Ashri and i: exploring "knowledge" through creative writing

A female protagonist simply identified as "She" remembers and relives acts of violence over a span of years and attempts to cope through poetry and an attachment to an imaginary `other.' Through poetry She imagines Ashri and her kidnap, abused, and descent into madness at the hands of Fin, connecting the pain of her own life with that of Ashri's. This combination of poetry and creative non-fiction is not only about the relation between men and women but also about sharing truths through the retelling of real events. This thesis focuses on the issue of how "knowledge" is created and sanctified by social and academic structures. The story shares the knowledge and the theory explains why it is important. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Can't take my soul: exploring and illuminating the spirituality and spiritual activism within British hip-hop

Hip-hop is a transnational musical genre that has historically affected the lives of marginalized youth in powerful ways across the "Black Atlantic." By using a womanist framework of analysis, this thesis illuminates the ways in which three British hip-hop MC's-Akala, Logic, and Lowkey-employ their music to enact spiritual activism. I explore how their music explicitly and implicitly centers on spirituality and seeks to break down the barriers necessary for spiritual awareness and growth through the awakening and/or transformation of consciousness. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Dream more while you are awake: a correctional fantasy

Before September 2013, I had been in four prisons, none of them currently used to incarcerate people. I had visited them all as a tourist--in Argentina, Cambodia, Chile, and Vietnam--for the purpose of understanding the histories of these countries. My participation in this tragedy tourism certainly informs the reader of the incredible amount of privilege (both personal and communal--to travel internationally as a tourist, to have had the luxury of not having been to prison or jail myself or to have had a incarcerated family member/friend, of having broken the law many times but never getting caught/arrested/charged due to my social and economic positions, to travel to sites of incredible violence out of curiosity, etc.) with which I first came to teach in the prison. For the past three semesters, I have been teaching composition, creative writing, and literature at Alabama prisons. I taught for one semester at Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka and for two semesters at. St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville (I am currently teaching there); both of these are maximum-security state facilities run by the Alabama Department of Corrections. Both Tutwiler and St. Clair have been in the news repeatedly over the past few years for egregious abuses of people incarcerated there. This thesis will, in an associative way, weave together disparate experiences and sources. I will include my personal experiences imagining and then teaching in the prison. Because it is unethical for me to share specific responses, verbal or written, from the students I work(ed) with in the prison, the prisoner voice in the thesis will be limited to narratives of prisoners around the United States excerpted from various published memoirs and collections. I will discuss the Free Alabama Movement manifesto produced by Mevlin Ray, who is incarcerated at St. Clair, which sparked labor strikes at three Alabama prisons in protest of cheap and free prisoner labor in January 2014. I will also contextualize the contemporary prison in the United States by discussing the punitive nature of the prison and its place in a U. S. racist institutional history that evolved from slavery and Jim Crow. I will be in dialogue with such prison theorists as Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, Michel Foucault, and Lisa Guenther. I will also reference the many depictions of prison in popular culture, including everything from television shows like Orange is the New Black and Oz, to leaders such as Bryan Stevenson and Collin Powell, to the Monopoly board game. With Dan Savage's idea that "we eroticize that which we fear," I will also bring the incredible amount of prison pornography into the conversation. The goal of this thesis is not to be a comprehensive analysis of the infinite flaws in the justice system of this country or of the ways in which we collectively support, deny, and necessitate this system. I will touch on, but not exhaust, state surveillance, for-profit prisons, detention of undocumented people, and juvenile detention. The goal is, rather, to attempt to understand my intentions coming to the prison and my experience teaching there by relating my own thoughts and observations to the ocean of prison-related material that floats through popular culture and academia. In addition, I will move between the sources I used in my classes, both to talk about the teaching experience itself and because the experience of teaching, reading, and discussing these pieces inside prisons has shaped the way I consume and remember them. In addition, I will include lyrical descriptions of the prisons themselves. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

"What don't Black girls do?": constructions of deviance and the performance of Black female sexuality

