Aberrant Time argues that the additional burdens of involuntary sexual and reproductive labor during slavery led both male and female slave narrators to articulate black women’s uniquely gendered experiences of time. It also asks how newly emancipated women writers portrayed their work time to express agency during Reconstruction. Black women’s work was unorthodox because they were forced to perform manual and domestic labor in addition to sexual and reproductive labor for the personal gratification and financial benefit of their owners. Even after emancipation, the labor and time of black women remained peculiar as many continued to work outside of the home and were subjected to discrimination in a profoundly racist labor market. Drawing from slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup and Elizabeth Keckley, Aberrant Time identifies and analyzes the slave laboring temporalities unique to black women. It also examines how the depictions of black women’s time and labor changes as they progress from puberty to motherhood and transition from slavery to freedom. In analyzing gender and time in African American autobiographies, this dissertation endeavors to correct the implicit scholarly assumption that nineteenth-century African American women and men—slaves in particular—experienced time in the same way.

This thesis identifies a new type of black female character present in African American literature. By extending Trudier Harris' research on representations of the "strong" black woman backwards into the nineteenth century, this thesis argues that the earliest literary depiction of such figures is the "extraordinary black slave woman," an image present in many nineteenth-century slave narratives. In particular, I argue that in the narratives of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, Sylvia Dubois, Zilpha Elaw and Jarena Lee, the extraordinary slave women are depicted as domestic workers, manual laborers, physical resisters, mothers, and spiritual sisters.

“Feeling the Crowd” uses affect theory to analyze representations of middle-class responses to the modern black violent crowd in African American fiction. My project demonstrates that writers ranging from Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952) to Walter Mosley in Little Scarlet (2005) have continuously portrayed black middle-class anxiety in relation to perceived leadership gaps in the collective African American community brought to light by images of black collective violence. Echoing Hazel Carby’s Race Men and Erica Edwards’s Charisma and the Fiction of Black Leadership, I argue that these writers problematize gendered notions of black leadership while they explore anxieties triggered by crowds. I turn to recent work in affect studies to explore these class-based anxieties, in particular Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, which offers a critical lexicon that allows me to attend to both the individual emotions and the collective affective responses that characterize my subject.

While past scholarship on the black crowd in literature tends to focus solely on the collective body, my work, which attempts to recover lesser known novels in conjunction with more canonical texts, offers a fresh approach that considers the individual response to such violence. In the dissertation, each chapter examines a particular time period, with the first devoted to Ellison’s reimagining of a Harlem Riot, which I suggest is depicted as an amalgamation of events that transpired in 1935 and 1943. My second chapter shifts to the 1960s social unrest depicted by Chester Himes, John A. Williams, Sam Greenlee, and Walter Mosley. The third chapter considers the post-1992 fiction written by Los Angeles-based women writers Bebe Moore Campbell and Paula Woods. Finally, my last chapter continues to focus on Los Angeles as it considers the juxtaposition of black collective violence with multiple references to the jazz musician Eric Dolphy in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996).

The Fictional Black Blues Figure: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention, Kimberly Mack

My dissertation examines representations of black American blues musicians in contemporary American fiction, drama, and popular music, and it argues that blues music can be examined as a narrative art rooted in the tradition of fictionalized autobiographical self-fashioning. I contend that the contemporary, multi-racial, literary and musical characters in my project who participate in so-called “authentic” blues expression create, sometimes consciously and sometimes unwittingly, a fiction on top of a fiction. This project questions the belief held by many blues scholars, critics, and fans that blues music is a racially essentialized form instead of a narrative tradition made possible through carefully constructed autobiographical and biographical fictions.

My project makes two important interventions into traditional discussions of blues production and the representations of blues figures in 20th- and 21st-century American literature. First, it destabilizes racial, socio-cultural, temporal, and gendered blues tropes by shifting blues expression from an innate skill to a storytelling art form through which its makers invent themselves. Second, this study allows for a different, interdisciplinary approach to autobiographical and biographical expression. In this project, I excavate literary and musical texts in order to identify moments of autobiographical and biographical articulation. Rather than relying on texts that are generically marked as autobiography or biography, my project teases out the autobiographical and biographical utterances in a wider variety of literary and musical texts. When narrators or characters tell their stories (in my project, songs, musical performances, and interviews with real-life musicians are stories too), they use formal structures, like description or dialogue, to define their lives and personalities. These mini-narratives constitute autobiographies or biographies, even if they are not formal ones.

