American hearts: African -American writing on the Congo, 1890--1915.
Item
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Title
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American hearts: African -American writing on the Congo, 1890--1915.
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Identifier
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AAI3103105
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identifier
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3103105
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Creator
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Dworkin, Ira Mark.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Michele Wallace
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | American Studies
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Abstract
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My dissertation, "American Hearts: African American Writings on the Congo, 1890--1915," asserts that African American writing during the period between nineteenth-century emigration campaigns and the 1920s New Negro movement was informed by contact with African people and by a political interest in contemporary Africa. As the product of these ongoing relationships, African American writing on Africa did not fabricate a remote heritage, but rather was grounded in the knowledge of emigrationists, explorers, journalists, missionaries, world's fair participants, African students at American colleges, political activists, and others. Through such interactive networks, direct engagement with the Congo State became part of the larger discursive context of African American literary production during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.;The figures that my dissertation discusses---historian George Washington Williams, missionary William H. Sheppard, educator Booker T. Washington, and editor-novelist Pauline E. Hopkins---challenged Belgian King Leopold II's brutal reign over the Congo State, defined their own relationships to the African continent, and helped construct an American national discourse on Africa in a variety of ways. A series of scathing reports that Williams issued on the maladministration of the Congo State fit the historiographic framework that he initiated in History of the Negro Race in America. Sheppard's lifelong association with Hampton Institute in Virginia was indicative of the African Diaspora networks through which information about Africa was shared. Washington's deliberate local rhetoric overshadowed a transatlantic perspective on racial uplift which was an important, if underappreciated, part of a career that included work with the Congo Reform Association. Finally, Hopkins's novel Of One Blood synthesized many of the trajectories of early-twentieth-century black intellectual life into a fictional exposition that, along with her nonfiction writings, addressed the predicament of the modern Congo. As this discourse circulated through networks of Historically Black Colleges and Universities such as Hampton and via the press, African American writers fashioned a complex relationship to modern Africa, borne of both their backgrounds in the United States and their knowledge of Africa.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
