History

The dissertation explores the intellectual history of the interconnection of European and African ideas about race and space in 19th-century European imperialism. I examine German colonial geographies of East Africa, meaning not only cartography, but the new discipline of human geography, which studies the relationship between people and their environment. Germans and East Africans together produced a hybrid geography that combined precolonial conceptions of race and space and race from both Europe and Africa, and race explicitly entered German governance for the first time. By analyzing changes in how both Germans and East Africans imagined geographical relationships, I argue, we can better understand the ways in which they developed new conceptions of themselves and the world at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The project traces the history of German racial thinking to a specific, earlier colonial context than other scholars have argued. It also brings a spatial dimension to studies of the colonial state in Africa in order to understand the ways in which spaces have become imbued with racial and ethnic meaning over the last century and a half.

Temple University – Theses

African American Studies

This dissertation interrogates Buchi Emecheta's motives in portraying Igbo culture through her novels. It attempts to situate the novels in reference to Igbo culture. It also highlights the ways in which the texts positively or negatively reflect traditional Igbo values. Overall it demonstrates how Emecheta's own psychological manifestations converge with socio-political Nigerian history in the creation of a body of literature that stands as significant in understanding the issues Igbo women face in their daily lives.

Temple University – Theses

African American Studies

The purpose of this study is to produce an Africological model that lends attention to epistemological questions in African diaspora research through theoretical and culturally based analysis, ultimately to aid the historical and psychological restoration of Africans in diaspora. This work reflects the theoretical and historic stream of scholarship that centers geographic Africa as the adhesive principle of study in shaping and understanding the cultural and political ally-ship between different African diasporic communities. My aim is to illustrate what Africa represents in diaspora and how it was shaped in the conscious minds and actions of early Africans in diaspora from their own vantage point. Secondly, through a case study of the intra-diasporic relationship between Haiti and free Africans of Philadelphia following the Haitian Revolution, this work lays precedence for the expansion of an African diasporic consciousness. The significance of the intra-diasporic relationship is in the mutual recognition that Haitians and Africans in North America considered themselves a common people. Moreover, they developed an international relationship during the early 19th century to serve their mutual interest in African freedom and autonomous development despite Western expansion. My research locates Africa as the place of origin for dispersed and migrating African diasporic communities, operating as a binding source. In this study Africa is explored as a cognitive and geo-political cultural location for African people in diaspora. I support that African diasporic communities exist as extended African cultural locations of awareness which can and have been negotiated by communities depending on their agency, support, and circumstance to achieve collective goals.

Temple University – Theses

African American Studies

In the cities of Richmond, Virginia; Charleston South Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Baltimore, Maryland, this dissertation endeavors to find out what can be learned about the archaeology(s) of Black memory(s) through Africological Epistemic Visual Storytelling (AEVS); their silences, their hauntings, their wake work, and their healing? This project is concerned with elucidating new African memories and African knowledges that emerge from a two-tier Afrocentric analysis of Eurocentric cartography that problematizes the dual hegemony of the colonial archive of public memory and the colonial map by using an Afrocentric methodology that deploys a Black Digital Humanities research design to create an African agentic ritual archive that counters the colonial one. Additionally, this dissertation explains the importance of understanding the imperial geographic logics inherent in the hegemonically quotidian cartographies of Europe and the United States that sanction white supremacist narratives of memory and suppress spatial imaginations and memories in African communities primarily, but Native American communities as well. It is the hope of the primary researcher that from this project knowledge will be gained about how African people can use knowledge gained from analyzing select monuments/sites of memorialization for the purposes of asserting agency, resisting, and possibly breaking the supposed correctness of the colonial map.

Temple University – Theses

English

This dissertation examines the various discursive expressions of black agency that formed the stereotypical representations of African descendants found in Victorian racial discourse. It is, therefore, an analysis of the discursive practices of peoples of African descent and not of the actual stereotypes frequently associated with Victorian racial discourse. I believe that a close reading and analysis of the discursive practices of peoples of African descent subject to British rule will generate more focused critical narratives about the fantasies that plagued the British imagination well into the twentieth century. This study also suggest that contemporary scholars should start looking at Victorian racial discourse as an active dialogue and conversation with the Other, rather than a description of the psychology of power.

