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F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black AtlanticMain MenuAuthor IndexFAQWeek 01: August 28: PedagogiesWeek 02: Friday, September 4: Thinking about Projects and Digital MethodsWeek 03: Friday, September 11: Black Atlantic Classics Week 04: Reccomended: Thursday September 17: 4pm: Indigenous Studies and British LiteraturesThe Center for Literary + Comparative Studies @UMDWeek 04: Required: Friday, September 18: Reading: Indigenous Studies in the Eighteenth CenturyWeek 04: Required: Friday, September 18: Book LaunchRemaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American CitizenshipWeek 05: Friday, September 25: Digital Humanities, Caribbean Stuides, and FashionGuest: Siobhan MeiWeek 06: Friday, October 2: OBIWeek 07: October 9: Black LondonSancho's Social NetworksWeek 08: Friday, October 16:Muslim Slave Narratives, Hans Sloane, the British Museum, Colonialism as CurationWeek 09: Friday, October 23: Reflection and Tools DayWeek 10: Friday, October 30: Myths of a White Atlantic (and Project Proposal)Week 11: Friday, November 6: Black New EnglandWeek 12: Friday, November 13: Woman of Colour and Mary PrinceWeek 13: Friday, November 20: Peer Review Workshop and Draft with Action PlanKierra M. Porter6b7d2e75a0006cdf2df0ac2471be73ef9c88c9e3Brandice Walker579eedcc76564f61b1ba7f36082d05bdf4fc3435Alexis Harper52f175308474d58b269191120b6cda0582dcde71Catherine C. Saunders80964fcb3df3a95f164eca6637e796a22deb5f63Joseph Heidenescher83b7b4309ef73ce872fc35c61eb8ed716cce705fJoshua Lawson8aecdcf9d2db74d75fb55413d44f3c2dfc3828bdKymberli M Corprue7f6419242e66e656367985fbc1cfa10a933ce71dJimisha Relerford1903b0530d962a83c3a72bad80c867df4f5c027fEmily MN Kugler98290aa17be4166538e04751b7eb57a9fe5c26a2Reed Caswell Aikendbd321f67398d85b0079cc751762466dfe764f88Brenton Brock619582e4449ba6f0c631f2ebb7d7313c0890fa00
Final Project Proposal
12020-11-30T16:32:48-08:00Jimisha Relerford1903b0530d962a83c3a72bad80c867df4f5c027f377913J. Relerford - Proposalplain2020-11-30T16:33:13-08:00Jimisha Relerford1903b0530d962a83c3a72bad80c867df4f5c027fMy final project stems from our early readings in the course on Black Atlantic classics, as well as my desire to have all the research and writing that I do in my current and remaining courses to relate directly to my upcoming comprehensive examinations and dissertation project. For my exams, I will examine contemporary African American literature as my primary field of specialty and Caribbean and Black British literature as my secondary fields. Essentially, my exams with focus on the Black Atlantic space. My dissertation will focus on Black women and humor in contemporary literature across the diaspora, analyzing humor, irony, and satire in works written by Black women as well as in representations of Black women. My aim is to identify and discuss the significance of humor as a literary and rhetorical mode of self-fashioning and community-building for Black women across the diaspora not simply as a reactive response to racial and gendered oppression, but rather as a creative, generative, and rhetorically-informed meaning-making force in itself.
Central to my project will be theorizing Black women’s humor from a diasporic perspective, which will require close engagement with Black Atlantic literary and cultural theory. I’ve discovered in my research that Black Atlantic, transatlantic, and diasporic Africana theories abound in the scholarship, but bringing these theories together and identifying the differences and resonances among them is a difficult and time-consuming process. I believe that a useful digital humanities project would be a Black Atlantic Theory database, which would bring scholarship and criticism that defines, expands, critiques, and challenges the idea of the Black Atlantic as a theoretical-geopolitical entity. Such a database would be too expansive in scope for both the amount of time I have to complete a final project in this class and also beyond my negligible expertise with digital tools and resources. Thus, for my project, I’d like to begin to attempt to create a small prototype of what the more extensive and robust database would be at its core. Essentially, my site will take a form similar to a #syllabus in that it will list academic texts (with brief annotations), including books and journal articles, relevant to Black Atlantic theory. Since my project will only be a small sliver of the database that I envision, I will narrow my focus to foundational theoretical texts, including Paul Gilroy’s book and scholarly responses to it. I will also include a section of texts on humor across the Black Atlantic as an example of how such a database might include sub-sections that show how Black Atlantic theory has been applied to various specific areas of literary and cultural study. This project will thus serve two purposes: a personal one, as it will allow me to begin to compile the reading list for my GQEs, and a public one, since it will be made available as an open-source web document and will allow other students and scholars to make connections between various Black Atlantic theories and applications of those theories as they apply to a specific topic (in this case, humor).