Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "African and African American Studies"
Now showing items 1-20 of 23
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A Capitalizing City: Dar Es Salaam and the Emergence of an African Entrepreneurial Elite (C. 1862-2015)
(2018-09-19)A Capitalizing City charts the ways some people of African descent in Dar es Salaam, the commercial and industrial capital of Tanzania, have attempted, historically, to either integrate into the modern capitalist system ... -
Beyond Charitable Imperialism: Intersections of Third Cinema, Music, and Social Change in (Post-) Conflict Democratic Republic of the Congo
(2013-02-13)Beyond Charitable Imperialism investigates the role of film, digital media, and music in mediating social and political change in conflict regions with specific attention to the aesthetic choices, ethical implications, and ... -
Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013
(2014-02-25)Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013 sheds new light on the hitherto neglected engagements of African American writers and thinkers with various ... -
A Black Presence Disclosed in Absence: The Politics of Difference in Contemporary Art
(2013-02-25)As an interdisciplinary project that integrates African and African American Studies, critical race theory, and Art History, this dissertation attempts to enrich our understanding of the politics of difference in contemporary ... -
Circus Aesthetics, Travel, History, and Mourning in the Poetry of Robert Hayden
(2016-02-16)Circus Aesthetics examines the work of the African American poet Robert Hayden and engages with the problem of identifying different frameworks with which to think about Hayden’s poetry and African American literature more ... -
Fantasies of Consent: Black Women's Sexual Labor in 19th Century New Orleans
(2015-08-18)Fantasies of Consent: Black Women’s Sexual Labor 19th Century New Orleans draws on Louisiana legal statutes and Louisiana State Supreme Court records, alongside French and Spanish Caribbean colonial law, slave narratives, ... -
Forms of Affiliation: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Globalism in Southern African Literary Media
(2015-05-20)Forms of Affiliation maps new literary geographies that cut across national, postcolonial, local, and global frameworks. Focusing on fiction from the 1950s to the present-day from South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, ... -
The Future of Rwanda’s Past: Transitional Justice, Archival Practice, and the Remaking of History After Genocide
(2016-09-14)“The Future of Rwanda’s Past” examines the politics of historical revisionism in contemporary Rwanda, arguing that the global fight against genocide has had a profound impact on historical research and production, and on ... -
"I Worship Black Gods": Formation of an African American Lucumi Religious Subjectivity
(2015-05-17)In 1959, Christopher Oliana and Walter “Serge” King took a historic journey to pre-revolutionary Cuba that would change the religious trajectory of numerous African Americans, particularly in New York City. They became the ... -
Imagined Voodoo: Terror, Sex, and Racism in American Popular Culture
(2014-06-06)I analyze the historical and cultural processes by which American racism is reproduced, approaching the issue through the lens of "imagined voodoo" (as distinct from Haitian Vodou). I posit that the American Marine ... -
Making Blackness, Making Policy
(2012-09-12)Too often the acknowledgment that race is a social construction ignores exactly how this construction occurs. By illuminating the way in which the category of blackness and black individuals are made, we can better see how ... -
Making Movement Sounds: The Cultural Organizing Behind the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement
(2017-09-07)Making Movement Sounds recovers the people, places, and ideas that shaped the freedom songs of the civil rights movement and the strategies for their frontlines use. Rather than locate the movement’s song repertoire within ... -
Multilateral Machinations: The Strategic Utility of African International Organizations in the Pursuit of National Security Interests in West Africa and the Greater Horn
(2016-05-20)Since the end of decolonization, African states have created a series of dense and overlapping international organizations (IOs) at both the continental (Organization of African Unity/African Union) and sub-regional (regional ... -
On the Nature of Cultural Capital: The Reinforcing Action of Non-Elite Forms and Racial Differences in Student Achievement in the Middle Class
(2014-10-21)This dissertation argues that cultural capital is self-reinforcing in nature. This conjecture is explored through the analysis of sixth-four semi-structured interviews with black and white middle class parents. The first ... -
Performing Passage: Contemporary Artists Stage the Slave Trade
(2013-10-18)My dissertation examines the work of George C. Wolfe, August Wilson, Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon, theater and visual artists working in the 1980s and 1990s who feature representations of the Middle Passage in their work. ... -
Sounding Creole: The Politics of Cape Verdean Language, Music, and Diaspora
(2013-02-14)This dissertation investigates the interrelationship of language and music in the complex cultural domain of Cape Verde and the Cape Verdean diaspora in West Africa, Europe, and North America. I illustrate how derogatory ... -
"Strange Longings": Phillis Wheatley and the African American Literary Imagination
(2017-05-12)Throughout the African American literary tradition, writers have engaged Phillis Wheatley as a forebear, invoking her poetry and her biography for a number of purposes. Because the ways in which black writers treat race ... -
Sufism and Ifa: Ways of Knowing in Two West African Intellectual Traditions
(2015-09-19)This dissertation examines and compares the epistemologies of two of the most popular West African intellectual traditions: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing theories native to the traditions themselves and contemporary ... -
The Texture of Change: Cloth, Commerce and History in Western Africa 1700-1850
(2016-05-18)This study re-examines historical change in western Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the lens of cotton textiles; that is by focusing on the production, exchange and consumption of cotton cloth, ... -
Three Essays on Race and Politics
(2013-08-12)Understanding how race shapes the lives of individuals and transforms institutions is central to social science. Yet, for many scholars, race is widely understood as a fixed and monolithic category that is resistant to ...