The focus in Afrofuturist scholarship has always been on the ways in which the black experience, particularly the forcible dislocation of the Middle Passage, has been akin to sensations of...Show moreThe focus in Afrofuturist scholarship has always been on the ways in which the black experience, particularly the forcible dislocation of the Middle Passage, has been akin to sensations of alienation and “Othering” explored in science fiction and speculative fiction. While a range of technologies have been analyzed in the context of Afrofuturism, from sonic, to digital, to even aerospace technologies, I argue in this thesis that there is a gap in scholarship on the medical technologies that undergird the alienation experienced by African Americans. To fill this gap, my research focuses on two works of fiction, Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man (1952) and Jordan Peele’s recent movie Get Out (2017), that deal with the oppressive power of medicine. I argue that in both narratives medical experiments are used to take control over black bodies and minds, and I position this political violence into a history of medical experimentation and abuse on African Americans as well as Afrofuturism. As much as the medical mistreatment that the protagonists in these texts suffer seems exclusive to the world of science fiction, it has been, and might continue to be, part of the real experience of black Americans.Show less
A intellectual history research. How did the ideas on philanthropy and doing good in America evolve from 1650-1830? Increased individualism and secularism influenced the way in which philanthropy...Show moreA intellectual history research. How did the ideas on philanthropy and doing good in America evolve from 1650-1830? Increased individualism and secularism influenced the way in which philanthropy and doing good were viewed.Show less
This thesis applies Du Bois's and Fanon's theoretical concepts about the construction of black identity in a white-dominated and postcolonial context to Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven and McKay's Home...Show moreThis thesis applies Du Bois's and Fanon's theoretical concepts about the construction of black identity in a white-dominated and postcolonial context to Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven and McKay's Home to Harlem - two novels of the Harlem Renaissance which have garnered little scholarly attention to date. Thesis statement: "Both Van Vechten and McKay wrote from a context which invested the dominant white culture with more value than its black counterpart. Although Van Vechten was sympathetic to African Americans, his white patriarchal perspective bleeds through the cracks of his narrative and his novel’s characters fail to escape stereotype and allegory. McKay shows himself as aware of black stereotypes as Van Vechten is, but he sometimes challenges them explicitly. The trouble, however, is that McKay’s construct of blackness depends to a far greater degree on an adherence to the dominant white paradigm than the author himself seems aware of: he has internalized the white value system of his Other. Constructing the black Self on the stage of the white Other, as Frantz Fanon would say, proves perpetually problematic."Show less
Racism is one of the main social issues in the United States which manifests itself in widespread unrest such as the LA riots after the acquittal of the officers responsible for savagely beating...Show moreRacism is one of the main social issues in the United States which manifests itself in widespread unrest such as the LA riots after the acquittal of the officers responsible for savagely beating Rodney King in the late 1990s and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the mid 2010s in the United States. Over the course of the last few decades Hollywood has increased its frequency of producing movies which are set in times of slavery. The degree of (relative) agency of the black protagonists in a selection of these movies (Amistad, 12 Years a Slave and The Birth of a Nation (2016)) becomes a method to criticise the persistence of racial injustice in the United States .Show less
This thesis offers a close reading of three neo-slave narratives, Octavia Butler's "Kindred," Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Charles Johnson's "Middle Passage" focusing on the themes of slave and...Show moreThis thesis offers a close reading of three neo-slave narratives, Octavia Butler's "Kindred," Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Charles Johnson's "Middle Passage" focusing on the themes of slave and post-slavery community, family and gender in relation to the historical trauma of slavery. This thesis first addresses the historiographical debates about the agency and resistance of enslaved people within a system of systematic oppression and dispossession and then demonstrates how the three novels negotiate this issue. Both "Kindred" and "Beloved" probe into the limitations and possibilities of the community as a site of black male and female empowerment. Instead of romanticizing life in the free and enslaved black communities, both Butler and Morrison challenge these sites and call attention to the costs of resistance to the slavery regime. On the other hand, in his effort to liberate his fiction from black identity politics that foreground the works of Butler and Morrison, Johnson explores the cultural hybridity of his protagonist, but he ultimately only reproduces patriarchal values he overtlty parodies.Show less
At a time in which the dominant culture’s pressure on immigrants to Americanize increased, Mary Antin (1881-1949) and Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) wrote literary works that bore witness to the...Show moreAt a time in which the dominant culture’s pressure on immigrants to Americanize increased, Mary Antin (1881-1949) and Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) wrote literary works that bore witness to the complexity and personal costs of assimilation. The Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Antin’s (fictionalized) autobiography The Promised Land (1912) and Cahan’s novella Yekl; A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and his novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) offer insights into the impact of America’s assimilationist ideology on identity construction, showing how both ethnic and national identities are imagined, constructed, and performed. The protagonists explore the social injustices Jewish immigrants suffered in the United States and the complex nature of Americanization by sometimes bluntly criticizing the pressure to conform, but elsewhere demonstrating that they have assimilated to a certain degree. The protagonists find themselves in a bind: on the one hand they need to give in to the pressure to assimilate in order to attain the American dream, while on the other hand they often feel tied to their Jewish cultural heritage.Show less
