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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Marshall, Courtney. "Sisters in Crime: Black Femininity, Law, and Literature in American Culture," English, University of California, Los Angeles, July 2009. Advisor: Arthur Little
My dissertation addresses twentieth-century legal and literary discourses of black female criminality. After Emancipation, stereotypes of black women as simple and content to serve the needs of whites gave way to popular images of black women as menacing, immoral, and dishonest. Black women’s supposed propensity for crime maps onto and influences an attendant shift in thinking about race as a social problem and a subsequent cultural investment in formal and informal policing. Authors such as Ann Petry, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison write back to this criminalization of black women and use literature as a site for contestation and resistance to existing concepts of American criminal law. In 2001, Liz Garbus continued their work when she followed the last months of condemned murderer Wanda Jean Allen and made domestic violence and capital punishment black feminist issues. At the center of these texts is a double movement—a recognition of law as unfairly transactive and disciplinary alongside a need to interrogate displays of improper and oftentimes violent behavior. These writers, I argue, complicate a formulation that early black women writers inaugurated: the virtuous, law-abiding race woman. Blending critical race feminism, critical criminology, and black feminist literary theory, my approach complicates the legibility of crime, reframes current premises about the relationship between law and crime, and redirects conversations within the field of law and literature.
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