This research interrogates the ways in which Black women process and negotiate their sexual identities. By connecting the historical exploitation of Black female bodies to the way Black female deviant identities are manufactured and consumed currently, I was able to show not only the evolution of Black women's attitudes towards sexuality, but also the ways in which these attitudes manifest when policing deviancy amongst each other. Chapter 1 gives historical insight to the way that deviancy has been inextricably linked to the construction of Blackness. Using the Post-Reconstruction Era as my point of entry, I demonstrate the ways in which Black bodies were stigmatized as sexually deviant, and how the use of Black caricatures buttressed the consumption of this narrative by whites. I explain how countering this narrative became fundamental to the evolution of Black female sexual politics, and how ultimately bodily agency was later restored through sexual deviancy. Chapter 2 interrogates the way "authenticity" is propagated within the genre of reality TV. Black women are expected to perform deviant identities that coincide with controlling images so that the "authenticity" of Black womanhood is consumed by mainstream audiences. Using Vh1's Love and Hip Hop Atlanta and Basketball Wives I analyze the way these identities are performed and policed by the women on both shows. Lastly, Chapter 3 is a reflexive analysis detailing the ways in which Black women process the performances of deviant Black female identities on reality TV using ethnographic methods. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Love's praxis: the political in Kierkegaard's Works of love

The goal of this dissertation is to incorporate Kierkegaard's Works of Love into current theorization of love as a political concept by showing how it models political sensibilities that can be responsive to contemporary problems of political and social injustice. It will be shown that the themes of `love' and `the neighbor', as contained in Works of Love, represent a politics that are critical not only in combating individual commitments to what bell hooks calls, "...the will to dominate and subjugate..." (hooks 1995, 262-272), but the structures of discrimination and oppression that result from such individual commitments as well. This dissertation, then, is concerned with the political subjectivity of the individual as it is, potentially, oriented around the praxis of love of the neighbor, concepts that populate what Lukács termed Kierkegaard's "qualitative dialectic" (Lukács [1952] 1980, 256). (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

The search for place and context: locating strategies of resistance in gay and lesbian subjectivity

This dissertation is about the nature of community and the substance of individual and collective subjectivity. Specifically, I interrogate the character of gay and lesbian subjectivity by investigating the ways in which the gay or lesbian subject is constituted through the discourse on same-sex marriage and military service. I argue that recasting gay subjectivity uncovers more meaningful ontological possibilities for the emergence of a new description of an individual who has relational and social attachments to a broader community while maintaining fidelity and integrity to descriptions of the self. I argue that gay subjectivity begins as a search for models, a search for examples, and of a representation of the self. Gay subjectivity is about a search for place and context in an environment that views homosexuality as merely a marginal sexual identity. It is in this environment that gay and lesbian subjectivity is produced through a heteronormative discourse that distorts what it means to be gay. I argue that marital equality and unqualified military service successfully fulfill the Foucaultian promise of meaningful resistance which allows for a fuller, more meaningful subjectivity to be embraced by gays and lesbians. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

The Jewish lived experience in Cuba

This research utilized an interdisciplinary qualitative approach to inquiry that requires border-crossing as its methodology for discovery in order to fully understand the lived experience of the Jews of Cuba. The study included a deep read of the Jewish Diaspora with a starting point being 597 BCE, then followed thousands of years of waves and world-wide movements, eventually leading to those Jews who settled in Cuba. For access into the lives of the present-day Jews, interviews with four participants who represented a cross-section of the Cuban Hebrew community were conducted; visits to the synagogues and to the kosher butcher shop were made; and many trips to the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic cemeteries in Guanabacoa, Cuba, were also made in order to take photographs and personally visit the sites. The four respondents interviewed were English speakers, were over 20-years old, and were citizens of Cuba. They were asked identical questions via e-mail with follow-up correspondence. For other narrative resources, 19 unpublished recorded stories were transcribed and included in the study to gain further access into the lives of Cuba’s Jewish population. To complete the inquiry, one published narrative was used to show parallels between those who were interviewed, as well as to show the similarities to those voices from the unpublished group. The end research result finds that today’s Cuban Jews, whose rich historical past on the island began as early as 1492, have survived despite all odds, and thrive with their traditions and laws intact. This research covered a period of 4 years—and four separate trips to Cuba. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries