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Building African futures: Afropreneurialism and Innovation in Lagos
Author: Oluwakanyinsola Obayan
Thesis Advisor: Carole Boyce Davies
Degree Date: December 2019
Thesis Advisor: Carole Boyce Davies
Degree Date: December 2019
Abstract:
This dissertation examines how actors in the Lagos startup ecosystem deploy discourses and practices of technological entrepreneurship to fashion new subjectivities within and beyond national boundaries in order to imagine alternative futures for their nation and the African Continent. In so doing, I argue for a reconceptualization of technological innovation beyond materialist preoccupations with objects to include innovative practices of self-making and national boundary-making. I also urge for a redefinition of African entrepreneurship beyond neoliberalism as a complex sociocultural practice...
This dissertation examines how actors in the Lagos startup ecosystem deploy discourses and practices of technological entrepreneurship to fashion new subjectivities within and beyond national boundaries in order to imagine alternative futures for their nation and the African Continent. In so doing, I argue for a reconceptualization of technological innovation beyond materialist preoccupations with objects to include innovative practices of self-making and national boundary-making. I also urge for a redefinition of African entrepreneurship beyond neoliberalism as a complex sociocultural practice at the interstices of culture, capital, and class. And ultimately, I conclude that Africa has always been a site and source of technological innovation, through an examination of the Lagos tech ecosystem as a convergence of deeply entangled global and local processes, practices, and imaginaries.
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DESIROUS DISPOSABILITY: READING CIRCUITS OF RACE, SEX, AND REFUSAL IN 20TH CENTURY BLACK EXPRESSIVE CULTURE
Author: Amaris Brown
Thesis Advisor: Gerard Aching
Degree Date: August 2023
Thesis Advisor: Gerard Aching
Degree Date: August 2023
Abstract:
"Desirous Disposability" reads the ruptures created by African diasporic literature and art to colonial, imperial, neoliberal circuits of desire that dominate ideologies of black subject formation in the aftermath of slavery....
"Desirous Disposability" reads the ruptures created by African diasporic literature and art to colonial, imperial, neoliberal circuits of desire that dominate ideologies of black subject formation in the aftermath of slavery.
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Elastic melodramas: abjection and self-authorship in African-American theater
Author: Kristen Tamara Wright
Thesis Advisor: Sara L. Warner
Degree Date: August 2020
Thesis Advisor: Sara L. Warner
Degree Date: August 2020
Abstract:
My dissertation, "Elastic Melodramas: Abjection and Self-Authorship in African-American Theater," highlights the transformative role of abjection in African American melodrama. The concept of the abject - a state of being "cast off" from society - was initially developed as a dilemma of self-representation by the French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva. Abjection later emerged as a critical concept in the Black Studies canon. It was radically rethought by Frantz Fanon, who argued that Algerians suppressed by French colonial rule were abject...
My dissertation, "Elastic Melodramas: Abjection and Self-Authorship in African-American Theater," highlights the transformative role of abjection in African American melodrama. The concept of the abject - a state of being "cast off" from society - was initially developed as a dilemma of self-representation by the French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva. Abjection later emerged as a critical concept in the Black Studies canon. It was radically rethought by Frantz Fanon, who argued that Algerians suppressed by French colonial rule were abject figures, and later through the critical discussions of Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved. More recently, it has been championed by theorists like Darieck Scott to describe Black queer subjects who enact agency from a place of marginalization. I use the abject as a means of analyzing dramatic literature, specifically African-American melodrama. My work builds upon previous uses of the abject in critical theory and performance studies, which posits the category as a private reaction to a horrible sight. In melodrama, which depends on an exchange of affect between the performers and the audience, the abject becomes public. On stage, we see who is cast off, and can thus mobilize empathy and ultimately, transformation. In my account, the idea of the abject has an elasticity that refers to a character's ability to see freedom beyond the embodiment of white power, harnessing the courage to reshape the contours of an antiblack world. It is the 'othered' bodies on stage - female, disabled, displaced, sick, and poor - who push to imagine a new form of black subjectivity, an Afro-futuristic space beyond abjection. In my dissertation, key authors of plays produced over a century of writing for the American theater are discussed, from Angelina Weld Grimké to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. I ultimately end with a coda on Black melodrama on primetime television, emphasizing that melodrama is a multimodal category, existing on screen and stage.
