English Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2042

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon English Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Browsing English Theses and Dissertations by Subject "African American literature"

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    Refiguring the Animal: Race, Posthumanism, and Modernism
    (University of Oregon, 2019-04-30) Curry, Elizabeth; Whalan, Mark
    This dissertation explores the entanglements of racialized histories and experiences in America with conceptions of animals and animality and examines how African American and Native American writers render these intersections in early-twentieth-century American literature. While animals, with their physical and behavioral features and subordinate status within Western cultural frameworks, were fundamental figures in the US racial imaginary, which relied on dehumanization as a weapon of control, animals (and conceptions about them) also curiously offered a way around and outside of the categorically demeaning declarations of “the human.” Through literary explorations of the nonhuman, the writers in this project reveal forms of interspecies affinity and understanding that affirm biotic connection and also make fantastically strange creatures with whom humans share domestic and proximal space. The figure of “the human” as separate, above, and radically distinct from other life becomes not only strange as well through these readings, but becomes visible as a prominent obstacle to social egalitarian and ecologically cooperative ways of living. I build on research in animal studies and critical race studies approaches to posthumanism to observe how race inflects literary animal representations while also tracking how animality interacts with various notions of personhood. While animalization often coincides with racialized and dehumanized personhood status, writers like Anita Scott Coleman and Zitkala-Ša rupture those associations and engage the animal (comparisons to it and becomings with it) as a fundamentally humanizing figure. On the flip side, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates how a racialized animalization trope operates in the novel to defend the killing of a black man. These writers all collapse the binary between human and animal while demonstrating how that binary operates in concert with racial binaries in an American context that extols the human. Reading animals through a lens that acknowledges how race and animality intersect ultimately opens routes for rethinking what it means to be human and defining how we view the nonhuman.
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    Visualizing Erotic Freedom in Black Feminist Fiction and TV, 1973-2020
    (University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Ohman, Carmel; Thorsson, Courtney
    “Visualizing Erotic Freedom” shows how contemporary Black comedic TV draws on the aesthetic legacy of the Black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970s to re-envision Black sexualities on their own terms. This project unfolds in two parts. Part 1 shows that texts from the Black women’s literary renaissance offer nonrealist visual vocabularies as innovative strategies for cultivating intimacy in the face of structural anti-Blackness and misogyny. Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973) provides a revised theory of the gaze, establishing looking together as a technique of relational plenitude that is erotic in Audre Lorde’s sense of a shared sensuous or spiritual energy. In for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1976), Ntozake Shange enacts erotic fullness by employing choreopoetic apposition: nonrealist strategies of critical distance per Bertolt Brecht that range from syntactic objectification (poetic disruptions to syntax that denaturalize subject and object) to vignette structure (loosely related monologues arranged side by side). Part 2 argues that contemporary Black TV creators redeploy these aesthetic principles to build Black erotic worlds independent of entrenched sexual discourses. Robin Thede’s A Black Lady Sketch Show (2019-) uses puppets – and a puppet version of Shange’s for colored girls – to destabilize the stuff of the self, spoofing realist interpretive assumptions that condition the reception of Black women’s art in the post-Civil Rights era. Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness (2018-) provides its own historiographical critique in vignette form, arguing that the critical gendering of abstraction since the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s has resulted in a failure to read Afrosurrealism and Black feminism together. Issa Rae’s insecure (2016) similarly puts critical distance to generative effect, using the nonrealist excesses of the ratchet to refuse easy incorporation into linear narratives of empowerment. Gazing askew at political realities during two periods of amplified conservatism and social services defunding (the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and the 2017-2021 presidential administration of Donald J. Trump), my texts of focus display a Black feminist commitment to denaturalizing historically contingent expressions of anti-Blackness and misogyny while enacting alternative worlds of erotic freedom through popular art.