Research suggests that Black women living in the United States are not engaging in sufficient physical activity, which is a major factor negatively impacting their health outcomes. Black Girls Run (BGR) is a targeted national health movement using the capacity of social networking technology as a tool to interact with and inspire Black women to live healthy through running. Literature lacked the voice and perspective of Black women who were embracing the innovation of technology to positively improve their health behaviors. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to gain a better understanding of the composite experiences of women in BGR and how they utilize social networking technology to improve their physical activity. Social cognitive theory provided the theoretical framework. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 13 women participants of BGR, who were selected using purposive sampling technique. Data were transcribed, organized, analyzed, and coded into common themes with the support of Nvivo 11 software. The findings revealed that social networking served as a tool that the women in BGR used to connect, encourage, and motivate physical activity, and it thereby helped to support their social and physical well-being. Study findings may contribute to positive social change by increasing knowledge and awareness of how technology can be used to promote healthy behaviors among Black women. This study may also provide useful information to stakeholders interested in health promotion strategies and programs to reduce the health disparity gap for Black women in the United States.

“If This Shop Could Talk: A Discursive Analysis of The Liberatory Function and Development of African American Beauty Salons and Culture” explores the intersection of political consciousness, aesthetics, and community development engendered in quintessential and atypical locales of African American beauty culture with an emphasis on the African American beauty salon as a discursive space. As it seeks to expand limited understandings of African American beauty culture, this analysis employs Afrocentric, Black Feminist, and Womanist theoretical perspectives as it traverses temporal and geographic boundaries. As proclamations of Black pride and beauty are juxtaposed in present day society against a multitude of headlines that detail stories of discrimination based upon hair, this work addresses matters of how and why Africana women assert such prideful proclamations amidst injustice. How do African American women know that there is power in beauty? Why do African American women believe such a thing? Why do African American women engage in beauty culture and beauty salons? This work focuses on 20th through 21st century America, by exploring Black beauty culture concepts and byproducts including trends, styles, community activism, and consciousness as connected to African history in Kemet, African history in West Africa prior to the Transatlantic slave trade, and African history in America between the 16th and 21st centuries. This work employs discourse analysis and Afronography to reveal and assert the existence of a unique epistemology within Africana women’s beauty culture that has been employed in the subversion of oppression and the assertion of Black female identity in America. An Afronographic research study accompanies this analysis and represents qualitative findings from interviews conducted with women who identify as persons of African descent and members of intergenerational family beauty practice, where women in their families preceded them in beauty service provision. The researcher’s perspective is also included throughout the work as she is a licensed cosmetologist and member of an intergenerational family of beauty practice. Ultimately, this work suggests that there is a unique, significant, and sacred agency that exists in the phenomena, traditions, history, and locations of African American beauty culture which has generated aesthetic creations in hair, skin and nails that rhetorically shift paradigms, in addition to words, actions, and feelings that foster an epistemology that can aid in the liberation of Africans in the United States and abroad. / African American Studies

