This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of Virginia's enslaved plantation cooks that seeks to advance our understanding of their contributions to Virginia's rich cultural traditions. By examining the archaeological record, material culture, cultural landscapes, folklore, written records, and racialized and gendered spaces this study uncovers the hidden voices of the men and women who cooked for their enslavers. Enslaved cooks were highly skilled, trained, and professional, creating meals that made Virginia known for its cuisine and hospitality. They were at the core of Virginia's domesticity and culinary pride as well as the center of the plantation community. Archaeological and historical records reveal the centrality of the cook's role and the material culture exemplifies how cooks created a Black landscape within a white world, and were able to share this unique space with the larger enslaved population. This study also explores the memory of enslaved cooks and their legacy in American culture.

This dissertation argues that in order to better understand the actions and experiences of African American women in nineteenth-century Missouri, we must not only use an intersectional lens that accounts for race and class, but also consider the ways what I call diagonality, which relates to geography and spatial factors, impacted their lives. I use the story of an obscure, formerly enslaved African American woman named Agnes Evans, in Franklin County, to argue that African American women sometimes chose not to pursue redress through legal pathways, and instead redressed their grievances informally, based on a moral authority. Drawing on newspapers, probate cases, and court records, I analyze the case of Evans, who allegedly embezzled personal property from her deceased former enslaver in 1870. I situate this dissertation within studies of the racialized and gendered nature of Black women’s archival silences and invisibility, examining the tension between moral and legal rights, and the ways intersectionality and diagonality shaped decisions around pursuits of redress.

This dissertation explores the making of race and the politics of belonging in Costa Rica between 1921 and 1950, during a period of shifting racial borders and entangled terrains of power. While the idea of "racial democracy" and official discourses of mestizaje (racial mixing) predominate in Latin America, Costa Rica has been long held as a unique country in Central America with an exceptional social geography characterized by "whiteness" and homogeneity. Employed in the United Fruit Company enclave in the Atlantic region of Limón since the late nineteenth century but not formally granted citizenship until 1949, persons of British West Indian origin posed alternative claims to racial belonging, based heavily on the language and ideas of Garveyism--the Pan-African political philosophy of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The surge of anti-imperial protest against the United Fruit Company in the 1920s and the subsequent renegotiation of the Company's contract in 1934 transferred the centers of banana production from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, where "persons of color" were prohibited from employment. This process re-drew the borders of the nation and initiated the "Costa Ricanization" of Limón. Theorizing Limón as a borderland formed by the encounters of U.S., Central American, and Caribbean ideas of race, this dissertation maps the convergences and divergences of two distinct yet interwoven articulations of racial citizenship in Costa Rica; one West Indian, Garveyite, and black, and the other criollo-identified and white.

Utilizing interdisciplinary research methods and critical theories of race and diaspora, this project employs an analytical lens that engages the national and transnational politics of race, and the relationship between space, power, discourse, and visual culture in the making and contestation of racial belonging. This dissertation draws from the fields of African Diaspora Studies, Latin American Studies, Intellectual History, Cultural Geography, Women's Studies, and Media Studies to analyze the languages, logics, signifiers, and imageries of racial belonging, reading newspapers and petitions as "counterarchives" and key sites where Costa Ricans and West Indians forged cultures of redemption and contours of citizenship, putting them on the record.

Introducing the concept of "redemptive geographies," the discursive spaces and territorial claims in which Costa Ricans and West Indians negotiated modern subjectivity and "diasporic" identity, this dissertation examines the re-mapping of the European and African diasporas alongside articulations of belonging to the Costa Rican nation. Costa Ricans re-formulated criollo whiteness and re-inscribed a mythology of homogeneity based on an identification with the Spanish settlers of the colonial past. The idea of national whiteness reinforced the outsider status of West Indians and was also an anti-imperial critique of the power of United Fruit in the country, which effectively reduced them to the status of colonized non-whites. Plagued with the problems of placelessness, lack of citizenship, and misrepresentation as savage threats to the Costa Rican nation, West Indians "invented" Africa in particular ways, highlighting legacies of greatness and civilization through the poetics and imageries of Garveyism to articulate black modernity and Afro-Costa Rican identity.

A key function of the dissertation is to highlight the internal hierarchies and exclusions that underpin the making of these redemptive geographies, complicating the notion of looking at history from below. I examine the ways Costa Rican and Garveyite ideologies of racial belonging invoked ideas and discourses of respectability, upstanding morality, and honorable behavior that drew interior borders along the lines of class, culture, gender, and sexuality. Defining and representing female honor was critical to producing and reproducing the authentic national body. I not only investigate the imageries of womanhood, motherhood, and femininity--including the frequent photographs of women featured in the newspapers--but I also analyze the ways that women theorized their own place within the projects of redemption.

