Flo Kennedy at home during a CBS-TV interview

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Flo Kennedy at Matriarchy conference

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Esther Peterson, Executive Vice Chair of Women's Bureau in Washington, D.C. since 1920, speaks at U.S. department of Labor Conference in NYC

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

U.S. Department of Labor conference in NYC. Dorothy Height (left), original member of Women's bureau in Washington, D.C. and Esther Peterson, Executive Vice Chair of Women's Bureau since 1920

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Other Than a Citizen: Vernacular Poetics in Postwar America

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.

Spic'ing into Existence: Epitaph, Epithet, and the Ethnopoetic Imagination

Quién Es, Quién Somos? Spic’ing into Existence claims a four-fold close-reading: first, analysis of texts: from theoretical meditations to (prison) memoir and film. Second, a half dozen central figures appear, largely Latinx and black American. They cut across a score of registers, socio-economics, ideological reservations, but all are, as Carl Carlton sang, poetry in motion. Writers, poets, theologians, pathologists, artists, comedians, actors, students whose vocation is invocation, the inner surge of their calling. Third, the manuscript draws from a series of historical moments—from radical liberation of the late 60s, to contemporary student activism. Finally, this body of work is movement, in all its social, gestural, and kinesthetic viscera. From this last heading, we peel away layers of what I call the ethnopoet, the fascia undoing that reveals its bio-political anatomy, dressing its bare life with kinship speech. First, the social revolutions of the Civil Rights, Black Power, abolitionism, the Black Panthers and Young Lords, boycotts and jarring artistic performances. These events are superficial not in vain sense, but key epicenters of underground murmurings, the workings of a cunning assailant. She robs not lavish estates, but another day to breathe. Gesturally, as perhaps the interlocutor, lies this author, interspersing his own diatribes to conjure her presence. The final branch is admittedly the most intangible. Kinesthetically, we map the nimbleness, footwork lígera of what I call the ethnopoet. Ethnopoet is no mere aggregate of ethnicity and poetry, but like chemical reaction, the descriptor for its behavior under certain pressures, temperatures, and elements. Elusive and resisting confinement, and therefore definition, the ethnopoet is a shapeshifting figure of how racialized bodies [people of color] respond to hegemonic powers. She is, at bottom, however, a native translator, the plural-lensed subject whose loyalty is only to the imagination of a different world, one whose survival is not contingent upon her exploitation. The native translator’s constant re-calibrations of oppressive power apparatuses seem taxing at best, and near-impossible, at worst. To effectively navigate through these polarized loci, she must identify ideologies that in turn seek “affective liberatory sances” in relation to the dominant social order (43). In a kind of performative contradiction, she must marshall the knowledge necessary to “break with ideology” while speaking within it. Chicana Studies scholar, Chela Sandoval, describes this dual movement as “meta-ideologizing”: the appropriation of hegemonic ideological forms in order to transform them (82). Nuestros padres se subieron encima de La Bestia, y por eso somos pasageros a ese tren. Y ya, dentro su pansa, tenemos que ser vigilantes cuando plantamos las bombas. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval schematizes this oppositional consciousness around five principle categories: “equal rights,” “revolutionary,” “supremacist,” “separatist,” and “differential.” Taken by themselves, the first four modes appear mutually exclusive, incapable of occupying the same plane, until a fifth pillar emerges. Cinematographic in nature, differential consciousness, as Sandoval defines it, is “a kinetic motion that maneuvers, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners” (44). For Sandoval, then, differential consciousness is a methodology that privileges an incredible sense mobility, one reaching artistic sensibilities. Our fourth and final analytic of movement serves an apt example of this dual meaning. Lexically speaking, ‘movement’ may be regarded as a political mobilization of aggrieved populations (through sustained efforts), or the process of moving objects (people or otherwise) from one location to another. Praxis-wise, it is both action and ideal, content and form. Thus, an ethnic poetics must be regarded less as a series of stanzas, shortened lyric, or even arrangement of language, but as a lens through which peripheralized peoples kaleidecope ideological positions in an “original, eccentric, and queer sight” (43). Taking note of the advantages of postponing identifications, the thesis stands its ground on the term ethnopoet. Its abstraction is not dewey-eyed philosophy, but an anticipation of poetic justice, of what’s to come from callused hands. This thesis is divided into 7.5 chapters. The first maps out the ethnopoet’s cartographies of struggle. By revisiting that alleged Tío Tomas, Richard Rodriguez, we unearth the tensions that negatively, deny citizenship to one silo, but on the flipside, engender manifold ways of seeing, hearing, and moving . The second, through George Jackson’s prison memoirs, pans out from this ethnography of power, groping for an apparatus that feigns an impervious prestige: ‘the aesthetic regime of coercion.’ In half-way cut, the thesis sidesteps to spic into existence, formally announcing, through Aime Cesaire, myself, and Pedro Pietri, the poeticization of trauma. Such uplift denies New Age transcendence of self, but a rehearsal of our entrapment in these mortal envelopes. Thirdly, conscious of the bleeding ethnic body, we cut open the incipient corpse to observe her pathologist. Her native autopsies offer the ethnic body’s posthumous recognition, the ethnopoetics ability to speak for and through the dead. Chapter five examines prolific black artists—Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar—to elide the circumvention of their consumption via invoking radical black hi/her-stories, ones fragmenting the black body. Sixth, the paper compares the Black Power Salute of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to Duke’s Mi Gente Boycott of their Latino Student Recruitment Weekend. Both wielded “silent gestures,” that shrewdly interfered with white noise of numbed negligence. Finally, ‘taking the mask off’ that are her functionalities, the CODA expounds on ethnopoet’s interiority, particularly after the rapid re-calibration of her politics. Through a rerun of El Chavo del Ocho, one of Mexican television’s most cherished shows, we tune into the heart-breaking indigence of barrio residents, only to marvel at the power of humor to, as Friday’s John Witherspoon put it, “fight another day.” This thesis is the tip of my tongue. Y por una vez, déjala que cante.

