Date of Completion
4-27-2016
Embargo Period
4-21-2026
Keywords
southern literature, african american literature, modernism, postmodernism, aesthetics, activism, avant-garde
Major Advisor
Veronica Makowsky
Associate Advisor
Clare Eby
Associate Advisor
Cathy Schlund-Vials
Field of Study
English
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Open Access
Campus Access
Abstract
“Aesthetic Activism” charts and analyzes an archive of liberatory southern culture found in a collection of experimental twentieth and twenty-first century multiethnic American texts. Resisting the reactionary foreclosures of Jim Crow and the Culture Wars, and offering emancipatory alternatives to the conservative southern monuments of segregation, antebellum nostalgia, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and elite-white modernisms, these texts use avant-garde textual strategies to resist and destabilize these reactionary forces. Further, these texts -- ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Truman Capote, Randall Kenan to Monique Truong -- forward flexible touchstones of response, re-possession, and communitarian cultural production that offer both an activating, progressive history for contemporary southern activists and a set of expressive and artistic strategies for moving forward. Ultimately, this project emphasizes the power of innovative cultural production to resist, re-build, and re-imagine.
Recommended Citation
Jewett, Chad M., ""Aesthetic Activism: Race, Ethnicity, Literary Experimentalism, and the U.S. South"" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 1069.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/1069