Racial Paraconstructions: Black Political Identities in Literature, 1892-1931
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Smith, Justin Alec
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 10, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Tina Goudie, Major Field Member
Aldon Nielsen, Major Field Member
Shirley Moody, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Mark Morrisson, Program Head/Chair
Kathryn Belle, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- African American Literature
Black Studies
Realism
Modernism
Print Culture
Critical Race Theory
Identity Politics - Abstract:
- My dissertation, Racial Paraconstructions: Black Political Identities in Literature, 1892-1931, positions the period from the end of the nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth century as a period where what race meant was a particularly open question, due to the shifting discourses of immigration, segregation, and racial pseudo-science. African American writing from this period captures this fluidity, as the transition from realism to modernism in Black writing reflects aesthetic and thematic changes as well as the changing possibilities of representing a vision for Black politics. African Americans proposed various, competing explanations of race mediated by their differential and unequal access to forms of publishing. The term paraconstructions describes alternative, thwarted, and illegible constructions of race that were non-hegemonic, and ultimately failed to be incorporated into broader societal understandings of race. Each chapter traces race as it intersects with things such as law, science, print culture, the Black radical tradition, gender, and sexuality. I demonstrate how various African American writers sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly offered radically different conceptions of Blackness and the experience of being Black. Reconsidering these lost racial constructions in the context of their political utility at the time of their creation is important for nuancing deployments of race in contemporary identity politics.