Student Name: Eunice Toh
Field: English & African American and Diaspora Studies
Dissertation Director(s): Drs. Shirley Moody-Turner and Sean X. Goudie
Dissertation Description:
In this dissertation, I consider how a terrestrial-oriented directionality might offer us an epistemological framework for thinking about the cosmological dimensions of Black ecologies. Black Cosmo-cologies: Rebirth and Renaissance in the Long Nineteenth Century argues that the politics and aesthetics of Black ecologies in literary narratives illustrate alternate cosmologies of being and ways of knowing in this world. I hope to show how Black ecology limns or haunts questions of liberation, world-making, and humanism in the writings of “American” authors. For instance, what are the alternative ontologies that might emerge when scholars imagine historical processes and modes, such as the afterlife of slavery, in a similar way to how one considers organic processes like germination or weathering? In line with crucial theoretical work from related fields of environmental humanities, Black print culture, critical race studies, and science studies, this dissertation looks to Black cosmo-(e)cologies to unsettle conventional periodization, foundations, and boundaries of the long nineteenth century.
Student Name: Justin Smith
Field: English & African American and Diaspora Studies
Dissertation Director(s): Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner (chair), Dr. Tina Chen, Dr. Aldon Nielsen, and Dr. Cynthia Young
Dissertation Description:
My dissertation, Racial Paraconstructions: Black Political Identities in Literature, 1892-1931, positions the period from the end of the nineteenth-century through the first three decades of the twentieth-century as a period where what race meant was a particularly open question, due to the shifting discourses of immigration, segregation, and racial pseudo-science. African American writing from this period captures this fluidity, as the transition from realism to modernism in Black writing reflects aesthetic and thematic changes as well as the changing possibilities of representing a vision for Black politics. African Americans proposed various, competing explanations of race mediated by their differential and unequal access to forms of publishing. The term paraconstructions reflects constructions of race that were non-hegemonic, and ultimately failed to be incorporated into broader societal understandings of race. Reconsidering these lost racial constructions in the context of their political utility at the time of their creation is important for nuancing deployments of race in contemporary identity politics.
Student Name: Sabrina Evans
Field: English & African American and Diaspora Studies
Dissertation Director(s): Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies
Dissertation Description:
My dissertation project, “Continuous Dignified Action: Black Clubwomen’s Literary, Intellectual, and Public Activism” charts what I identify as the “continuous dignified action” of Black clubwomen who intervened in turn-of-the-twentieth century discourses of dignity to join their intellectual work with organized, direct action. My project works at the intersections of Black literary and print culture, digital humanities, and Black feminism to take seriously the intellectual contributions women like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Ida B. Wells were making to discourses on dignity, print culture, and collective organizing. Mining the archives of published and unpublished writings, my project brings together a wide range of materials, across literary genres and forms, to argue that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a critical period in which Black clubwomen shared the challenges of seeing their collective dignity denied and based on their own intellectual and experiential knowledge of racism and sexism, understood that Black people’s right to dignity was not stable and would require a continual process of direct action to controvert future attacks.
Student Name: Ashley Lamarre
Field: Philosophy and African American and Diaspora Studies
Dissertation Director(s): Kathryn Sophia Belle and Robert Bernasconi
Dissertation Description:
My dissertation is titled How do Images Hurt? Oppressive Representations and Black Feminist Redress. Two central questions drive her dissertation: what is the social efficacy of harmful representations, and what responses to these images hold the potential to disrupt their normative and naturalizing power? In response, Ashley brings together Black feminists’ intersectional accounts of oppressive representations, such as social theorist Patricia Hill Collins’ account of controlling images and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s account of cultural imposition. In this dissertation, Ashley argues that critical engagements with oppressive representations are not periphery but jointly necessary for all movements concerned with the liberation of oppressed peoples. She brings together Fanon and Black feminists’ accounts not only to form a robust intersectional account of oppressive representations as a phenomenon but also to identify responses that hold the potential to disrupt the oppressive norms they bring about. In discussing the mechanism of oppressive representations, it will be necessary to discuss extensively the nature of harm associated with this phenomenon to emphasize why the ongoing presence of these images still requires critical engagement.