In my opening chapter, literary texts that include iconic American bluesman Robert Johnson as a character, such as Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie and RL’s Dream by Walter Mosley, juxtapose Johnson, the character, with his historical, mythologized, biographical representation, allowing him to subvert or support his depiction through fictionalized autobiographical expression. Other chapters focus on the self-fashioning of female blues musicians, on the blues apprenticeship, and on blues rocker Jack White’s autobiographical self-invention.

This thesis offers a critical analysis of matrilineal legacies and traumatic memories in twentieth-century neo-slave narratives by black female authors in the literary works of Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. These three novels identify ways in which captivity and liberation, orality and literacy, positionality and self-making situate the black enslaved woman as the physical and psychic bearer of transgenerational trauma. Each novel counters white male supremacy and its connection to violence against the body and power over spatial movement. In response to historical oppression, female protagonists in each text oppose projected master narratives by challenging the various guises of knowledge through reading, writing, speech, and song. Formations of Matrilineal Memory: Sites of Trauma within Twentieth-Century Neo-Slave Narratives contends that the enslaved black woman is at the epicenter of maternal genealogies and unmediated historical erasure.

This dissertation examines Black-authored novels featuring White (or White-passing)

protagonists in the post-World War II decade (1945-1956). Published during the fraught

postwar political climate of agitation for integration and the continual systematic racism, many

novels by Black authors addressed the urgent topic of interracial relationality, probing the

tabooed question of whether Black and White can abide in love and kinship. One of the

prominent—and controversial—literary strategies sundry Black novelists used in this decade was

casting seemingly raceless or ambiguously-raced characters. Collectively, these novels generated

a mixture of critical approval and dismissal in their time and up until recently, marginalized from

the African American literary tradition. Even more critically overlooked than the ostensibly

raceless project was the strategic mobilization of the trope of passing by some midcentury Black

writers to imagine the racial divide and possible reconciliation.

This dissertation intersects passing with postwar Black fiction that features either

racially-anomalous or biracial central characters. Examining three novels from this historical period as my case studies, I argue that one of the ways in which Black writers of this decade have imagined the possibility of interracial love—with all its political pitfalls and ethical imperatives —is through the trope of passing. Through the paradoxical leitmotif of passing with its ontological defiance, fugitive liminality, and its distinctly African American historical association, Willard Savoy, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin invoke the Judeo-Christian ethics of the neighbor—loving one’s neighbor as oneself—to envision love across different borders and to underscore the need for intersectional accountability, breaking down the binary divisions associated with race, gender, class, and sexuality, as well as between the oppressor and the oppressed. They imagine passing as a vexed yet productive site or passage way toward neighbor-love. The primary methodological thread that interweaves my chapters is the use of intertextual lens: By reading the novel under study against works by the same author or by other African American writers, I spotlight the shared commitment of the authors studied to the ethics of neighbor-love as well as their deep engagement with the African American literary tradition.

The Work of Movement Literatures: Images of Labor in 1960s and 1970s African American and Latinx Writing tracks the depiction of labor in 1960s and 1970s US movement literature. My three chapters examine the ways in which authors involved in the Black Arts Movement, the Chicano Movement, and the Nuyorican Movement developed urgent critiques of labor by representing the struggles of Black and Brown workers. Each chapter offers a study of how a central author of US movement literature constructs a particular story about the meaning of labor for racialized populations. I look at how the writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and Pedro Pietri respond to the world of work by depicting the arduous experiences of workers either absorbed in or excluded from the formal labor market. These writers engage the labor of several kinds of workers, constructing critiques of different working environments and practices.

“Time’s Citizens” explores how American fiction shaped the public classification of sexual identification and civic membership in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During a period when discourses of anti-progressive deviance were used for purposes of civic exclusion, “Time’s Citizens” argues that a subset of novelists deployed the qualities ascribed to queers in order to claim civic presence. As critics have shown, the U.S. novel in both its realist and its romantic incarnations has long depicted heterosexual life to underwrite civil belonging. The novels of my study—Henry James’s The Bostonians, William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Nella Larsen’s Passing and Quicksand—expose and critique this formation through their depiction of racial, sexual, and gendered exclusion. Even as the modern sexual binary was coming into articulation, these novels show queer modes of belonging that did not assimilate to the heteronormative model standardized in the law and assumed in most literature. “Time’s Citizens” claims that this strain of U.S. fiction reveals the limitations on rights for subjects who did not contribute to the narrative of national progress, which was associated with marriage, reproductive futurity, property ownership, and the regulated time of the industrial economy.

