Date of Award
3-17-2020
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Heritage Studies, Ph.D.
First Advisor
Janelle Collins
Committee Members
Cherisse Jones-Branch; Marcus Tribbett
Call Number
LD 251 .A566d 2019 W42
Abstract
Due to the history of racism in America, African Americans have always held a conflicted relationship with it. This is true in both regional and local contexts. This study imagines the ways in which African American Arkansans are contributing to the notion of “place” in both real and imagined ways via published fiction, oral histories, and memoirs. The bildungsroman, or coming of age genre, serves to unify seeming disparate genres in the project, as all texts in the study depict growing up in Arkansas. The most comprehensive treatment of Arkansas as a place may be found in Brooks Blevins’s cultural history, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters , Hillbillies and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State. Herein, Blevins uses cultural artifacts from Arkansas’s frontier history to the Clinton presidency to account for how the hillbilly became the image most often associated with Arkansas. This regional treatment of Arkansas’s image inspired my search for African American artifacts depicting Arkansas. This study examines four historical periods of African American literature depicting Arkansas. To demonstrate how competing narratives of place exist, it begins with the Works Projects Administration’s oral histories of former slaves in Arkansas, comparing those narratives to plantation tourism sites in Arkansas. Next, to illustrate how Jim Crow affects understanding of Arkansas in childhood, the study examines early twentieth century memoirs of childhood set in Jim Crow Arkansas as depicted by Richard Wright, Daisy Bates, and Maya Angelou. The third period examines three Little Rock Nine memoirs depicting the Central High School integration in Little Rock--imagining the child’s role in challenging the power of Jim Crow. The fourth and final period examines depictions or childhood in Arkansas since Jim Crow, and includes two queer coming of age narratives and one geopolitical narrative, produced by Daniel Black, E. Lynne Harris, and Henry Dumas respectively. The study found that, not only do competing images of Arkansas exist in all periods of literary production depicting Arkansas, but that marginal groups (black, queer, women, and children) have particularly distinctive perspectives about Arkansas. Such narratives depict Arkansas as both a place of trauma and of healing.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Williams, Carmen Lanos, "Arkansas in the African American Imaginary: A Rhetoric of Place" (2020). Student Theses and Dissertations. 435.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/435