While Black educational history generally centers the infamous debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, this dissertation re-conceptualizes this framing through an innovative exploration of the work of Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950). Culture, Curriculum, and Consciousness analyzes Woodson’s argument that the ideological foundations of schools relied on a human history of the world that centered Whiteness and distorted the humanity of Black people. He not only advocated for a transformation that would supplant the ideological stronghold White supremacy had on Black education, but he simultaneously created an alternative model that centered Black humanity and cultural achievements. Coupling archival methods with critical text analysis and coding schemes, I examine how Woodson institutionalized his educational praxis through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), self-published textbooks, and his close relationship with Black teacher networks. Most importantly, the dissertation exposes the theoretical, pedagogical, and curricular insights Woodson’s model of education offers for contemporary challenges in Black schooling.

I analyze letters between Woodson and key educational figures, sales documents regarding his textbooks and publishing company, annual reports published in Woodson’s Journal of Negro History, reflections by his past students and mentees, and pamphlets he disseminated amongst Black teachers. In building on these materials and more, the project utterly unmasks Woodson’s educational praxis and the findings present him as a pioneering scholar in Black educational reform.

Woodson’s absence in the historical narrative, despite his prominence amongst Black teachers, is evidence of the failures of the prevailing frameworks. To address this elision, Culture, Curriculum, and Consciousness writes Woodson and his iconic educational model directly into the historical narrative and, in doing so, reimagines the Black educational trajectory. The pinnacle of this study lies in the "Black Educational Heritage," a new analytical framework for studying schooling and Black life. This more expansive framing of Black educational history is born at the intersection of education, freedom, and affect.

Culture, Curriculum, and Consciousness presents Woodson as an educational theorist. His philosophy offers a counterweight against contemporary discourse on “the Black educational crisis,” which largely fails to engage the role of power, hegemonic culture, and racial ideology in facilitating what has been termed African American underachievement. This rigorous historical and theoretical engagement with Woodson’s educational model urges us to deal with the most pressing moral and intellectual challenges as it pertains to American schooling. The first step in any purposeful education is the recognition of a people’s humanity—the failure to do so only sustains schools as a site of Black suffering.

This study considers the social, cultural, and political production of black women's humor, making the case that humor becomes more than merely a technique of entertainment. Instead, I argue that humor is a mode of literacy and site of self-authorship for African American women across a variety of discursive fields, including literature, sketch comedy, stand-up comedy, and electoral politics. Usually described as a "routine," the professional stand-up comics of this study are in fact presenting new ways of thinking about race, class, sex, culture, and power. Using archival research, ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and close readings of performances, this dissertation engages several questions: how do black women use humor to express emotions like desire, anger, and contempt? What are the effects of black women's public performances on their own identities? What do their performances tell us about black culture? How do ideas about black womanhood and feminism factor into their dialogue? What personal, political, and economic opportunities does stand-up comedy offer African American comediennes? Finally, how do black women engage in practices of self-fashioning in and through stand-up comedy? A deeper understanding of the affective and political dimensions of black women comedians' practices highlights stand-up comedy as a renegade space in which performers move literally and figuratively from outrageous comics to become audacious thinkers and potent social critics.

This dissertation is a historical analysis of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the movement for Black lives (MBL) in Los Angeles from 2013 to 2021. It is also a theoretical consideration of the prospects and complications of racial justice activism in the 21st century. It interrogates the political philosophies and organizational strategies of BLM/MBL. This study explores how the intervention of intersectional, intergenerational, and decentralized leadership forms have disrupted heteropatriarchal traditions in the Black freedom struggle. It evaluates the significance and utility of Marxism in addressing issues of economic crisis and state-sanctioned violence from the 2008 Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also evaluates how BLM/MBL has interfaced with labor organizing and other racial justice developments like the #StopAsianHate, #AbolishICE, and Indigenous Sovereignty movements. Lastly, it examines the vital role of youth and student activism in college campuses and community-based non-profit organizations in both initiating BLM/MBL and in sustaining its mobilization.

KEY WORDS: Black Lives Matter, racial justice activism, abolition, anti-capitalism, intersectionality, Marxism, state-sanctioned violence, labor organizing, youth activism

Since the death of Michael Brown Jr. on August 9, 2014, the social media platform Twitter and its Black usership have become central actors in the production and dissemination of news, political action, and protests challenging anti-Blackness. This dissertation explores what I call the Black Twitter Turn as a pivot away from what I term selfsploitation as its primary identifiable cultural currency. The Black Twitter Turn has transformed Twitter into a place to pushback and challenge dominant white racial frames rooted in white supremacy. It also serves as a site for making Black voices and concerns audible and unavoidable as both a community and as a media force. Black Twitter has provided community for working-class folk, Black freedom fighters and also for those considered to be Black elites (athletes and celebrities), furnishing them all with a safe-space to publicly protest anti-Blackness, becoming a homeplace of resistance.

