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Events
Apr. 7 | MAASA Joint Conference—April, 2011
Joint conference on material culture, April 7-11, 2011, UW-Madison
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Fulton-Maybin, DoVeanna S. "'When Oral and Written Traditions Meet and Mingle:' Black Feminist Orality in African-American Women's Narratives of Slavery," American Studies, University of Minnesota, March 1999.
This dissertation is a study of African-American women’s oral formations—both lived and imagined—of slavery experiences. Through the orality African-American women use to relate slave experiences in autobiography and fiction, I identify constructions of usable pasts for the storyteller to negotiate or validate her present and effect self-representation that supports Black female autonomy. Using literary and rhetorical analysis in combination with methodology employed by Black feminist scholars, I explore different forms of oral discourse demonstrated in oral and written narratives by African-American women. My dissertation recognizes Black women writers use orality to unite oral and written traditions. Thus, this unification is a literary tradition that expresses Black women’s experiences to affirm Black subjectivity in an environment that would like to exclude Black presence.
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