In dialogue with current trends in queer theory and historiography, “Time’s Citizens” suggests that the novel was uniquely positioned to register the political stakes of queer difference. Deploying the temporal deviance used to represent queer subjects and their relation to, antagonism toward, or erasure by the progressive, reproductive state, the novel was able to represent modes of civic presence that were becoming impossible under U.S. social and legal regimes. To explore the relation between politics and the novel, “Time’s Citizens” works at the intersection of legal studies, critical race theory, and the investigations of queer time to show how marginal figures of a variety of identities relate to the ongoing struggle for equal rights and representation. When taken together, the novels of this study question the presumption of normativity and view queerness as a mode of identification deeply tied to civic structures and local politics. Instead of carving a separate sphere for queer being, these texts sought relations to citizenship not predicated on conformity but able to accommodate more diverse modes of expression and identification.

My project examines the historical ideas of American identity that developed in early U.S. periodicals, the most popular form of print in the 18th- and 19th-century U.S. In periodicals, I show, American identity was often imagined as a category distinct from nationality or U.S. citizenship, and expressed a host of local and contingent meanings. I look beyond the book form to historicize U.S. writers’ ideas of the relationship between the American, the U.S. government, and the nation it purportedly represented.

My dissertation is a comparative analysis of Arab American and African American literature spanning from the Cold War era up to the present “War on ‘Terror.’” I examine how paradigms of security are constructed and contested within the texts under analysis, and argue that the writers’ recurrent trope of using socio-political struggle as a means of cohering transnational sentiments of solidarity constitutes a larger critique of the boundless scope of oppressive disciplinary paradigms. Furthermore, I show how the texts indicate—however implicitly or fleetingly—possibilities for a more egalitarian, alternative social order in place of the current hegemonic status quo.

Chapter One, “‘Relax! We not studying you guys:’ Making State Scrutiny (In)Visible Via Resistance Poetics,” is dedicated to a comparative analysis of African American June Jordan’s poetry (Living Room, 1985) and Palestinian American Suheir Hammad’s verse in Born Palestinian, Born Black (1993). I effect a close reading of select pieces from each collection to demonstrate how both consciously engage the direct overlap between state surveillance and disciplinary repression and ostensibly removed projects of imperial and colonial subjugation.

Chapter Two, “The Global Reach of the Racial Gaze: Cosmopolitanism (or Exile?) in William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face and Sam Greenlee’s Baghdad Blues” begins by establishing some of the key conceptual frames for my dissertation. Reading Smith’s The Stone Face (1963) against Greenlee’s Baghdad Blues (1976), I consider Denise Ferreria da Silva’s contention of how an insufficient interrogation of the Enlightenment conception of “Man” allows for the instantiation of “the global” as an organizing apparatus for the perpetuation of worldly racial subjugation. Drawing from the writings of Edward Said, I close this chapter with a reappraisal of whether “cosmopolitanism” or “exile” constitutes the most appropriate framework for the extra-nationalist anti-racisms reflected in either text.

Chapter Three, “‘you stare at the cops for as long as they stare at you:’ Law and Disorder in the Novels of John A. Williams,” is dedicated to a consideration of Williams’ novels The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969). Specifically, I consider how both novels evidence an urgent form of what I am calling “security poetics” through their categorization of the ultimate (often implicit) task of state and federal police as the perpetuation of racial inequality and liquidation of anti-hierarchical political visions, regardless of borders or boundaries.

The concluding chapter of my dissertation, “‘New World Disorder:’ Disfiguring a Perpetual Present,” takes up another assault of the post 9/11 climate that remains less-theorized: the assault upon time and history. Simply put, the War on Terror initiates an apparent arresting of temporal and historical progression vis-�-vis a perpetual present of interminable paranoia, protracted imperialism/colonization, and an ever-prefigured, preemptive necessity for racial punishment via global policing and incarceration. By way of a phenomenon I am currently terming “securitization’s disciplinary tautology,” the objectified subject of a charge of “terrorism” is deprived of any symbolic or rhetorical recourse towards exculpation. For these reasons, the writers under investigation in my final chapter (playwright Ismail Khalidi and novelist Mohja Kahf, respectively) engage in literary efforts that I classify as disfiguring, challenging the hegemonic and exceptionalist conceptions of “Terrorism” of the “War on ‘Terror’s’” perpetual present with the excavated histories of joint struggle, overlapping persecutions and common religious and cultural heritage.