The purpose of the research in this thesis, Emily Dickinson's Sexual Personae, is to investigate how and why Emily Dickinson utilises a variety of sexual personae in her poetry.
The research focuses on how each chosen sexual persona functions in Dickinson's poetry - what the specific sexual persona is (lesbian, sadist, etc), how it functions, and what each persona allows Dickinson to articulate, as pertaining to thoughts, ideas and questions about sexual and/or taboo subjects.
Personae as a mode of expression is analysed, as are the possible reasons for Dickinson's choices of personae.
Research
The first chapter focuses on the function of the sexual persona in Dickinson's poetry, suggesting that Dickinson was inspired to use personae in ways made familiar by Robert Browning, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue, but how she then moved persona deployment beyond historical or literary models into taboo sexual territory.
Each of the subsequent seven chapters of the thesis focuses on an analysis of the function of a particular sexual persona deployed by Dickinson in her poetry.
Divisions
These sexual personae identified in Dickinson's poetry include the male heterosexual, the female heterosexual, the lesbian, the autoeroticist, the sadist, the masochist and the necrophile.
Method
The thesis is a re-reading of Emily Dickinson's poetry, with new readings and interpretations of the poems and new insights into Dickinson's organisation ofher poems. Each chapter of the thesis provides new conclusions regarding Dickinson's literary project.
Contribution to knowledge
The thesis continues work started by others in the 1970s on Emily Dickinson's use of personae in her poetry. The thesis focus is on sexual personae as a method of articulating the taboo; an area of Dickinson study that has been neglected or ignored.
While Maya Angelou has been recognized as a feminist icon and a successful author, publishing more than thirty books and winning numerous awards, the aim of this research is to bring attention to her role as a writer/activist. This thesis analyses her six-volume serial autobiography, which was written over 33 years, and traces the development of Angelou's activism through her life writing. In so doing, this project argues that the success of the first volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has obscured the integrity of the series, which consists in the use of Angelou's political voice that has not been recognised before. This research places Angelou in the African American political autobiography tradition, which combines life writing with consciousness raising from the slave narratives onwards. Following the conceptualisation of Patricia Hill Collins, this research theorises Angelou's political voice as a mode of intellectual activism. Adopting an American Studies approach, it shows how Angelou's self-representation as a black artist seeks to intervene in the social and political context of its writing and demonstrates how her life writing is in turn shaped by African American history and activism. While she is known as a pioneer of black feminism, this research, building on recent scholarship in intersectionality, argues that Angelou's work not only addresses the intersection of race and gender, but also class through what Patricia Hill Collins calls the "matrix of domination". Angelou started her writing career with the Black Arts movement, and this thesis traces the influence of this movement beyond the Black Arts era and shows how the debate of art versus propaganda continued to inform her autobiographical work. Since one of the movement's main principles was "art for people's sake", this thesis reads Angelou's life writing through differentiating the narrating "I" from the narrated "I", in which the former functions didactically as a vehicle for Angelou's political consciousness raising of a younger generation.
This thesis provides a critical analysis of shifting US foreign policy toward India. The study covers the period from the end of the Second World War up to the end of the first Obama administration. With Indo-US relations since India’s independence in 1947 used as a backdrop, the focus is on policy from the end of the Cold war and, specifically, from the time of the 9/11 attack. The thesis explores, in both conceptual and empirical terms, the reasons for United States growing involvement in the South Asian region and its enhanced engagement with India. The principle aim of the study is to determine whether the ramifications of 9/11 were mainly responsible for present state of Indo-US relations, or whether US policy toward India was driven by the broader changes in international affairs associated with globalisation, among which the rise of China is paramount. The approach taken is a critical historical analysis that has involved review of secondary literature and close examination of a range of primary US and Indian government material, supplemented by field work conducted in the US that involved interviews with policy makers and academics.
This thesis shows that US policy toward India has two major dimensions: the first is the US adaptation of its foreign policy in response to the changed international political climate after the Cold War, a shift in which the question of its relative decline from sole superpower status was critical. The second dimension is India’s rise, which has given it growing geo-strategic importance in the 21st century and has created the potential for India to become an essential partner in US attempts to maintain the stability of the international order and its own hegemonic role with this order. The argument of the thesis is that US policy toward India is more one of continuity than change, and that the driving force behind recent Indo-US relations is not primarily the consequences of 9/11, but is rather the result of power shifts within a more globalised world. In this changed context both the US and India have looked for closer, strategic relationships with countries that share their interests. While far from being united in this respect, their interests are sufficiently common so that from the end of the Cold War the US and India have developed a closer partnership. The effects of 9/11 contributed to an environment conducive to this partnership, but they were not the primary factor.
This research is concerned with Langston Hughes’ professional and personal contacts and their impact on his cultural production.One of the foremost African American writers of his generation, Hughes has been mainly considered in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, with scholars critically assessing his writings. This thesis, by contrast, takes a ‘network approach’ to Hughes’ work and argues that his inter and intra-racial relationships, international collaborations and friendships, and the strategies (e.g. professional contacts, financial resources) served to sustain and protect first Hughes’ black cultural production and second, to build a ‘black cultural infrastructure’.In the introduction, ‘network’ and social capital are theorized using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Mark Granovetter. The first chapter examines Hughes’ working relationship with his black and white patronsand their impact on his early years as a poet. In Chapter Two, this thesis examines how Hughes,in an effort to find other means than just private patronage to sustain his literary career,became involved in the wider political networks of the American left. In Chapter Three, I continue the examination of Hughes’ efforts to find alternative means tosustain his literary career but also create more opportunities for black artistic expression in the dominant literary fieldby assessing his professional network ties. In Chapter Four, I examine how Hughes, during the last two decades of his life, in the face ofpolitical persecution, reclaimed control over his artistic rights, and engaged through his writings, speeches and mentoring a new generation of black writers and artists. The thesis as a whole thus demonstrates how, with the expansion of his socialcapital (aka network ties), Hughes was able to build a writing career, defend his artistic rights, create alternative black cultural spaces, and nurture the development of future black writers and artists.
This article examines the grassroots Black internationalist organizing of the British Black Panther Movement (BBPM). The BBPM, which was inspired, although not founded, by the U.S. Black Panthers, was a London-based antiracist movement composed mainly of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom. The British Panthers led hundreds of campaigns for housing, education, health, legal aid, employment and against police brutality from 1969 to 1973. These pages reconstruct the day-to-day organizing efforts of the BBPM, revealing a highly active movement that focused on bridging local people's experiences of racism with the movement's membership in diasporic networks. Analysis of oral histories and forty-four issues of movement newspapers collated from across six archives demonstrates that the BBPM also raised awareness of British institutional racism and police brutality in the absence of public recognition of these issues. In so doing, this article introduces significant new evidence about the nature and extent of anti-Black racist violence in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s and opens up novel perspectives on the forms of Black political mobilization in Britain. Among the UK's Black Power organizations, the BBPM was the most militant and secretive. Members rigorously studied Black history and literature and labor movement history inside communal spaces that the movement occupied in London. The BBPM also acted as an umbrella organization, facilitating a network of Black Power movements across the United Kingdom. While increasingly internationalist in its outlook, the movement splintered over time, with former members founding Black organizations dedicated to working-class people's concerns, intellectual life, and women's issues.