Les Cenelles

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Louisiana, Media Archive, Poetry, United States on 2011-06-05 23:44Z by Steven

Les Cenelles

Centenary College of Louisiana Press / Editions Tintamarre
January 2003
208 pages
ISBN: 0-9723258-9-1

Armand Lanusse

The text is in French.

With few exceptions, the poets of Les Cenelles–the very first collection of poetry by Creoles of color–do not directly address their precarious situation in a South that was ever increasingly hostile to the racial caste to which they belonged. On the contrary, a naive reader might only discover the most pedestrian sorts of romantic subjects in these poems written by seventeen free men of color. However , why would Valcour B… refer to himself as an “unrecognized son of New Orleans?” What “cruel fate” might have forced P. Dalcour into exile? What is the source of the regret, the preoccupation with departure and the fear of betrayal that seeps from every line of these works?

However gifted and diligent they might have been, free people of color were forced to live within the constraints of their fate as second class citizens. May the modern reader delve into these “modest Cenelles” conscience of the troubling context that underpins their creation. Without this awareness, the profound depths of their melancholy spirit will escape him completely.

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Racial Identity Development and Psychological Adjustment in Biracial Individuals of Minority/Minority Racial Group Descent

Posted in Dissertations, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2011-06-05 05:08Z by Steven

Racial Identity Development and Psychological Adjustment in Biracial Individuals of Minority/Minority Racial Group Descent

Marquette University
Spring 2011

Kizzie Paule Walker

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirments for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Based on the theoretical framework of symbolic interactionism and race as a social construct, individuals with biological parents racially distinct from each other have biracial identity options (i.e., Singular, Border, Protean, and Transcendent) (e.g., Rockquemore and Brunsma, 2002). The purpose of the current study was to examine factors that influenced biracial individuals’ level of racial/ethnic identity development and the impact on biracial identity and psychological adjustment (i.e., self-esteem and psychological well-being). A total of 199 biracial individuals, who ranged in age from 18 to 55 years, completed an online survey that measured factors such as the rule of hypodescent (i.e., one-drop rule), physical appearance, self-monitoring, and exposure to multicultural experiences. Although the one-drop rule was not a significant predictor of biracial identity options, there were other significant findings within this population. Physical resemblance to two or more racial groups and exposure to multicultural experiences predicted biracial individuals’ identification with a Border or Protean identity. Second, this study found that a high level of exposure to multicultural experiences best predicted a high level of ethnic identity development and positive interactions with other racial groups. Lastly, the current study found that the previously mentioned factors also contributed to biracial individuals’ psychological adjustment (i.e., self-esteem and psychological well-being). Limitations of the current study and recommendations for future research with this population were also discussed.

Read the entire dissertation here.

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Shades of gray: Black-white multiracialism in contemporary American literature

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2011-06-05 03:51Z by Steven

Shades of gray: Black-white multiracialism in contemporary American literature

York University (Canada)
2011
294 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR71345
ISBN: 9780494713457

Molly Littlewood McKibbin

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in English in partial fulfillment of the requirments for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The American construction of whiteness and blackness as dichotomous racial categories and subsequent black refashioning of the one-drop rule as a method of empowering and mobilizing African Americans have meant that whiteness has developed in terms of purity (and not-blackness) while blackness has absorbed mixture into one racial category. However, since the Civil Rights Movement and the Multiracial Movement (begun shortly after the Loving v. Virginia decision invalidated antimiscegenation laws in 1967), American treatment of racial mixture has undergone consistent change. My dissertation addresses how literature at the turn of the millennium ultimately offers a new exploration of black-white multiracialism. I examine four texts in detail: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish (2001), Emily Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter (2005), and Rachel Harper’s Brass Ankle Blues (2006).