"A New Genesis": The "Silent Vigil" at Duke University, April 5th-12th, 1968

Honors thesis

They’re There, Now What?: The Identities, Behaviors, and Perceptions of Black Judges

Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, fewer than 50 Black judges had been elected or appointed to the judiciary. As of August 2015, there are over 1,000 Black state and federal judges. As the number of black judges has increased, one question arises: have American courts been altered purely by this substantial increase? One expectation—and, at times, a prediction—behind the increased descriptive representation of Black judges is that their mere presence would alter the judiciary. It was supposed that these judges would substantively represent Black interests in the decisions they made. In other words, it was suspected, and predicted, that Blacks in the judiciary would enhance equality and justice by being aware of, responsive to, and advocating for African Americans. This theory about the likely role of Black judges derives from theoretical work on political representation and racial group consciousness, and empirical studies of Black elite behavior in other political institutions.

Despite such predictions, there is no corresponding scholarly consensus regarding whether Black judges possess a racial group consciousness and have racially distinctive judicial behavior. Therefore, the theory undergirding the demand for increased diversification, as a means to transform the judiciary, remains unsubstantiated. This is precisely where this project, “They’re There, Now What?: The Identities, Behavior, and Perceptions of Black Judges,” seeks to intervene in and explore, if not settle, the matter of whether black judges possess a racial group consciousness and exhibit racially-distinctive judicial behavior. It addresses a set of interrelated questions relevant to understanding whether we can view Black judges as representatives in ways that are similar to how we view other Black political officials. I examine these questions using a multi-method approach. For my analyses, I draw on diverse materials: the published biographies of every Black judge appointed to the federal bench, a survey experiment with a nationally-representative adult sample, and semi-structured interviews with 30 Black judges.