Temple University – Theses

History

As part of the Immigration Act of 1990, the United States has held an annual Diversity Visa (DV) lottery, encouraging nationals of countries that historically sent few migrants to the United States to apply for one of 50,000 legal immigrant visas. The DV lottery has reshaped global migration, making possible for the first time significant voluntary immigration from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States, and serving U.S. public diplomacy in the region by sustaining the American Dream. Drawing on a range of archival and published sources and oral interviews conducted in Africa, this dissertation illuminates how immigration and American global power have shaped each other since the end of the Cold War. It traces the history of the lottery from its legislation in Washington to its operation in sub-Saharan Africa, where, transmitted by non-state actors, it shaped African perceptions of the United States. Sparked by the advocacy of undocumented Irish immigrants in the United States in the late 1980s, policymakers created the lottery as an instrument for legal migration outside of family, employment, and refugee admissions categories. Motivated by domestic politics, and aiming to make visas available to white Europeans shut out of the system since 1965’s Hart-Cellar Act, Congress embraced “diversity” to attract immigrants from countries underrepresented in the immigration stream. Once enacted, immigration attorneys and others amplified the program for personal profit, attracting eager applicants both within and outside of U.S. borders. The lottery was the subject of the world’s first internet spam in 1994, and its operation coincided with the global spread of internet cafés, which became, by the early 2000s, key sites of DV lottery participation and migration commercialization in Africa. The lottery provided a rare chance at geographic mobility for Africans after the end of the Cold War, making it powerful in the countries examined in this dissertation: Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. As neoliberal reforms reconfigured many African states’ economies in the 1980s and 1990s, individuals sought increasingly to escape in search of greener pastures. Unlike other contemporary migration policies, the lottery unintentionally created a channel of legal access to the United States for Africans. Local entrepreneurs seized the visa lottery as an opportunity to profit from fellow Africans’ desperation and aspiration to depart. They transformed the abstract policy into a concrete possibility and promoted positive impressions of the United States as a land of “milk and honey,” reshaping African migrations and international relations in the process.

Temple University – Theses

African American Studies

“Africological Reconceptualization of the Epistemological Crises in Postcolonial Studies” aims at investigating the epistemological problems and theoretical inconsistencies in contemporary post-colonial studies. Capitalizing the Afrocentric theories of location, agency, and identity developed by Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama, this research takes Afrocentricity beyond the Africological analysis of African phenomenon and demonstrates its applicability in resolving issues that concern human liberation irrespective of race, class, gender, and nationality. To do so, this project juxtaposes the theories of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak with the Afrocentric theories of Molefi Asante and Ama Mazama, and demonstrates that the application of Afrocentric methods can help answering severe allegations against postcolonialism raised by a number of critics from within the school itself. Issues concerning spatial and temporal location of the term post-colonial, commodity status of post-colonialism, and crises in the post-colonial pedagogy can be addressed from an Afrocentric perspective based on a new historiography. To support the proposed arguments, the paper provides an Afrocentric analysis of some postcolonial works and shows how the very radical stance of postcoloniality has been neutralized by the Western academy. Simultaneously, the research also shows, despite being ridiculously disparaged as essentialist and racist, Afrocentricity is fundamentally radical and quintessentially emancipatory in its relentless fight against misrepresentation, pseudoscience, and injustice in the name of objective scholarship perpetrated by Eurocentric intellectuals—particularly from Asia and Africa.

Temple University – Theses

History

This dissertation is a study of how religion is manufactured, policed, imagined, and defended in the modern United States. It traces the history of one group, MOVE, from its inception in the late 1960s to the present in order to illustrate how the category of religion functions in the modern United States. The central premise of the book is that MOVE people believed MOVE was a religion. They believed, nearly from the very beginning of the group, that John Africa was a prophet who communicated on behalf of the divine, that his Teachings were inspired and had supernatural effects on the body, and that MOVE people had a role to play in a cosmic conflict between forces of good (The Law of Mama) and forces of evil (The System). Despite this, MOVE was rarely allowed to be a religion. That is, MOVE’s claim that they had a religion was, more often than not, dismissed. Historians of religion have, in recent years, begun turning their attention to the people with the power to define lived experience as either religious or secular. In MOVE’s case, the people who defined their experience as secular, and not religious, included police officers, judges, journalists, established religious leaders, and politicians. At various points throughout MOVE’s history, these social actors articulated a series of claims about what “true religion” was and why MOVE did not count. The disconnect between how MOVE people viewed themselves and how MOVE was understood by most outside the group points to the central concern of this dissertation.

Temple University – Theses