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Eye/I and eyes/we: reflexsivity and intersubectivity in Afircan glocal visual and auto ethnography
Author: Nadia Marie Sasso
Thesis Advisor: N'Dri Therese Assie-Lumumba
Degree Date: August 2019
Thesis Advisor: N'Dri Therese Assie-Lumumba
Degree Date: August 2019
Abstract:
This dissertation aims to explore West African transnational experiences in order to further understand how identity markers and politics manifest anxieties for transnational migrants and their movements between America and Africa. It engages and expands contemporary understandings of transnationalism with a focus on generational migrants. Generational migrants are defined as 1.5 through second-generation offspring of African immigrants. For the purposes of this research, "1.5-generation" is defined as an individual who was born in Africa and spent most of their lives...
This dissertation aims to explore West African transnational experiences in order to further understand how identity markers and politics manifest anxieties for transnational migrants and their movements between America and Africa. It engages and expands contemporary understandings of transnationalism with a focus on generational migrants. Generational migrants are defined as 1.5 through second-generation offspring of African immigrants. For the purposes of this research, "1.5-generation" is defined as an individual who was born in Africa and spent most of their lives in America, while "second-generation" is used to connote an individual who was born in America to African parents. Reflexivity, intersubjectivity, as well as identity negotiation and/or “code switching” are explored to explicate the experiences of generational migrants. Influenced by the theories and arguments of Stuart Hall, John Arthur, Joanna D'Alisera, W. E. B. Dubois, Pnina Motzafi-Haller, Audre Lorde, and Chandra Mohanty, this dissertation argues for a multiplicity and fluidity of identity (i.e.: holding multiple and sometimes contrary communities while constantly moving between continents), but also I am advocating for the possibility of fluidity in the reflexivity as one moves between these identity markers to create epistemological questions, constitute authorship, and expand representation. This argument is explored in each chapter via problematizing familial structures, African Fashion, ethnographic filmmaking, and auto-ethnographic writing. These contributions will transform the conceptualizations of African diasporic identities from one that is historically limited by bicultural formation into one that asserts the complexity of diasporic consciousness, which will construct new texts.
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Kenbe Fem: Haitian Women’s Migration Narratives and Spaces of Freedom in an Anti-Immigrant America
Author: Marsha Bianca Jean-Charles
Thesis Advisor: Carole Elizabeth Boyce Davies
Degree Date: May 2019
Thesis Advisor: Carole Elizabeth Boyce Davies
Degree Date: May 2019
Abstract:
"Kenbe Fem: Haitian Women's Migration Narratives and Spaces of Freedom in an Anti-Immigrant America" is a study of the impact of forced exodus from Haiti and experiences of anti-Black racism in migration for Haitian women and girls as expressed in narratives of Haitian/Haitian-American women writers. This study demonstrates that writing about coming of age during migratory processes is a genre of literature that captures the diaspora experience and offers a significant way of understanding the nature of women's migration experiences....
"Kenbe Fem: Haitian Women's Migration Narratives and Spaces of Freedom in an Anti-Immigrant America" is a study of the impact of forced exodus from Haiti and experiences of anti-Black racism in migration for Haitian women and girls as expressed in narratives of Haitian/Haitian-American women writers. This study demonstrates that writing about coming of age during migratory processes is a genre of literature that captures the diaspora experience and offers a significant way of understanding the nature of women's migration experiences. Throughout this work, I use the trends, experiences, and themes explored in the texts written by Edwidge Danticat, Roxane Gay, Elsie Augustave, and Ibi Zoboi to deliberate on both the politics of travel for black women and the generative spaces that provide for identity formation, political consciousness-raising, and reimagining of one's place in the world. I introduce a concept of dyaspora saudade- combining the Brazilian notion of “saudade” with the Haitian conceptualization of "dyaspora." Dyaspora saudade is that which also nurtures and provides similarly generative spaces where home is lost, found, contested, and restructured and healing is as much a journey as it is the goal. Lastly, I uncover the politics in these works, conceptualize Black feminist citizenship, and offer foundations on which to imagine better experiences for both marginalized migrants and citizens. This dissertation is an understanding of the revolutionary potential of these texts that involves a foundational shift in conceptions of race, womanhood, class, cosmology, and nationhood that immigration due to forced exodus catalyzes. It is an exploration of the science of this literary revolution- a revolution that interpolates Black women authors publishing in diaspora speaking for, against, and through their kindred. The goal of this literary revolution is to affect change. If struggle brings forth the best of human existence, then the stories of Black immigrant women are masterpieces in their exploration of human social issues that are prominent in contemporary societies worldwide. In my work, I endeavor to comprehend, complicate, catalog, and translate their genius.
