In the nineteenth century, Orientalism functioned as a Western tool for dominating and restructuring the perception of the Orient. In France, where Orientalism found favor amongst artists, Orientalist works were produced in the literary and visual arts to inform and control the narrative about the East. Influenced by the Napoleonic imperial conquests and an increased French presence in the East, Orientalism became an integral movement in the French visual arts. The relationship between France and the Orient was one of power and domination, which was mirrored in that between the French and the Blacks. As a part of the Western perception of the Other, the black individual had a unique role in nineteenth-century France. To be black in nineteenth-century French society was to be a second-class citizen. The existence of slavery, the increase in French ethnography, and racism in French society objectified the black individual, turning them into another symbol of French power and conquest. The exploration of this project will focus on the symbolic representation of the black body in nineteenth-century Orientalist visual art. As two separate areas of exploration in Art History, Orientalism and Race Theory have seen growth in scholarship thanks to contemporary interests in race and post-colonial theory. However, the overlap between the two subject areas is limited in research. Through the analysis of black figures in nineteenth-century Orientalism, we can discover more about the role of the Black individual with respect to European society and the Eastern cultures in which they existed. This research project explores depictions of Blacks in nineteenth-century Orientalist art to clarify their societal roles and explore the imbalance of social perception and representation in nineteenth-century French society. This project will reveal the truths hidden within the depictions of the black form.

In 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was murdered by Minneapolis Police. As social media and news outlets reported on Floyd's death, racial justice activists began to organize under the Black Lives Matter movement. The United States was also on lockdown due to the global pandemic – COVID-19. Prior researchers have noted that the lockdown was consequential to the sustained longevity of peaceful protests. Additionally, researchers have concluded that this time saw a heightened number of college students from diverse racial backgrounds. This study examines what explicitly motivated Black and White college students to act on racial justice and engage with these movements. More importantly, this study included 11 participants to inquire about what motivated White racial justice activism and to explore Black students' perceptions of these actions from their White peers. This research used an interpretative phenomenological to analyze interviews and a facilitated Social Justice Dialogue circle on racial justice. Despite the lack of research on racial justice activism amongst White students, understanding theories such as Intersectionality and Critical Race is paramount in being aware of countering anti-Blackness. Ultimately, this study produced five findings explaining how Black and White college participants described their perceptions of White racial justice activism and how race socialization contributed to this interpretation. Findings show that White participants possessing marginalized identities interpreted this as Intersectionality and showed more empathy in engaging with racial justice activism while also expressing uncertainty about self-identifying with this advocacy status. Additionally, participants revealed that social media contributed to inauthentic and performative activism post-Floyd's death by using black squares by White content creators lacking a fundamental understanding of anti-Blackness and the Black Lives Matter movement. Participants looked more profound into how society has socialized Whiteness as the normative identity and manifested guilt, fear, and fragility when discussing racialized topics. Lastly, participants revealed that the divisive socio-political climate during the Trump administration significantly contributed to furthering structural racism. At the same time, the global pandemic provided an environment of racial reckoning within the United States. Broader implications for practice and theory are offered to guide recommendations for future research on racial justice activists. / Educational Leadership

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This dissertation is a fundamental critique of the Western discourse using an Afrocentric critical reading of major Western constructions of knowledge. As such the study examines both the origins and dehumanizing consequences of the European project of Modernity. The study departs from the thesis that Afrocentricity, a philosophical paradigm conceptually rooted in African cultures and values, brings renewed ethical and social significance to a sustained project of human agency, liberation, and equality. Thus the dissertation explores how each major Western idea is understood within the context of the revolutionary philosophical paradigm and epistemological theory of social change. Concepts like individualism, domination, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, progress and supremacy that Molefi Kete Asante calls the “infrastructures of dominance and privilege” are reviewed against the backdrop of agency, community, commonality, cultural centeredness, and ma’at. Indeed, employing critical ideas from the works of Afrocentrists this study highlights the inadequacy of Westernity in overcoming the various forms of oppression. Modernism, Marxism, Existentialism, Feminism, Post-modernism, and Post-colonialism, are addressed in dialogue with Afrocentricity as an exploratory part of a two-way relationship between theoretical understanding and practice which challenges established and hegemonic approaches to knowledge. In fact, the study argues for a rational approach to conceptual “rupture” that would allow the scholar to navigate the shattered ideologies of Western thought, and to contribute to the exposure of the imperialistic ambitions that worked at the backstage of the political and economic philosophies of Europe since the early fifteen century. In effect, the dissertation can be viewed as an intellectual journey moving from an epistemological location in Western epistemology towards an Afrocentric paradigm and theory of knowledge in the quest to defeat the inhuman. Ultimately, the aim is the search for a more humanistic and ideologically less polluted mind and for a more human humanity. / African American Studies

"Materializing Blackness: The Politics and Production of African Diasporic Heritage” examines how intellectual and civic histories collide with the larger trends in the arts and culture sector and the local political economy to produce exhibitions at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) and structure the work that museum exhibitions do to produce race visually for various audiences. Black museums are engaged in the social construction of race through their exhibitions and programs: selecting historical facts, objects and practices, and designating them as heritage for and to their audiences. In tracking this work, I am interested in 1) the assemblages of exhibits that are produced, as a function of 2) the internal logics of the producing institutions and 3) larger forces that structure the field as a whole. Looking at exhibits that engage Blackness, I examine how heritage institutions use art and artifacts to visually produce race, how their audiences consume it, and how the industry itself is produced as a viable consumptive market. Undergirded by the ways anthropologists of race and ethnicity have been explored and historicized race as a social construction I focus on an instantiation of the ways race is constructed in real time in the museum. This project engages deeply with inquiries about the social construction of race and Blackness, such as: how is Blackness rendered coherent by the art and artifacts in exhibitions? How are these visual displays of race a function of the museums that produce them and political economy of the field of arts and culture? Attending to the visual, intellectual, and political economic histories of networks of exhibiting institutions and based on ethnographic fieldwork in and on museums and other exhibiting institutions, this dissertation contextualizes and traces the production and circulation of the art and artifacts that produce the exhibitions and the museum itself as a way to provide a contemporary concrete answer. Overall “Materializing Blackness” makes the case for history and political economy as ghosts of production that have an outsized impact on what we see on exhibition walls, and are as important to the visual work as a result. Further it takes the Black museum as a site of anthropological engagement as a way to see the conjuncture of the aesthetic and the political, the historical and the material in one complicated node of institution building and racecraft in the neoliberal city. / Anthropology