This research, which engages with scholarship on representation, group consciousness, judicial behavior, and candidate perceptions, offers new insights into the lives, perceptions, and behavior of Black judges, as well as the manifestations of Black substantive representation in the judiciary. My dissertation argues that, despite the general reluctance to use the term “representation” when referring to judges, we can consider Black judges as representatives. Black judges behave as substantive representatives by (1) sharing and understanding the experience, history, and perspectives of Black Americans, (2) challenging language, persons, policies, and laws they feel negatively affect, or violate the rights and liberties of, African Americans, (3) respecting African American litigants, and (4) ensuring the rights of African Americans are protected and the needs of black Americans are being met.

Only through research that considers the perspectives, identities, perceptions, and behavior of Black judges will we arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the importance of racial diversity in the courts. As this project finds, a link between descriptive representation and substantive representation can, and frequently does exist within the judicial context. Such a link is significant given that Blacks’ liberty and justice through the American legal system continues to be subject to those who exercise judicial power. This dissertation has implications for the discourse surrounding the need for increased descriptive and substantive representation of Blacks in the judiciary, and the factors that affect representation in the justice system.

Spatial Articulations of Race, Desire, and Belonging in Western North Carolina

The sociocultural mythology of the South homogenizes it as a site of abjection. To counter the regionalist discourse, the dissertation intersects queer sexualities with gender and race and focuses on exploring identity and spatial formation among Black lesbian and queer women. The dissertation seeks to challenge the monolith of the South and place the region into multiple contexts and to map Black geographies through an intentional intersectional account of Black queer women. The dissertation utilizes qualitative research methods to ascertain understandings of lived experiences in the production of space. The dissertation argues that an idea of Progress has been indoctrinated as a synonym for the lgbtq civil rights movement and subsequently provides an analysis of progress discourses and queer sexualities and political campaigns of equality in the South. Analyses revealed different ways to situate progress utilizing the public contributions of three Black women interviewed for the dissertation. Moreover, the dissertation utilizes six Black queer and lesbian women to explain the multifarious nature of identities and their construction in place. Black queer and lesbian women produce spaces that deconstruct the normativity of stasis and physicality, and the dissertation explores the consequential realities of being a body in space. These consequences are particularly highlighted in the dissertation by discussions of the processes of racialization in the bounded and unbounded senses of space and place and the impacts of religious institutions, specifically Christianity. The dissertation concluded that no space is without complication. Other considerations should be made in the advancement of alleviating oppression deeply embedded in United States landscapes. Black women’s geographies offer epistemological and ontological renderings that enrich analyses of space, place, and landscape. The dissertation also concludes that Black women’s bodies represent sites for the production of geographic knowledge through narrating their spaces of material trajectories of interlocking, multiscalar lives.

Of Marx and Makers: an Historical Perspective on Generative Justice

In Marxist frameworks “distributive justice” depends on extracting value through a centralized state. Many new social movements—peer to peer economy, maker activism, community agriculture, queer ecology, etc.—take the opposite approach, keeping value in its unalienated form and allowing it to freely circulate from the bottom up. Unlike Marxism, there is no general theory for bottom-up, unalienated value circulation. This paper examines the concept of “generative justice” through an historical contrast between Marx’s writings and the indigenous cultures that he drew upon. Marx erroneously concluded that while indigenous cultures had unalienated forms of production, only centralized value extraction could allow the productivity needed for a high quality of life. To the contrary, indigenous cultures now provide a robust model for the “gift economy” that underpins open source technological production, agroecology, and restorative approaches to civil rights. Expanding Marx’s concept of unalienated labor value to include unalienated ecological (nonhuman) value, as well as the domain of freedom in speech, sexual orientation, spirituality and other forms of “expressive” value, we arrive at an historically informed perspective for generative justice. 

