Ifa/Yoruba tradition. As the intentional community of Òyötùnjí grew, the Ifa tradition spread as well because of its porous population. To explore the relationship between identity and social movements, this paper examines the motivation behind the formation of Òyötùnjí Village and the formation of an independent community.

Thesis (M.A.)--Baylor University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-111).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles - History. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 504-513).

The purpose of this thesis is to discover and assess the rhetorical methods employed by LeRoi Jones in the evolution of cultural black nationalism. First, the thesis concentrates on his ethos and philosophy. Second, it analyzes the cultural black nationalism organization in Newark, New Jersey. Third, it discusses the impact of LeRoi Jones on the black cultural nationalism movement. The conclusions drawn from this study reveal that LeRoi Jones was able to attract, maintain, and mold his followers, to build a sizable power base, and to adapt to several audiences simultaneously. Implications of the study are that because of his rigid requirements and a gradual change in ideology, LeRoi Jones is now losing ground as a leader.

This dissertation explores the memories and motivations of women who helped mold Pan-African cultural nationalism through challenging, refining, and reshaping organizations influenced by Kawaida, the black liberation philosophy that gave rise to Kwanzaa. This study focuses on female advocates in the Us Organization, Committee for a Unified Newark and the Congress of African People, the East, and Ahidiana. Emphasizing the years 1965 through the mid-to-late 1980s, the work delves into the women’s developing sense of racial and gender consciousness against the backdrop of the Black Power Movement. The study contextualizes recollections of women within the groups’ growth and development, ultimately tracing the organizations’ weakening, demise, and influence on subsequent generations. It examines female advocates within the larger milieu of the Civil Rights Movement’s retrenchment and the rise of Black Power. The dissertation also considers the impact of resurgent African-American nationalism, global independence movements, concomitant Black Campus, Black Arts, and Black Studies Movements, and the groups’ struggles amidst state repression and rising conservatism. Employing oral history, womanist approaches, and primary documents, this work seeks to increase what is known about female Pan-African cultural nationalists. Scholarly literature and archival sources reflect a dearth of cultural-nationalist women’s voices in the historical record. Several organizational histories have included the women’s contributions, but do not substantially engage their backgrounds, motives, and reasoning. Although women were initially restricted to “complementary” roles as helpmates, they were important in shaping and sustaining Pan-African cultural-nationalist organizations by serving as key actors in food cooperatives, educational programs, mass communications pursuits, community enterprises, and political organizing. As female advocates grappled with sexism in Kawaida-influenced groups, they also developed literature, programs, and organizations that broadened the cultural-nationalist vision for ending oppression. Women particularly helped reformulate and modernize Pan-African cultural nationalism over time and space by resisting and redefining restrictive gender roles. As such, they left a legacy of “kazi leadership” focused on collectivity, a commitment to performing the sustained work of bringing about black freedom, and centering African and African-descended people’s ideas and experiences.

<p>Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.</p><p>In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.</p><p>My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.</p><p>Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.</p> / Dissertation

University of the Witwatersrand Department of Political Studies