This dissertation reconceptualizes war and conflict by exploring Angolan women’s complex and contradictory entanglement with war and peace. Given the gendered ways that Angolan women were mobilized to enter national war projects, this dissertation examines the experiences and pivotal roles women played in the “People’s War” (1961-1975) and the civil war and conflict following the proclamation of independence (1976-2002). How Angolan women participated in national liberation struggles as well as how they respond to violence, gets at the intersection of theories of memory and embodiment and disrupts the popular narrative that all women are inclined toward peacemaking. Taking a feminist theoretical approach and utilizing feminist ethnography as a pertinent tool for making visible the experiences and voices of African women in wartime, this dissertation argues that women are often rendered invisible in the big narrative of nationalism because of the highly masculinist nature of national politics. Nevertheless, their presence as historical agents and patriots is made possible through the symbolic trope of women as mothers of the nation. Paying attention to the centrality of the Angolan female body in the politics of the nation also reveals that despite women’s participation in national freedom struggles, peace and security for them remained elusive, limited, and always precarious. Lastly, this dissertation interrogates gender-specific forms of wartime violence against women in order to demonstrate how the Angolan female body functioned as a screen onto which both Portuguese colonialists and Angolan men could project their patriarchal desires and anxieties around power and masculinity.

Awaiting Middle Ground contributes to Black feminist scholarship with respect to the medicalization of disability, gender, and sexuality in American biomedical and literary discourse. By shifting Disability Studies and African American Studies’ attention to sexology archives in the post-World War II era, this project provides a historiography of intersexuality as a racial project that resonates in the contemporary moment. Following the intersex protocols put into motion by sexologist Dr. John Money, I argue that Dr. Money championed patients’ narratives that disavowed embodied difference. Essentially, patients’ bodies and behaviors were medicalized and regulated toward whiteness, able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, and heterosexuality, and away from Black, disabled, and intersex difference.

Simultaneously, I examine intersex representations and disability metaphors in fiction, including Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002) and Alexis De Veaux’s Yabo (2014). I contend that the novels are intersex counternarratives to those produced within American biomedicine in the post-WWII era. I utilize historian Miriam Reumann’s notion of “American sexual character” to argue that dimorphic genitals and gender normativity were aspects of an American reinvestment in sexual and racial morality and able-bodiedness and able-mindedness in the face of foreign and domestic adversaries. I attend to the interrelated archives, pathological representations, intersectionality, and alliances between Black, intersex, and disabled people and fictional characters, by joining in on the conversations in Critical Intersex Studies from scholars David A. Rubin, Morgan Holmes, and Hilary Malatino; in Disability and Crip Studies from Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer; and in Black feminist disability studies from Moya Bailey and Sami Schalk.

This interdisciplinary project draws from American medical archives, the history of science and medicine, queer theory, Black feminisms and Feminist Science Studies, and African American literary criticism to offer another interlaced genealogy of Blackness and disability. As an invitation to African American Studies, this dissertation presents a pedagogical and methodological account of other, peripheral, Black bodies and minds.

Nigger Chaos is a multifaceted and multilayered experimental storytelling project in Black Studies. The stories and pieces of data from which this dissertation draws is animated by the theoretical formations of violent black rebels, sutured together by the sonics of black musicians, arranged and composed with the fugitive in mind. In one register, this study departs from traditional scholarly inquiries into violent black rebellion wherein violence is operationalized as a dependent variable within a predictable arc that extols resistance, rescues the black body, ascribes it with agentic characteristics, and/or identifies rebellion as symptomatic of a larger phenomenon enacted with a predetermined teleological endpoint. Nigger Chaos understands the violence of the black rebel as an independent variable imbued with narrative properties possessing distinctly autonomous semantic and material characteristics. Reconceptualizing violent black rebellion in this manner not only elucidates how the use of violence by black people has historically served as an effort to reshape their lives, but also how their utilization of violence – as an ideological formation freed from means/ends – challenges the founding epistemological antagonisms upon which colonial and state power was created and maintained, namely who is killable and who is not. And, on another scale, Nigger Chaos attends to the long intellectual history that carefully created our current epistemological socio-politico-juridical order and examines the ways in which violent black rebellion intervenes, in the form of a question mark, to postulate different possibilities and new potentialities of being. I do this by tracing the epistemology that animates the codification of the pirate within the legal and political imagination of Western statecraft and analyzing the ways in which these grammars have been transumed over and across time. It is suggested that the interplay between the state and the pirate – as the enemy of all, to whom no rights are afforded and no protection owed – discloses the positionality of the violent black rebel. That is, our current socio-politico-juridical epistemological order, by design, constrains the black subject’s opportunity for redress to be found in appeals to the state. And yet, it is this very same positionality – always an enemy, always potentially violent, and always an internal threat – that makes possible for a new political praxis.