Thesis (Ph.D. Communication Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2020 / Hair has been a marker of identity that communicates issues of race, acceptability, class and beauty. Evidence of this was during colonialism and apartheid where South African identities were defined by physical characteristics such as the texture of one’s hair, and the colour of one’s skin. Whiteness was the epitome of beauty which came with certain privileges. Non-White bodies were defined as part of a particular narrative that saw them as well as their hair as inferior to that of White bodies. Academic literature continues to engage African hair from the perspective of a colonial legacy through a postcolonial lens. This study, however, asserts a shift in engaging African hair and introduces an African identity which is re-empowered and liberated through agency and choice, and active participation in the construction of its own identity. This shift in engagement also relinquishes the African identity’s association with the dominant narrative of its conformity to a single European ideology of beauty and identity by introducing a (post)colonial, postmodern theory of a Multi-flex, Neo-hybrid identity which forms part of the theoretical framework of this study. This study draws on the theoretical positions of postmodern theory about the concepts of ‘self’ and identity. It engages interpretations of postmodernism and ‘self’ through the works of Kenneth Gergen and Robert Lifton who provide critical theoretical insight into postmodernism and identity. It also engages critical scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Franz Fanon, Kwame Appiah, Charles Ngwenya and Achille Mbembe, amongst others. Through this theoretical lens, I examine the role of the media in the presentation of the panoply of hair (styles) to South African women in the process of constructing a fluid, flexible and hybrid identity that decentres the ideology of rigid racial identity. I also critically investigate whether non-White women who lived during the colonial-apartheid era and those born in a free democratic era share this multi-flex, neo-hybrid identity of the postmodern woman. Thus this study aims to critically explore social narratives of South African women’s hair and how the media perpetuate the construction of a new postmodern African female identity within the backdrop of the commodification of hair and identity in a globalised market and media environment. Coupled with an interpretivist paradigm, a phenomenological v approach was adopted for this study. Data was collected from print media content material namely, DRUM Hair magazine (editions 2014-2019) due to the assortment of hairstyles and identities it provides for African women. Data was also collected in the form of semi-structured interviews/personal accounts/stories presented as phenomenological narratives from colonial-born Coloured and colonial-born Black female participants. Focus group interviews were conducted on post-apartheid/born-free Coloured and Black female South African participants to understand how these women construct their identities through hairstyle choices and the impact this has on the (re)presentation of their identities within the global beauty market environment. These diverse participants aged from 18 to 104 allow me to trace, if any, the changes in perception of hair and hairstyles from colonial-apartheid South Africa to the new and free post-apartheid South Africa. The results of the study show that media enable the African woman to construct a postmodern identity through the multiplicity of hairstyles/identities available to her. It also provides the African woman with the tools to create various identities for herself through the diversity of hairstyles available to her. The African woman who is exposed to an assortment of hairstyles can navigate from one identity to the next without being loyal to one identity which is typical of the postmodern self. Another finding is that coloniality seems to continue to shape the identities of women born during the colonial apartheid era. But for those born during the (post)colonial and post-apartheid era, they embrace a navigatory form of hybridity that is not loyal to one identity but explores various forms of identity, which the market place affords them and the media perpetuate in the construction of multi-flex, neo-hybrid and postmodern identities. The implication of this study is that it is liberating since it allows us to critically review our identity and what we deem as beautiful and to question the daily choices we make not only with our hairstyles but with fashion, food and other cultural elements that shape our performance of identities. / National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) and South African Humanities Deans Association (SAHUDA)

No description available.

<p>My dissertation is a Black feminist inquiry into how Black women writers employ soul food imagery to equally assert their characters’ Blackness and sexual agency in post-Black Arts texts. These include Gayl Jones’ <em>Eva’s Man </em>(1976), Ntozake Shange’s <em>Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo</em> (1982), Gloria Naylor’s <em>Bailey’s Café</em> (1992), and TT Bridgeman’s <em>Pound Cake for Sweet Pea </em>(2004). These novelists tell complex stories of Black women’s grappling with respectability, trauma, and erotic and sexual agency. In each novel, these Black women share a common reliance upon soul food that is often underexamined in critical scholarship. I argue that soul food is essential to how Black women cope with the duality of pleasure and pain by helping them assert liberated senses-of-self amidst sexism and its attendant emotional and physical violence. I also conceptualize this coping as a vibrational reprieve. </p>

In November 2006, award-winning novelist, Bebe Moore Campbell died at the age of 56 after a short battle with brain cancer. Although the author was widely-known and acclaimed for her first novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) there had been no serious study of her life, nor her literary and activist work. This dissertation examines Campbell's activism in two periods: as a student at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1960s Black Student Movement, and later as a mental health advocate near the end of her life in 2006. It also analyzes Campbell's first and final novels, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine and 72 Hour Hold (2005) and the direct relationship between her novels and her activist work. Oral history interview, primary source document analysis, and textual analysis of the two novels, were employed to examine and reconstruct Campbell's activist activities, approaches, intentions and impact in both her work as a student activist at the University of Pittsburgh and her work as a mental health advocate and spokesperson for the National Alliance for Mental Illness. A key idea considered is the impact of her early activism and consciousness on her later activism, writing, and advocacy. I describe the subject's activism within the Black Action Society from 1967-1971 and her negotiation of the black nationalist ideologies espoused during the 1960s. Campbell's first novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine and is correlated to her emerging political consciousness (specific to race and gender) and the concern for racial violence during the Black Liberation period. The examination of recurrent themes in Your Blues reveals a direct relationship to Campbell's activism at the University of Pittsburgh. I also document Campbell's later involvement in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), her role as a national spokesperson, and the local activism that sparked the birth of the NAMI Urban-Los Angeles chapter, serving black and Latino communities (1999-2006). Campbell's final novel, 72 Hour Hold, is examined closely for its socio-political commentary and emphasis on mental health disparities, coping with mental illness, and advocacy in black communities. Campbell utilized recurring signature themes within each novel to theorize and connect popular audiences with African American historical memory and current sociopolitical issues. Drawing from social movement theories, I contend that Campbell's activism, writing, and intellectual development reflect the process of frame alignment. That is, through writing and other activist practices she effectively amplifies, extends, and transforms sociopolitical concerns specific to African American communities, effectively engaging a broad range of readers and constituents. By elucidating Campbell's formal and informal leadership roles within two social movement organizations and her deliberate use of writing as an activist tool, I conclude that in both activist periods Campbell's effective use of resources, personal charisma, and mobilizing strategies aided in grassroots/local and institutional change. This biographical and critical study of the sociopolitical activism of Bebe Moore Campbell establishes the necessity for scholarly examination of African American women writers marketed to popular audiences and expands the study of African American women's contemporary activism, health activism, and black student activism. / African American Studies