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Redrawing the Balance of Power: Black Left Feminists, China, and the Making of an Afro-Asian Political Imaginary, 1949-1976
Author: Zifeng Liu
Thesis Advisor: Russell Rickford
Degree Date: August 2022
Thesis Advisor: Russell Rickford
Degree Date: August 2022
Abstract:
This dissertation traces the history of African American leftist feminists' interactions with Chinese government officials and intellectuals during the first three decades following the end of the Second World War. This period, bookended by the founding of the Chinese Communist regime and the decline both of Maoism in China and of Black radicalism in the US, witnessed concerted efforts by Black women radicals and the party-state to weave the African American freedom struggle, China's socialist construction, and anticolonial national liberation...
This dissertation traces the history of African American leftist feminists' interactions with Chinese government officials and intellectuals during the first three decades following the end of the Second World War. This period, bookended by the founding of the Chinese Communist regime and the decline both of Maoism in China and of Black radicalism in the US, witnessed concerted efforts by Black women radicals and the party-state to weave the African American freedom struggle, China's socialist construction, and anticolonial national liberation movements in Asia and Africa into a united front for a just world order. Examining the engagements of Eslanda Robeson, Claudia Jones, Mabel Williams, and Vicki Garvin with China as case studies, this dissertation shows that the transportation and communication technologies of the era enabled Black left feminists' access to a transnational mediascape through which they mobilized multiple publics toward the cause of antiracism, anti-imperialism, and Third World national liberation. In building Afro-Asian alliances and collaborations, Black radical feminists ensured that women's liberation was part of any revolutionary agenda and formulated new notions of the radical Black female subject that both challenged and reinforced the gender and sexual norms of Cold War China and African America. In addition to negotiating the gender and sexual hierarchies of the time, they also had to carefully maneuver their way through the thickets of Cold War political intrigue and of geopolitical and ideological tension within the Third World and the Communist camp. Although their political imaginaries were fraught by Cold War realpolitik, Black left feminists crafted independent political positions and consciously attempted to forge ahead with their own agendas. The first book-length study of Black women's internationalism in China, this dissertation shows that Black left feminists played a crucial role in shaping the history of Afro-Asian solidarity and the contours of Cold War international relations.
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SCIENCE, MODERNITY, AND PROGRESS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY WEST AND NORTH AFRICA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF JAMES AFRICANUS BEALE HORTON AND RIFA'A AL-TAHTAWI
Author: Zeyad El Nabolsy
Thesis Advisor: Olufemi Taiwo
Degree Date: August 2023
Thesis Advisor: Olufemi Taiwo
Degree Date: August 2023
Abstract:
This dissertation seeks to contribute to a rethinking of the intellectual history of nineteenth century West and North Africa through examining the writings of James Africanus Beale Horton and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi. My focus is on the history of philosophy and science, and the possibility of situating Horton and Tahtawi in the context of the global history of modern philosophy and science. The aim is to show that African intellectuals participated in some of the key debates that characterized and shaped...
This dissertation seeks to contribute to a rethinking of the intellectual history of nineteenth century West and North Africa through examining the writings of James Africanus Beale Horton and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi. My focus is on the history of philosophy and science, and the possibility of situating Horton and Tahtawi in the context of the global history of modern philosophy and science. The aim is to show that African intellectuals participated in some of the key debates that characterized and shaped modernity, and that their engagement in these debates cannot be explained away as being merely the result of their "mental colonization". I argue that far from being mentally colonized, both Tahtawi and Horton had good reasons for holding the views that they held, e.g., the universal validity of modern scientific knowledge, and the possibility of a truly universal philosophy of history centered on the belief in progress. I have chosen to compare a figure from North Africa with a figure from West Africa precisely because the idea that the Sahara desert has been a barrier between Africa south of the Sahara and North Africa has led intellectual historians of Africa and historians of African philosophy to overlook the similarities between the intellectual ferment which took place in parts of West Africa (especially in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Lagos, and the Gold Coast) during Horton's life time (1835 - 1883), and the intellectual ferment which took place in Tahtawi's Egypt over the course of his lifetime (1801 - 1873). Both Horton and Tahtawi, subscribed to philosophies of history centered around progress, and they both believed that modern European societies were superior to their own societies in certain ways (specifically with respect to the social organization of knowledge production), but they differed from many nineteenth century European intellectuals insofar as they did not take these facts as justifying European despotic rule over non-Europeans in general or any form of biological racism.
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