Since the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and his subsequent election to the presidency in 1994, South Africa certainly has not achieved the hopes and dreams of its people or for the rest of the continent. But despite bleak conditions, there are many who still have hope for their country. One of those people is Zakes Mda, and his hope is reflected in his novels. Yet, his novels remain complex. They do not provide all-encompassing solutions or answers to the problems that face the nation. But they do address questions with possibilities, suggestions, and innovation. The South Africa he creates, both in the past and the present, embodies what the real South Africa is and isn’t, and what it has the potential to be. Mda is not afraid to be critical of his own people, he is not afraid to face the history of his country with an equally critical lens, and even more importantly, he is not afraid to face the future of his country with that same critical gaze. This open approach to the people of his country, to its history, and current policies opens up his narrative to imagination, allowing his characters to re-envision themselves more completely and form a more complete and encompassing cultural identity that was previously denied to them.

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

The intent of this thesis is to discuss the manner in which four black newspapers covered the U.S. Masters Tournament, hosted annually at the Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia, from 1994 through 2001. The four black newspapers include two from the North, the New Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, and two from the South, the Atlanta Voice and the Birmingham Times. It is my contention that U.S. Masters coverage in the aforementioned black papers is dependent upon the presence of Tiger Woods. Without Woods' participation at the Masters, coverage of the event would be diminished in the four black newspapers. The years 1994 through 2001 (excluding the Birmingham Times which was only microfilmed to 1999) have been analyzed in each of the four newspapers in order to present my case. The thesis proves that to the four black newspapers Tiger Woods is the deciding factor in its Masters coverage.

This study analyzes the rhetoric of William "Parson" Brownlow during the Civil War era. Within the pages of the Whig, Brownlow's famous newspaper, he created a fixed image of African Americans. Brownlow argued that when removed from slavery, people of African descent naturally became barbaric, and thus slavery was needed to ensure the safety of the white population. Despite this consistency in racial thought, Brownlow, through the course of the 1850s shifted from defending slavery as a necessary evil to promoting slavery as an unqualified blessing in the years before the Civil War. Furthermore, during Brownlow's governorship of Tennessee during Reconstruction, Brownlow argued that slavery was economically deleterious to poor white farmers. These findings have important implications for the history of Appalachia. Most specifically, Brownlow's racist rhetoric suggests that race perceptions in East Tennessee were not significantly separable from the race sentiments of the larger South.

This study examines recurring motifs and personas in hip-hop. Interviews with influential hip-hop scholars, writers and music industry personnel were conducted and analyzed using qualitative methods. Interview subjects were selected based on their insider knowledge as music critics, hip-hop scholars, ethnomusicologists, publicists, and music industry positions. The vast majority of constructed imagery in hip-hop is based on a single persona, the gangsta. This qualitative analysis reveals why gangsta personas and motifs have become the de facto imagery of hip-hop. Gangsta imagery is repeatedly presented because it sells, it is the most readily-available role, and because of music industry pressures. This study is significant because gangsta imagery impacts African American social knowledge and the generalized perception of blackness. Gangsta imagery has also served to alienate black culture and has caused rifts in the African American community.

My research examines the enslaved black woman's reclamation of self through the use of voice and resistance from enslavement into freedom. I argue that the enslaved black woman's voice was one that grew stronger and louder, in an effort to have her story heard, through her attempts of reclamation of self and transition from slave to a free woman. I begin with an introduction to the purpose of my research. Chapter one describes my approach to my research. Chapter two describes the conditions of slavery for black women. Chapter three describes enslaved black women's mechanisms of resistance. Chapter four examinations the reclamation of self in slavemade quilts and the controversial Underground Railroad Quilt Code. Chapter five examines the reclamation of voice in Harriet Jacobs' narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written under a pseudonym, Linda Brent, after she escaped from slavery. Chapter six examines the reclamation of womanhood is Dr. Anna Julia Cooper's text, A Voice from the South. My conclusion describes how these historical events are still relevant to present-day society.

The scholarly consensus is that the early essays “Il mare dell’oggettività” and “La sfida al labirinto” are two of the most important Italo Calvino wrote on his literary poetics, influencing the metaphors and problematics of his entire corpus: the sea of objectivity, the labyrinth, chaotic flux, a rational cogito subjectivity, binary oppositions etc. The essays were made available to a general public in the collection Una pietra sopra in 1980, part of a selection of texts handpicked by Calvino himself. Curiously, the 1986 English translation titled The Uses of Literature does not contain these important and influential essays, making them unavailable to an Anglophone audience. These essays are here now translated, accompanied by a critical commentary by the translator about their relevance and importance to Calvino’s corpus. The problematics discussed in these essays would re-emerge, with remarkable consistency, in the metaphorical imagery Calvino deployed throughout his career. Nevertheless, Calvino evolves the problematics significantly throughout his career, almost inverting his original stance. Rather than this being an inversion, however, the translator argues that Calvino’s evolution represents a dialectical movement propelled by contradiction, and that therein lies the actual poetics or the stylized mode of thought that these essays inaugurated. Viewing the essays in this light renders them, and Calvino’s entire corpus, ripe for dialogic encounter and collision with otherwise parallel philosophical traditions and schools of thought.

The hypothesis of this study is that there is a relationship between race attitudes and "denominocentrism, " and with certain social categories, e.g., age, social class, income, education, etc., in the Church of the Brethren in the Pacific Coast Region. If a relationship can be identified and analyzed, the results will be of value as tools in helping to understand, predict, and change human behavior. It might be further suggested that if there is a strong relationship between attitudes and certain social categories in the church, attitudes of the Brethren on these issues, and perhaps on many more, are, to a large extent, conditioned by, if not the direct outgrowth of, certain socio-economic factors.

The Nazi violence did not have its origins only in the brutality of the First World War or radical nationalist ideologies, but also in European colonialism. Hence, the goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that colonial processes were fundamental to the origins of the Holocaust. To prove this, I applied the content analysis to detect colonial discourse (stereotype, ambivalence, and mimicry) in three legislations from different contexts, which prohibited sexual relations and marriages between races. The documents analyzed exemplified the segregationist thinking of each period of colonization. Portuguese laws from the beginning of modernity demonstrate the transition from religious to racist thought. Analyzing German Southwest Africa, there is the application of racist pseudoscience, and finally, in Nazism, a mixture of both, but also an evolution of colonial discourse. At the end, I proved the existence of colonial discourse in the Nuremberg Laws, demonstrating how earlier colonialisms influenced the Holocaust.

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