This MA Thesis discusses the way in which Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing represent the notion of the transmission of the traumas of slavery. Both Beloved and Homegoing represent...Show moreThis MA Thesis discusses the way in which Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing represent the notion of the transmission of the traumas of slavery. Both Beloved and Homegoing represent the notion that traumas need to be narrated, and witnessed by others, or they will continue to have a negative impact on multiple generations, not only the generations of the present, but also those of the future. They do, however, differ significantly in the way in which they portray the notion of transmission of trauma. In Beloved, Denver is mostly traumatized not by being enslaved but by living with a mother who is traumatized by slavery, whilst in Homegoing the recurrent tropes of a black necklace, fire, and fear of water in the stories of the various generations suggest that the collective trauma of slavery is transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a significant difference, because it suggests the novels engage differently with the question central to the scholarly debate on transmission of trauma: can trauma be transmitted or is it the traumatized parent who creates a traumatizing atmosphere for the child?Show less
One of the central points developed in this thesis is that the Nigerian-Biafran War, represented in Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a...Show moreOne of the central points developed in this thesis is that the Nigerian-Biafran War, represented in Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), exacerbates the deterioration of Biafra by revealing the inherited corruption adopted from colonisation. The lives and identities of both Achebe's and Adichie's central characters are dramatically altered when exposed to the trials and traumas of civil war; relationships break down, national pride falters and societal constructs are dismantled. By humanising stories of civil conflict, both narratives work towards shaping and legitimising the wartime experiences of the Igbo community, whose struggle for independence has often been blamed as the cause of a disastrous civil war.Show less
Due to an increasing public push for multiculturalism in mainstream media, films have (at least since the 1990s) been attempting to give a more positive representation of what is deemed to be a...Show moreDue to an increasing public push for multiculturalism in mainstream media, films have (at least since the 1990s) been attempting to give a more positive representation of what is deemed to be a racial and cultural Other from the target audience’s perspective, and animation films are no exception. Case in point, while the two animated films discussed in this study, The Book of Life (2014) and Coco (2017), are made by different studios, they share a general goal of trying to give such a representation of a racial and cultural Other for a Western target audience. This goal makes these films some of the latest examples in a long trend of American animation aiming to broaden their representation of minority cultures and ethnicities, in response to pressure from various social movements in the 1990s (Palmer 2, 4). Consequently, such animation has increasingly received academic reading, with scholars studying the medium’s role in the representation of racial and cultural Others and multiculturalism in general. This study will add to this budding field by analyzing two contemporary iterations of this representational trend.Show less
In my analysis of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), I will look...Show moreIn my analysis of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), I will look at the ways in which writers employ various literary techniques (fragmentation, syntax disruption, ellipses, text/image layout, repetitions, symbols, photograph insertion, intertexts, framing of panels, and so on) in order to represent the unspeakable and evasive nature of traumatic experiences. The use and interplay of these techniques in the image-text setting of the two novels and Spiegelman’s graphic narrative leads to the construction of discursive events that help the reader understand and feel emotionally engaged with the narrator’s story, thus encouraging empathetic reading and contributing to secondary witnessing of the narrator’s trauma on the part of the reader.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
The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) started with a hashtag: in 2012 Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created the slogan “Black Lives Matter” after a case of police brutality that...Show moreThe Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) started with a hashtag: in 2012 Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created the slogan “Black Lives Matter” after a case of police brutality that led to the death of seventeen-year old Trayvon Martin. From the guiding principles of BLM it becomes obvious, that the original idea behind the movement mainly focused on the inclusion of minority groups within Black communities, rather than only on racialized police violence. The movement gained great popularity not only with hashtag-users and participants in protests, but it was also immediately picked up by the media and in public debates, while numerous variations of the slogan emerged to either mock or hijack the movement. The media attention can be divided into three different kinds: reports about the movement in connection to the police shootings, reports about protests and current incidents, and a wider field in which BLM was connected to the cultural scene in the US from 2012 to the present: the cultural discourse. Part of this cultural discourse are Steve McQueen's movie 12 Years A Slave (2013), Ava DuVernay's movie Selma (2014) and Nate Parker's movie The Birth of a Nation (2016), all three historical dramas, as well as Kendrick Lamar's album To Pimp A Butterfly (2015). All four cultural productions were directly connected to BLM by the media. They were brought up in discussions about and within the movement, and, even though BLM was initially created in response to racially motivated police brutality, the three movies also triggered debates about other cultural and societal issues, such as the acknowledgment and representation of Black directors and actors in US cinema. The protagonists of all three films are black heterosexual men. Although Lamar's album provided the anthem of the movement, “Alright”, and addresses police brutality in the other songs as well, it also uses a number of common rap themes, treating women, for instance, from a male-centered and at first glance misogynist perspective. Especially when we look at other Hip Hop artists connected to BLM as well, it becomes clear that the pop-cultural narrative that is associated with BLM is actually about black heterosexual men. Considering that the three founders of BLM are, in their own words, “queer Black women,” this contextualization of the movement is surprising. This thesis investigates the incongruity between the original principles of BLM and its public appearance in (pop)cultural contexts that put a black male heterosexual narrative in the foreground.Show less