This thesis conducts an analysis of gay identity in Dominican poetry through a queer reading on Frank García’s poetry collection: Lo que escribí mientras esperabas en una habitación vacía (2023). The Dominican society in which the bildungsroman narrative takes place is contextualized as a tender culture, yet largely not acceptant of homosexuality and nonheteronormative forms of gender expression, with high levels of violence against gay people, including at the hands of police and militiamen. The aim of the investigation is to both expand the limited existing body of research analyzing gay Dominican literature, as well as identifying and exploring intersecting factors that detrimentally contribute to the homophobia that the author endures as reflected in his writing. It is concluded that such factors permeating his experience intersecting with homophobia are the peripherical position of Dominican Republic in Spanish-speaking literature and the world system, the relevance of Christianity in Dominican Republic, a vulnerable social class, and his mixed race. This investigation also acknowledges the construction of blackness in Dominican Republic in opposition to Haiti, and the subsequent rejection of several mixed race Dominicans to identify as black, but rather using terms such as trigueño, moreno, or mulato (even though the latter is pejorative) to refer to themselves instead. The author rejects colorist discourses and both claims and embraces his black queer Dominican identity in his writing, further humanizing a highly disregarded and marginalized demographic in mainstream literature and arguably the world system: black gay Dominican men.

Thesis advisor: Andrew L. Prevot / Anti-Black racism and white supremacy are critical and interrelated contemporary crises. Achille Mbembe theorizes the confluence of these crises in the concepts of necropolitics and Black reason. But Mbembe does not elaborate the historical relationship between anti-Black necropolitics and Christian thought. I address this aporia in my dissertation while also formulating a theological response through an integrated reading of James Cone and Johann Baptist Metz. In Chapter One, I adopt Mbembe’s framework to contend that the uncritical coöptation of Black reason by white Christianity has resulted in a necropolitical theology, which I demonstrate through an evaluation of three theological loci: anthropology, Christology, and eschatology. Turning to constructive possibilities, chapter two introduces Cone and Metz, whose theologies I read against necropolitical theology. Chapter Two argues that Cone’s revaluation of Blackness as God’s intent for humanity meets Metz’s call for an anthropological revolution of white Christians at the point of conversion: a decision to die to whiteness and become Black with God. Chapter Three emphasizes revelation in Cone’s Christology as an objective Black event; the subjective, ecstatic encounter with the crucified and resurrected Christ; and the necessity of the Cross for theological imagination. Metz’s Holy Saturday Christology, specifically, his paradigmatic memoria passionis, grounded in the descensus ad infernos, complements Cone’s notion of concrete and transformative encounter with Jesus as it emphasizes solidarity with the oppressed. Chapter Four addresses the deformation of Christian hope by necropolitical theology. I integrate Cone’s analysis of Black hope in existential, material, and apocalyptic interpretations of eschatology with Metz’s eschatological proviso which, above all, suggests that one must see the future from the memory of the suffering and the dead. In the United States, I argue that this means white Christians are called to relational praxis in solidarity with oppressed Black communities. In Chapter Five, the conclusion, I look to the pericope on discipleship in Mark 8 in tandem with the theological interventions from Cone and Metz to provide an assessment of what it might mean for white Christians to become Black with God. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

The apparent ‘invisibility’, or lack of representation of black men in contemporary mainstream gay visual cultures is the primary critical issue that the study engages with. The study presupposes that the frequency with which white men appear in popular representations of ‘gayness’ prevails over that of black men. In order to substantiate this assumption, this study analyses selected issues of the South African queer men’s lifestyle magazine Gay Pages. Gay visual cultures appear to simultaneously conflate ‘whiteness’ and normative homosexuality, while marginalising black gay men by means of positioning ‘blackness’ and ‘gayness’ as irreconcilable identity constructs. Images of the gay male ‘community’ disseminated by queer and mainstream media constantly offer stereotypical, distorted and race-biased notions of gay men, which ingrain the exclusive cultural equation of white men and ideal homomasculinity. The disclosure of racist and selectively homophobic ideologies, which seem to inform gay visual representation, is therefore the chief concern of the dissertation. By investigating selected images that ostensibly embody the complex cultural relationship between race and homomasculinity, the study addresses the following forms of visual representation: colonial representations of ‘blackness’; so-called gay ‘colonial’ representations; black self-representation; gay black self-representation; and contemporary representations of homomasculinity in advertisements and queer men’s lifestyle magazines such as Gay Pages. A genealogy of images is explored in order to illustrate the ways in which ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ are respectively positioned as contradictory to and synonymous with dominant visual representations of homomasculinity in gay visual cultures. The hegemony of ‘whiteness’ in images sourced from colonial systems of representation, queer male art and commercial publicity, for example, are thus critiqued in order to address the various race-based prejudices that appear to be symptomatic of contemporary gay visual cultures. Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Visual Arts / unrestricted