Title:

UnWritten, UnDefined, UnEquivocally Black: How Black Women Release their Inhibition in Literature

Abstract:

This project, UnWritten, UnDefined, UnEquivocally Black: How Black Women Release their Inhibition in Literature, explores how political movements like the Black Power Movement of the 1970s and feminism between 1955 and 1972 shape contemporary Black playwrights’ engagement with narratives of Africa, Africanism, and Black womanhood. My research examines how race and gender intersect in literature and theater, challenging long-standing American narratives.

Through intensive readings, film analysis, and historical research, I investigated how Black women writers’ stories are often overlooked when they deviate from stereotypical depictions of Black female characters. This erasure influences the kinds of narratives Black women produce. Under the guidance of Professor Meenakshi Ponnuswami Associate Professor of English, Affiliated Faculty in Critical Black Studies and Theatre & Dance, who specializes in Black theater, I traced the lineage of Blackness from the transatlantic slave trade to modern movements like the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, Black Nationalism, and the Black Arts Movement.

These sociopolitical shifts continue to shape Black artistic expression, influencing how writers engage with themes of race, resilience, and identity in a digitized age of Black violence and pop culture. Literature and theater allow Black creators to reclaim narratives and challenge perceptions of racism. By engaging with these materials, I developed a deeper understanding of the forces that influence Black feminism literature and theater, from historical struggles for liberation to modern digital-age realities of Black violence, resilience, and pop culture.

At the conclusion of this project, I produced an annotated bibliography, a literature review, and a creative journal reflecting my engagement with these themes.

“Culture evolves with time”: Learning about Rwandan culture through traditional music.

Rwandan culture, rooted in oral traditions of storytelling, poetry, and music, faces threats from colonization, the loss of knowledgeable people to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, and the adoption of Western Cultures. In the summer of 2024, I spent ten weeks conducting research on the measures that need to be taken to preserve the Rwandan culture from this fate. I conducted interviews with five traditional music artists and attended various cultural festivals in order to understand how they helped to preserve and pass down traditions to next young generations. Through my interviews, I learned something opposite to my prior understanding of culture. Instead, I found that there is not one single way to retain traditional culture. In this presentation, I will share these artists’ views on what we can do to protect the culture. Some artists advocate for preserving old traditions, while others embrace new combinations of traditional music and modern values. Although these ways are different in their implementation, the ultimate goal is the same: preserving the heritage of our ancestors in this contemporary society. What I initially thought would be a journey to discover how to bring back the old ways ended up having a detour to how we can protect the heritage of our ancestors from getting diluted and lost.

From War to Walls: U.S. Intervention and the Rise of Carceral Society in El Salvador

In January 2023, El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, opened Central America’s largest prison, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). The facility was primarily built to address the country’s escalating gang violence which had become one of the most significant security threats by the early 2000’s. The history of its development has its roots in the 1980’s when the United States played a significant role in the political and military landscape of El Salvador during the Salvadoran civil war. The involvement of the U.S. government, initially focused on counterinsurgency efforts and the suppression of left-wing movements in Latin America, helped stabilize the Salvadoran government and military during the war. However, it also fostered an environment of state violence and repression that prompted the rise of powerful gangs in the United States, as a result of increased immigration, which then spread to El Salvador through the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in the 1990’s. Through the study of primary and secondary sources, including historical and legal documents from both the U.S. and Salvadoran government, I examine the historical and cultural significance of the foreign relations between the United States and El Salvador, in an attempt to provide an understanding about how U.S. intervention has shaped current security measures and the political landscape of the country, including the establishment of CECOT. CECOT has dramatically changed the country’s policing and carceral system, since its establishment, in an attempt to address the long-term consequences of American foreign influence.

INTEGRAL BUT FORGOTTEN: METICS IN ANCIENT ATHENS

Every civilization has contained foreign residents, and Ancient Athens was no exception. In Classical Athens (489-323 BCE), these foreign residents and freed slaves were known as metics. The “metic” label came from the tax they had to pay: the metoikion, or metic tax. While foreign resident status most likely existed throughout city-states across Greece, Athens is the location best documented. Many of these documents come from wills and court cases, giving glimpses of the daily life of Athens’ non-citizen residents. Metics commonly worked as craftsmen, bankers, and people of commerce. A large number of philosophers also lived as metics, including Aristotle. Yet, although Athenians allowed metics to live and work in their city-state, metics faced numerous legal restrictions, limiting their rights and reinforcing their status as outsiders.