The introduction outlines the historical development of racial blackness in the U.S. and traces the possibilities and limitations of racial identity for multiracial figures throughout African American literary history. In the first chapter, I analyze more recent multiracial theory and advocacy to establish and critique the state of current discourse surrounding (multi)racial identity and also examine the ways in which contemporary writers depict the negotiation of racial identity within a new social climate that permits self-identification but still clings to recognized labels. In the second chapter, I use white studies and an understanding of the historical development of racial whiteness in the U.S. to analyze how contemporary writing is transforming the apparent homogeneity of whiteness into a heterogeneous classification by racializing and diversifying the otherwise normative, generic category of whiteness. In the third chapter, I use the context of black racial identity politics to analyze the difficulty multiracial figures have in claiming blackness, since on the one hand they are “not black enough” to claim blackness and on the other they are seen as “race traitors” for not claiming monoracial blackness.

My research emphasizes that multiracial discourse is still in its formative stages but is working towards articulating multiracial identities and writing them into the American literary landscape even if current literature can only gesture towards such identities at present.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Black and White in the United States
  • Chapter One: “What are you, anyway?”: Mixture, Identity Formation, and the Social Context of Race Classification
  • Chapter Two: Racializin’ and Diversifyin’: Negotiating Whiteness
  • Chapter Three: “Black Like Me”: Negotiating Blackness
  • Conclusion: The (Continuing) Work of Multiracial Literature
  • Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

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The one-drop aesthetic: How literary formalism reinvented race in the United States

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2011-06-05 02:02Z by Steven

The one-drop aesthetic: How literary formalism reinvented race in the United States

Harvard University
2009
233 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3365201
ISBN: 9781109254617

Kevin Brian Birmingham

A dissertation presented by Kevin Brian Birmingham to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English.

The One-Drop Aesthetic argues that late twentieth-century theories of race and identity are translations of the early twentieth century’s aesthetic formalism, the New Criticism. The first cohesive formalism in the United States was an aesthetic ideology shaped by the imperfections of the South, which the southern New Critics took as a social model for their aesthetic ideals. They imagined literature not as a solid structure or an organic wholeness but as a welter of contingencies—a terrain that, like the South, was besieged by science and industry and whose beauty resided in fragments and ashes. The New Criticism was largely a dialogue between Allen Tate’s faith in transcendent wholeness and Ransom’s attention to art’s “infinite residue.”

The southern institution capable of relating fragments to organic wholes as well as bringing the idealized past into the industrialized present was, perhaps surprisingly, the cornerstone of segregation: the one-drop rule. A guiding principle of American race ideology was the belief that a trace of blackness is powerful enough to constitute blackness itself . Though it was a powerful weapon of oppression, several American writers in the twentieth century turned the implications of the one-drop rule into aesthetic virtues. Abiding, contaminating racial traces provided not only a model for cultural continuity over time and for imagining parts as transcendent wholes, but it intensified the complexity of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness, a modern American version of both Hegel’s self-consciousness and Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetics.

This project covers a fifty-year period from the New Criticism of the 1930s to the New Mestiza of the 1980s. Several writers used the idea of overwhelming racial traces to reframe the European aesthetic ideals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in immediate social terms. William Faulkner’s powerful imagination of the one-drop aesthetic in his 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! was foundational, and the unlikely inheritor of Faulkner was James Baldwin, who amplifies Faulkner’s race-based apocalyptic mode in his essays. This dissertation then turns to the central importance of the racially-mixed Schwarzkommando in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). It ends with a discussion of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which provides yet another vision of a lost aesthetic society recoverable from traces of both memory and blood.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Chapter One – Hellenic Dixie: The Soil of American Formalism
  • Chapter Two – The Master/Trash Dialectic: William Faulkner and the Origin of an American Aesthetic
  • Chapter Three – “History’s Ass Pocket”: The Bind of Identity and Aesthetics in James Baldwin
  • Chapter Four – Revolutionaries of the Trace: Thomas Pynchon’s Schwarzkommando and the One-Drop Sublime
  • Chapter Five – Gods Out of Entrails: The Old Aesthetic of the New Mestiza
  • Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

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