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation is a Black feminist qualitative inquiry of the interconnections between Black women, literary activity, community, activism, and restoration and healing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and the Black feminist movement converged to create one of the richest periods in Black women’s history. Black women came together in community, through the text, and through various literary spaces–often despite or even because of their differences–to build an archive that articulates a multivocal Black women’s standpoint which many believed to be monotonously singular. During this period, for example, Black women writer-activists wrote more novels, plays, and poetry in these two decades than in any period prior while also establishing new literary traditions. These traditions included the recovery of previously published yet out of print Black women writers, the development of the Black Women Anthology era, the creation of Black women writer-activist collectives, the founding of bookstores, as well as the development of Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist literary criticism in the academy. In the dissertation, these traditions are intrinsically tied to the articulation and definition of the theoretical concept of literary kinship. Conceptually, relationally, and materially literary kinship is the connection generated by the intergenerational literary activity between Black women and girls. In the dissertation, I use literary activity in slightly different ways including to denote community-engaged oral practices, publication, relationships defined around literary sites, and the practice of reading. Literary kinship provides access to community based on and derived from a connection to the literary that is often marked by intergenerational activity. I argue that Black women writer-activists during the period of the BWLR articulate and define literary kinship as a practice of communal restoration and healing for individuals and the collective.</p><p dir="ltr">Literary kinship is explored in four interrelated, yet distinct ways in the dissertation. In chapter two, literary kinship is located in and operationalized through Black women’s literary kinship “networks” founded during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance. In chapter three, the focus is on the Black Women’s Anthology era that begins in 1970 and becomes a pipeline for the development of the interdisciplinary field of Black Women’s Studies in the 1980s. The fourth and fifth chapters shift the impact of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance to the 21st century and examines how literary kinship is rearticulated or re-visioned a generation later. The fourth chapter, in this vein, uses autoethnography and literary analysis to illuminate the interconnections between Black girlhood, geography, and my concept of literary kinship. The chapter explores my experience of literary kinship at the kitchen table, in public libraries, and in secondary and higher education as transformative opportunities that fostered my love for reading, engaging in literary community, and developing reading as a restorative and healing practice. In the final chapter, the rapid reemergence of Black women booksellers and their bookstores in the last five years (2018-2023) become integral to a contemporary rearticulation of literary kinship.</p><p dir="ltr">The Black Women’s Literary Renaissance is a significant period of literary output by Black women writer-activists that has had intergenerational impact in the lives of Black women. During the Renaissance, Black women writer-activists were catalysts for critical and necessary literary interventions, strategies, and methods that supported their sociopolitical activism, the development of a rich Black feminist and literary archive, and that manifested community functional practices of restoration and healing. Black women’s articulation, definition, and utilization of literary kinship in the 20th and 21st centuries has supported their literary labors as activists, as intellectuals, and as community members, and is therefore a practice of community restoration and healing.</p>

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation analyzes the sixty-four (64) page handwritten ledger of Mrs. Goldleana Harris (also known as Mrs. Mosley Abraham Gibbs, 1920–1986), kept between 1944 and 1960. Harris is a Black woman born in Longstreet, Louisiana DeSoto Parish. She lived in Shreveport, Louisiana from 1949–1986. Using a case study approach and close reading analysis of Mrs. Goldleana’s writings, I document a Black woman’s lived experience and the historical significance of Hollywood, a segregated Black neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana and related gathering spaces within the Deep South region of the United States between 1944 and 1960. These spaces include five areas of significant and overlapping importance: The Family House, The School House, The Church House, The Labor (Work) House, & The Play (Leisure) House. </p>