Following the Light

The Samek Art Museum contains a collection of ancient Mediterranean lamps as part of the Turnure Collection. In my research, I first focused on a specific mold-made lamp, lamp TD2020.12.29, which I identified as belonging to an Ephesian style originating from the Eastern Mediterranean. However, further analysis of the lamp revealed that it is not of Eastern Mediterranean origin, leading me to investigate how the Ephesian style transformed throughout the Mediterranean. I started to look at similar later lamps in Italy, which then prompted me to start considering North African red-glaze pottery. Expanding my study, I explored two additional lamps in the Turnure collection, TD2020.12.38, and TD2020.12.28, which may represent two different periods of the lamp’s stylistic development. My research on the stylistic shifts then led me to look at the makers-mark on lamp TD202.12.28, which provides a connection between Italian lamp workshops and those in North Africa.

Belonging Through Bourdieu: Belonging as a Community College

The study aims to understand the feeling of belonging as a community college transfer student that has transitioned to a four year university. Utilizing Bourdieu’s (1997) capital theory as a framework, this qualitative study seeks to answer what capitals students need to feel belonging, how to provide different types of capital to transfer students and fill the gaps students are experiencing. We find that the three capitals posed by Bourdieu (1997) (social, economic, and cultural) influence a student’s sense of belonging and that by providing different types of capital to transfer students and fill the gaps students are experiencing does successfully influence the feeling of belonging. Through articles, literature, and interviews we identify that capital, economic, and social capital all pose important roles in a transfer student’s experience and the presence of these capitals can improve the overall experience of a student’s transfer process. Students tend to come in with a variety of skill sets related to each of these capitals including self efficacy, resilience, and perseverance. However, these students also need help in obtaining the capitals that they are lacking. There are many actions that can be taken to help in improving each of these capitals including advising and mentorship programs, increasing opportunities for involvement in campus activities, expansion of scholarship programs, and the development of networks of support. In increasing the necessary capitals that enable transfer students to thrive we see that the sense of belonging in academic and social environments increase.

A Glimpse into Race and Representation in Roman Artifacts

This research presents a Roman terracotta oil lamp, featuring the stylized head of a presumed African male, investigated for its cultural, anthropological, and artistic significance. The lamp, likely produced between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE, was part of a private collection until its recent donation to the Samek Art Museum. Its iconography raises questions about Roman perceptions of identity and otherness, explored through comparative analysis with similar artifacts from the British Museum and other collections. By situating the lamp within the broader cultural milieu of Roman art and material culture, this research examines its role as both a functional object and a symbolic artifact. The analysis places the lamp in the context of Roman practices of representation, stereotyping, and cultural hybridity, highlighting how everyday objects serve as reflections of societal narratives. This research contributes to ongoing discourse on material culture and the artistic expression of identity in antiquity.

Imperial Roman Art & Ideologies in Pre-Fascist Colonial Italy: (D)evolution of the Treatment of Afro-Italian Women

When considering the impact of the Roman Empire, its tyrannical government is regarded as unsurpassed. However, Rome’s seemingly brutal rule must be evaluated in other facets besides the physical violence perpetrated against the conquered territories. Drawing on 19th and 20th-century visual publications, funerary portraits, denari (coins), and monumental architecture of Imperial Rome, this presentation examines the nature of North African provincial integration into the Roman canon and pre-fascist colonial Italy’s lack thereof. Although the original imperial imaginary, the so-called “Hannibal prototype”, defined the North African powers as threats, it evolved into one that called for the integration and persistence of provincial customs. Through a close analysis of the depiction of provincial women in art relative to Rome’s primary enemies, the Dacians and the Parthians, I demonstrate how the African woman is not artistically abstract, rather she is depicted through a cohesive combination of Italian-Roman and African provincial artistic conventions. Conversely, the art of 19th and 20th-century colonial Italy reveals the fetishization and exoticization of African women. Italian Unification and the Scramble for Africa accompanied by aestheticization and futurist primitivist rhetoric barbarized the African woman and rendered her as an object of power and an object that gives power to colonists. Although I draw parallels between the violent physical nature of pre-fascist colonial Italy and Imperial Rome, the presentation affirms that the former’s paradoxical attraction and repulsion socially excludes and dehumanizes North African women, and therefore distorts and adversely surpasses the Roman Empire’s original and integrative imaginary they sought to replicate.