Jubilee and the Limits of African American Freedom after Emancipation

Scholarship generated in the post-civil rights US underpins a growing consensus that any honest confrontation with the American past requires an acknowledgment both of the nation’s foundations in racially-based slave labour and of the critical role that the enslaved played in ending that system. But scholars equally need to examine why the end of slavery did not deliver freedom, but instead – after a short-lived ‘jubilee’ during which freedpeople savoured their ‘brief moment in the sun’ – opened up a period of extreme repression and violence. This article traces the political trajectory of one prominent ex-slave and Republican party organiser, Elias Hill, to assess the constraints in which black grassroots activists operated. Though mainly concerned with the dashed hopes of African Americans, their experience of a steep reversal is in many ways the shared and profoundly significant legacy of ex-slaves across the former plantation societies of the Atlantic world.

Política pública para o idoso : um estudo da cidadania no Grupo Cabelos de Neve do Programa Conviver em Campina Grande-PB

The main objective of the study about the citizenship development in elderly attended by the Conviver Program of the City Hall of Campina Grande in Paraiba, Brazil was to evaluate how the actions of the Program contribute for the citizenship practice according to the users. The Citizenship analyzed is the existence of political, civil and social rights according to Marshall. For that it was utilized a descriptive research and a study of case based on technical procedure. The research was settled by the people who are benefited by the Conviver Program of the Snow Hair Group and the sample was formed by the active participants that it is in the Group for over ten years, corresponding to a total of ten elderly. For the data collection was utilized basic questionnaire in function of the low schooling of the interviewed, according to Marshall (2002) theory about the citizenship construction from each person. It was utilized the methodological procedure proposed by Bardin (2006), categorical analysis, in the qualitative data analysis, that was divided in four parts. In relation to Political Rights, noted that the program has stimulated your Watched on the exercise of voting and being voted. On the Civil Rights was observed that the Program has given incentive to actions which provide the users the justice rights in and in occupational activities as a job. In relation to Social Rights it was observed that the Conviver Program has contributed in order that its users can lead their lives according to the standards imposed by the society, which have being failed in the education area. As for the type of citizenship it was verified that the Program has given incentive to the served users, becoming more evidence on the speech basis

Contracting Freedom: Race, Empire, and U.S. Labor Importation Programs, 1942-1964

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

The leaderless resistance: George Lincoln Rockwell and the White Separatist Movement

The scope of the thesis encapsulates the wider post-war White Separatist Movement from the origins of American Nazism under George Lincoln Rockwell to the later developments of leaderless resistance and the political and cultural changes to the movement. The specific focus will be upon the relationship between George Lincoln Rockwell and the leaderless resistance concepts, in particular through its development and utilisation. Due to the complexity of the issues and the variety of influencing factors it is necessary in the first instance to assess it in terms of a historiography to allow themes to develop. As a result of this historical analysis themes have become evident to allow a conceptual analysis. In particular the thesis will utilise the following thematic contexts for assessing the various developments within White Separatism: including, state building; political marketing; the role of the media; and the propensity for terror and hate activities. In assessing the basis upon which the conceptual analysis is developed the research has utilised extensive use of texts, radio broadcasts, and pamphlets from the movement. The study has also been able to consider, government reports, law enforcement updates and communications from Civil Rights groups and other agencies. In the conceptual analysis of this information and themes, the thesis utilises new concepts as a means of creating an understanding of a rapidly changing area of politics; including ‘organic politic’ and ‘political firms’, when assessing political marketing trends; and assessing terrorist motivation.

Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education

“Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education,” explores how the category of “mixed race” has underpinned university politics in California, through student organizing, admissions debates, and the development of a new field of study. By treating the concept of privatization as central to both multiraciality and the neoliberal university, this project asks how and in what capacity has the discourses of multiracialism and the growing recognition of mixed race student populations shaped administrative, social, and academic debates at the state’s flagship universities—the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. This project argues that the mixed race population symbolizing so-called “post-racial societies” is fundamentally attached to the concept of self-authorship, which can work to challenge the rights and resources for college students of color. Through a close reading of texts, including archival materials, policy and media debates, and interviews, I assert that the contemporary deployment of mixed race within the US academy represents a particularly post-civil rights development, undergirded by a genealogy of U.S. liberal individualism. This project ultimately reveals the pressing need to rethink ways to disrupt institutionalized racism in the new millennium.