Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed

Outlines best-practice strategies historically black colleges and universities in Texas used in the 1990s to lower student loan default rates and avoid losing federal aid, including campuswide collaboration, partnerships, and teaching financial literacy

Romance, Race and Resistance in Best-Selling African American Narrative

This dissertation critically examines popular romantic fiction by African American writers and argues for its inclusion in the canons and curricula of African American literary studies. While novels that privilege themes of love and romance and that appeal primarily to a mass-market audience have tended to be cast as antithetical to matters of racial uplift and social protest, my work reverses this bias, establishing such texts as central to these concerns. I argue that popular romantic fiction and its authors have a particular story to tell in the history of African American literature, one that reveals a desire to address racial concerns but also, as importantly, to reach a wide audience. Using the work of critical race theorists and feminist studies of the romance and sentimental genres, I identify the "racial project" undertaken in the popular romantic fiction of three best-selling African American writers in the latter-half of the twentieth century-- Frank Yerby, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan. I begin my study with a discussion of the "contingencies of value" and the need for an ongoing process of canon revision in African American literary studies. In Chapter One, I argue that in his first published novel, The Foxes of Harrow (1946), Yerby uses the platform of historical romance to illuminate the instability and unreliability of racial identity. In Chapter Two, I argue that in Tar Baby (1981), Morrison integrates the narratives of romance and race to critique the popular romance genre's lack of racial diversity and perpetuation of white female beauty. In Chapter Three, I argue McMillan uses her first three novels, Mama (1987), Disappearing Acts (1989) and Waiting to Exhale (1992) to advance new paradigms of contemporary domesticity that for the young, urban, upwardly mobile black females portrayed in her novels both disrupt idealized notions of love and marriage and redefine gender roles within heterosexual unions. This study illuminates the critical biases that have shaped African American literary history, calls for a reassessment of those practices, and most importantly, in arguing for the serious study of popular romantic fiction, provides a critical framework for taking on the study of fiction - popular romantic or not - that has been similarly neglected by literary critics

Fallacies of hope: Contesting narratives of abolition in Turner’s Slave Ship

This article explores the risks and dangers of redemptive readings of JMW Turner’s (in)famous 1840 painting, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon Coming on) that assume that we cannot be complicit in anything other than abolition and deliberately forget and disavow the underlying structures and continuing dispossessions of slave racial capitalism. The paper reads the painting as an intervention in an important set of nineteenth-century debates around slavery and the slave trade, and as a key element in the war over representations over slavery. How should we incorporate black death and white abolitionism into our stories, self-understandings and conceptions of justice? Turner’s painting brings us all into a space of temporal entanglement, and leaves us to question the history of modernity and the meaning of freedom both in the past and in the present

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak

In 1997 I was asked to organize humanities outreach activities at the University of California, Irvine. The result was the formation of Humanities Out There (HOT). In our workshops, faculty members and graduate students supervise teams of undergraduates in order to take the methods and materials of the university into the larger community.I believe that programs like these will  become increasingly important in the next century, as economic, cultural, and educational divisions deepen in the wake of the demise of affirmative action and as the humanities fight to define their missions in a world driven by technology and its discontents. In this brave new world, what I call the new outreach may have a role to play in responding to social crises as they are visited on the life of the university. The new outreach will be driven by intellectual content, not public relations.It will take its orientation from the faculty rather than administrators. It will engage all the research disciplines rather than remain the purview of education departments. It will be integrated into the professional lives of its participants rather than rely on the spirit of volunteerism alone

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak

In 1997 I was asked to organize humanities outreach activities at the University of California, Irvine. The result was the formation of Humanities Out There (HOT). In our workshops, faculty members and graduate students supervise teams of undergraduates in order to take the methods and materials of the university into the larger community.I believe that programs like these will  become increasingly important in the next century, as economic, cultural, and educational divisions deepen in the wake of the demise of affirmative action and as the humanities fight to define their missions in a world driven by technology and its discontents. In this brave new world, what I call the new outreach may have a role to play in responding to social crises as they are visited on the life of the university. The new outreach will be driven by intellectual content, not public relations.It will take its orientation from the faculty rather than administrators. It will engage all the research disciplines rather than remain the purview of education departments. It will be integrated into the professional lives of its participants rather than rely on the spirit of volunteerism alone