Browsing by Subject "Black Women"
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Item Bodied knowledges (where our blood is born): maternal narratives and articulations of black women's diaspora identity(2010-12) Crump, Helen J.My dissertation titled Bodied Knowledges (Where Our Blood Is Born): Maternal Narratives and Articulations of Black Women's Diaspora Identity is an intervention in black diasporic criticism and black feminism. It highlights black women's diaspora literature, maternal narratives, and interrogations of identity. I employ a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. My study considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. In my thesis, I center Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, and I examine Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites. I contend that black women writers, with a certain intentionality, use their novels to articulate a woman-centered generationality located inside and throughout the African Diaspora, doing so in order to theorize both the structure of that diaspora and black women's identity within and as part of it. To address this theory, I focus on motherhood / mothering, a common role associated with women, and name and discuss specific maternal narratives as sites through which to delineate and interrogate the intersection of identity and Diaspora. Drawing on specific diaspora frameworks, such as that proposed by Kim Butler in "Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse" and Brent Hayes Edwards in "The Uses of Diaspora", I conduct a close examination of the primary novels, addressing the maternal discourse and the Diaspora construction in each. Moreover, these texts are woman-centered, which, I argue, re-locates diaspora from a traditionally male-centered and male-dominated situated-ness to one that focuses on black women's readings of and experiences within the Diaspora.Item Making Black Girls Real: Reconstructing Black Girlhood In the U.S., 1861-1963(2016-06) Owens, TammyFrom the 1861 publication of Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to Norman Rockwell’s iconic image of first-grader Ruby Bridges walking alongside U.S. marshals to integrate her elementary school in 1960, the black-girl figure and performances of black girlhood are present within popular texts, images, archival materials, and cultural work produced in the U.S. Yet, black girls and their girlhoods are noticeably absent in dominant historical conversations of childhood, and thus Jacobs’s narrative of slave-girl life in bondage or Ruby Bridges’s integration of her school are not read as constituting a visible history of black girlhood or a significant period in the formation of black female political as well as intellectual identity in the U.S. History scholars of the U.S. Civil War through Civil Rights Movement have begun to recognize children as important historical actors and childhood as a key site of cultural knowledge. However, these scholars have failed to examine the epistemological, historical, or theoretical importance of black girls or their girlhoods. As a result, the historical record endorses racialized ideologies of childhood that render black girlhood illegible and black girls exempt from the analytical category of children or girls in U.S. culture. My dissertation addresses the exemption of black girls from the socially-constructed categories of childhood and girlhood by recovering black girls as historical actors and illuminating constitutive elements of black girlhood in the U.S. from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights Movement. I argue that within historical discourses of childhood and in the dominant visual field, the intersections of race, class, gender, and age render black girls illegible, or incapable of being read or “seen” as girls with valuable girlhoods. To make black girls and their lived experiences legible, I draw on Black Feminist and Queer theories to inform my discursive, literary, and visual cultural methods of investigating a diverse collection of nineteenth-century slave narratives, popular novels, images in popular press, children’s literature, and archival sources including the unpublished autobiography of black-girl Civil Rights activist Brenda Travis.