UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item Racial Choice at Century's End in Contemporary African American Literature(2008-11-17) Tucker, Kaylen; Washington, Mary H; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation introduces the term "racial choice" to describe a contemporary idea that racial identity can be chosen or elected, as can the significance and the influence of race on an individual's identity. Racial choice emerges out of the shifting historical, cultural, and social discussions of race and identity we have witnessed after integration. This dissertation examines the resulting representations of contemporary black identity in African American literature by analyzing texts that were published in the last quarter of the twentieth century and that feature protagonists that come of age during or after integration. Andrea Lee's Sarah Phillips (1984), Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998), and Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996) are representative texts that engage racial choice to register how the racial hierarchy has changed in the late twentieth century and how that change affects the African American literary tradition of race writing. In their attempts to write outside of the existing racial paradigm--using white flight, passing, and satire as narrative strategies--the authors test the racial boundaries of African American literature, finding that writing outside of race is ultimately unachievable. The introductory chapter explains the cultural, literary, and scholarly context of my study, arguing that because race matters differently in the late twentieth century contemporary African American literature handles race uniquely. I argue in my first chapter that Lee uses white flight as a narrative form to move Sarah Phillips beyond the influence of racialization and to suggest class as an alibi for racial difference. Continuing this theme amidst the Black Power Movement of the 1970s and the multiracial project of the 1990s, my second chapter analyzes Senna's Caucasia, which revises the passing narrative form and explores the viability of choosing a biracial identity. In my third chapter, I show how Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle satirizes the African American protest tradition to point up the performativity necessary in maintaining racial binaries and suggests that culture is a more accurate identifier than race. My concluding chapter argues that though the three novels under study challenge racial categories--and by extension race writing--to different degrees, they all use similar methods to point up the shifting significance of race, racial categories, and racial identity. By historicizing attitudes about racial categories, challenging the dichotomous understanding of race, representing the tensions of racial authenticity, and showing the performativity necessary to maintain racial categories, the novels illustrate the traditional boundaries of racial choice and attempt to stretch the limits of the African American literary tradition.Item "Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond(2007-05-01) Drake, Simone; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 1970s were a prolific era for Black women's writing. During what is now referred to as the Black Women's Literary Renaissance, Black women writers worked to center Black women's experiences in American and African American literary "traditions" that had theretofore excluded them. This project examines how more recent writing by Black women signifies on the issues and concerns that defined the Renaissance, particularly issues of historical recovery and Black male sexism. Despite the progressive nature of the Renaissance, Black women consistently found that their work was at odds with what Farah Jasmine Griffin calls, "the promise of protection," propagated by Black Nationalism. In response to this patriarchal promise, writers like Toni Morrison, for example, created characters, who like Sula Peace, chose a space of solitude over the patriarchal offer of "protection." I argue that contemporary Black women writers are re-thinking spaces of solitude, and instead proposing a "promise of partnership" that is grounded in a critical gender consciousness. "Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond" is an interdisciplinary study of reformed partnership in the cultural productions of four contemporary Black women writers. Appropriating Homi Bhabha's concept of "dwelling in the beyond," I discuss how these writers imagine a productive and secure space for intra-racial, heterosexual dialogue in Toni Morrison's, Paradise, Erna Brodber's, Louisiana, Kasi Lemmons' film, Eve's Bayou, and Danzy Senna's short story, "The Land of Beulah." Each of these texts suggest that not only do promises of protection leave characters needing "something more," but that previous narratives of kinship and family that were a hallmark of Black women's Renaissance era writing, leave the characters needing "something more," as well. As the texts interrogate familial and heterosexual relationships, they consistently conclude that "the more" is a reformed heterosexual partnership that is grounded in unmotivated respect.