Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1999. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2836. Typescript. Abstract appears on leaf [ii]. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-67).

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Research on Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl exploded after 1981, when Professor Jean Fagin Yellin discovered textual evidence for refuting then-current claims that Lydia Maria Child was the author of this engrossing story. Child was indeed the book's editor, but Yellin discovered letters from Jacobs among the papers of abolitionist Amy Post that proved that the ex-slave was the author of her own narrative. Though the research this discovery engendered has been quite extensive, especially regarding the narrative's close adherence to the conventions of a sentimental novel, very few scholars have attempted to deal with a feature relatively unique to Jacobs" narrative: the use of African American English (AAE) in representing the speech of a number of her characters. Nor has any scholar exclusively focused on the authenticity of her representation of AAE. This paper, a first step in such an effort, demonstrates that Jacobs' use conforms to features found by linguists in their studies of contemporary AAE and Early Black English (EBE).

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Johannesburg, 2017 / Set within a revisionist and feminist context, this thesis seeks to draw parallels in the autobiographical texts of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) written by an African American ex-enslaved and Schizophrene (2011) penned by Bhanu Kapil, a British born Asian American, a descendant of a generation that live (d) through/with ‘what happened in a particular country on a particular day in August 14th 1947’ (Quaid). These literary representations will constitute the corpus of this research paper as it attempts to examine how these autobiographies draw attention to and break the notion of prevailing dominant geographies of oppression. In both texts, the authors juxtapose appropriation and hegemony with an alternative literary geographic narrative that seeks to recuperate the liminal (black) body and psyche. This research paper will seek to explore the multiple and interrelated ways in which both authors employ certain strategic mechanisms to re-appropriate tools of social power, thus exposing the frailties of their respective oppressive histories by disrupting their continued, albeit imagined stronghold on them. In employing their autobiographies as anthropological arsenals, these authors seem to demonstrate the manner in which history has attempted through its numerous sites of oppression not only to construct black victims and mere black bodies but also to un-write and evacuate its untidiness. These autobiographies will be employed to reconstruct and re-imagine the authors but symbolically the collective black body as more than objects but rather as humans with subjectivities and self-assertion. The paper further seeks to understand how these autobiographies tend to a vicious past of slavery and partition and how they translate these memories, remembering the depth of their experiences whilst also being haunted by their contemporary echoes. An accent will be given to the ambivalence, perversions and anxieties of these autobiographies. / XL2018

Advances in technologies of voice profiling shed new light on questions of listening and its entanglement with antiblackness as a structuring paradigm of modernity. To contest current conceptions of listening with regards to the question of race and antiblackness while also shining light on the potentials offered by blackness, this dissertation engages listening at three distinct sites that are entangled with this modern question of voice profiling AI. In the process, this dissertation elaborates on the ethical stakes involved in listening itself. Chapter 1 excavates the way in which the ears of enslaved Black lives were ritualized. It centers an analysis of the role of the punishment of ear cropping and how this performed both a claim over slaves’ belonging and an inhibition on their freedom. Scholarship from Hebrew law aids in uncovering the meaning of the specific form of punishment. The chapter concludes by comparing the conception of slaves’ ears to Black artistic expressions such as Harriet Jacobs’s various methods of narration in Incidents of a Slave Girl and Blind Tom Wiggins’ unique use of clusters and graphic notation in Battle of Manassas, so as to demonstrate their methods of resistance and refusal to a claimed all-encompassing regime of listening. Chapter 2 engages modern notions of sound and listening. The way in which sound is theorized and engaged in modern digital technologies is entangled with the conception of what listening is and what it entails. Hermann von Helmholtz provides an axis after which sound and listening, as well as the relation between an inner world of perceptions and an outer world of sensations, has to be engaged as a question of listening as entangled in societal questions. The chapter critically elaborates alongside questions of categorical distinction in sound, such as the use of skull shapes as referents for AI listening, instrument classification systems, and the general question of the form of sound, or sound as object. The concluding Chapter 3 discusses, alongside Sylvia Wynter’s work and Roscoe Mitchell’s piece S II Examples (date) the kinds of questions we must pose in the development of modern AI listening technologies to move past antiblackness. Immanuel Kant’s theorizing of race and his influence on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s classification of skulls relate tomodern voice profiling AI technology directly through the question of using cranial shapes. Wynter’s work challenges both a turn to varieties that do not allow the addressing of structural antiblackness, and a continuation of claims to proper knowledge on the basis of antiblackness. Ultimately, Wynter aids us in hearing Mitchell’s continual shapeshifting practice on the saxophone as a proposal towards a refiguring of our conception of sound, listening, and us.