Dagbovie-Mullins, Sika

Throughout the 21st century, some artists, athletes, and politicians began to use their platforms to speak out against the issues of systemic racism and police brutality that continue to affect black Americans to this day. While this outpouring of support for the black community has helped move the needle in terms of equity and inclusion initiatives, critics have often labeled these figures and movements too public or loud, conflating the concepts of talking and loudness with resistance to the status quo. Yet, in an era when “silence is not an option” and “quietness is complicity,” African American authors and artists have taken a subtle and quiet approach to depicting the lives of enslaved men and women. More specifically, novels, films, and art from the past two decades portray resistance as not only a public and physical phenomenon, but a mental and ideological one. This dissertation project comes at the intersection of African American literary, religious, and historical studies to argue that quiet and internal acts, such as surrender, memory, and visions, throughout contemporary representations of slavery provide an effective form of resistance to white hegemonic authority, ideology, and values. It asks readers to look beyond the public and the loud, to think about resistance that is not merely physical, to consider the possibilities present in reticence.

“Psychoanalysis and Dreams in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Exploring Continuities and Ruptures of Trauma Cycles,” explores the function of dreams as they relate to trauma and memory. This thesis argues that a character’s engagement with their dreams leads to a healing discontinuity of traumatic cycles, while dreams left untouched likely result in historical and transgenerational cycles and the continuation of personal trauma and its symptoms. This thesis compares the dreams of the characters Beloved and Denver. In part because Morrison notes her influence from both African and Western traditions, this paper argues that a sufficient understanding of dreams in her work requires a multiplicity of approaches. This thesis draws on a plurality of ideas from African and Western perspectives of dreams, the intersections of race and psychoanalysis, and trauma theory. The focus on dreams extends the arguments of critics who analyze trauma in Beloved more generally.

This thesis project examines the intertextuality between Cameron Awkward-Rich’s poetry collection Sympathetic Little Monster (2016) and earlier African American texts: Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents of a Slave Girl (1860) and Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973). Focusing on intertextuality and the trope of the train, this project analyzes Awkward-Rich’s collection which details how black bodies are still subjected to oppression and anti-black/anti-trans violence. His poems explore how black trans subjects are inhibited from reaching “arrival,” wholeness, and freedom in one’s representation and expression of their identity. White supremacy and constructs of race and gender attempt to dictate the speakers’ movements, possibilities, and mobility. Paying close attention to references to the past and the trope of the train, I examine how Awkward-Rich’s poetry interrogates black trans legibility, subjectivity, and subjugation.