Using the premise set forth by Roland Barthes that “food signifies,” this thesis analyzes immigrant fiction and how diasporized peoples construct and perform their identities along class, gender,...Show moreUsing the premise set forth by Roland Barthes that “food signifies,” this thesis analyzes immigrant fiction and how diasporized peoples construct and perform their identities along class, gender, and ethnic lines. The first chapter unpacks and presents food culture theory as a meaningful tool to analyze works of literature. The subsequent two chapters apply food culture theory and its role in identity production through a close reading of T.C. Boyle’s novel The Tortilla Curtain (1995) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2013). In both, food behavior of the migrants exemplifies the ongoing vacillation between the desire for assimilation and rejection of the host culture. Moreover, the various foodways presented in the works show how food consumption can signify a divide or exemplify a struggle to reconcile public and private identities.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
Steve McQueen’s 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) brought Northup’s narrative to new, large audiences and stimulated discussion and research. It is striking that...Show moreSteve McQueen’s 2013 film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) brought Northup’s narrative to new, large audiences and stimulated discussion and research. It is striking that McQueen chose to adapt this particular slave narrative, as Northup was a free-born man and his narrative and agency therefore differs from widely read and taught slave narratives of slave-born narrators. Agency is central in these narratives as the narrators decide to escape the limited conditions of slavery and rebel against their master in order to live a life in which they are free to make their own decisions. The representation of slaves’ agency in their narratives is influenced by the socio-political environment at the time and place of writing and publication of the narrative. The genre of the autobiographical slave narrative has influenced the literature about slavery that has followed it, as can be seen in the autobiographies of former slaves published after the emancipation of all slaves in 1865 and in the genre of the neo-slave narrative that appeared in the 1970s. As the times in which they are made differ, so does their representation of agency, as they are all influenced by the socio-political environment they were published in. Autobiographies of former slaves offer a softened version of slavery and an optimistic view of the future that can be achieved through hard work, neo-slave narratives emphasize the rebellious agency of slaves, and contemporary films dwell on the ways slavery limits slave agency which makes every act of rebellion heroic. This thesis will argue that the forms of agency that are represented in contemporary novels and film dealing with slavery differ from those in the nineteenth-century autobiographical narratives that have influenced them, as all are influenced by the socio-political environment of the narrator and/or author. In order to research the theme of agency, I will look at slave narratives and works from different periods, and show different forms of agency. The works used are Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Steve McQueen’s film 12 Years a Slave (2013).Show less
Although the Victorian age is popularly understood to be an age in which motherhood was glorified, by the end of the nineteenth century mothers in late Victorian novels were often portrayed as...Show moreAlthough the Victorian age is popularly understood to be an age in which motherhood was glorified, by the end of the nineteenth century mothers in late Victorian novels were often portrayed as negative characters and motherhood as an institution was under attack. The rise of feminism and the introduction of the New Woman could be seen as provoking this negative portrayal. Not only women but also men criticized women’s and mothers’ positions in society. Straightforward criticism on the position of mothers was likely to be censured. Writers took it on themselves to portray the mother’s distorted social position, one that made her practically invisible within the public realm. Some feminist writers attacked motherhood in order to advocate another life and lifestyle equal to men; in literary texts, they used discouraging depictions to show women what would happen to them if they too would walk into the trap of marriage and motherhood. I shall argue that such writers portrayed mothers as undesirable characters in order to expose what the social conventions invented by a patriarchal society did to mothers and how it affected their behaviour. I shall analyse what motherhood meant in the late nineteenth century and how ‘the mother’ was characterized in literature during that time period. Two novels and a play will be analysed for the support of my argument: George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894); Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton (1897); and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). I shall demonstrate that in each primary source the author criticizes a distorted situation that affects mothers and their behaviour that is regarded as deleterious.Show less
Since, as anthropologists and cultural critics have argued, food and food practices constitute a system of communication that conveys social meaning, food as a cultural and social practice and as a...Show moreSince, as anthropologists and cultural critics have argued, food and food practices constitute a system of communication that conveys social meaning, food as a cultural and social practice and as a literary trope provides insight into society and culture and the identities they produce. If we are what we eat, food is an important means to define and, more specifically, perform our identities. In a globalizing world, in which both people and products constantly travel, food follows migratory flows. When placed in a political, economic, and cultural context food functions as a boundary marker as well as a boundary crosser. This makes food a useful trope in postcolonial and other migrant literature in particular, as these novels explore the effects of migration and cultural encounters on the formation, negotiation, and performance of identities. Placing my reading of Desai’s postcolonial novel The Inheritance of Loss in the theoretical framework of food theories, I will argue that Desai uses food as a metaphorical instrument not only to deconstruct colonial identities, such as that of the Anglophile judge and his friends, and fixed ethnic identities, such as Biju’s, but also to imagine more fluid, multiple, migrant identities, such as Saeed Saeed’s, and to focus attention on unequal power relations and the fluidity of nationhood and national identity.Show less
The experience of illness produces profound disturbances in a person’s sense of self and integrity. Beyond the uncertainty caused by the incongruence between the sickened person’s self-concept and...Show moreThe experience of illness produces profound disturbances in a person’s sense of self and integrity. Beyond the uncertainty caused by the incongruence between the sickened person’s self-concept and his or her state of illness, there comes also an experience of uncertainty over the concept and potential prospect of death. The process of autopathography—defined by Smith and Watson as “[creating] first-person illness narratives”—often serves as a therapeutic outlet for those stricken by serious illnesses, allowing for them to both reflect on the past, as well as prompt for social change within the greater society. With reference to Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, and their resultant “virtues”, the study considers the tramatized’s intrapsychic and social orientations. It describes a functional method for analyzing autopathographical works for evidence of their authors’ working through of their trauma from these dimensions. Aude Lorde’s “The Cancer Journals” is used as a proof-of-concept case study.Show less
