(Re)Imagining the First Steps: Childhoods of African American Literature, 1950-2008 Restricted; Files Only
Cohens, Derrick (Spring 2019)
Published
Abstract
Taking seriously Robyn Bernstein’s articulation of childhood studies’ limitation of reconciling “the simultaneity and mutual constitution of children and childhood,” this dissertation serves as an intervention into this question. Considering the ways that “children and childhood give body to each other,” I examine texts in African American literature that potentially produce paths forward for ways of understanding the categories of blackness, queerness, and childhood simultaneously. The desired, phantom child, and the ways in which we make this ethereal child material through innocence is pressed against the impossible black/queer child, a child who highlights the latent dangers of the perfect imagined child. Bringing together the tension between History and fiction, the instructive but indeterminate (queer) child emerges from both. Ultimately, it is a child who is given shape through an arranged History, memory, metaphor, and shame.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE 17
The Look of Love…and Shame: Suffering Well in William Demby’s
Beetlecreek
CHAPTER TWO 54
A Moribund Kingdom/A Nasty Little Faggot—From There To Here
Through The Queer Body
CHAPTER THREE 90
On The Black Queer Poetics of Origins: Pat Parker’s Child of Myself
CHAPTER FOUR 120
Writing about Thomas Glave’s “He Who Would Have Become ‘Joshua,’ 1791”:
A Meditation on Water, Memory, and Time
BIBLIOGRAPHY 157
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