Towards a New Black Nation: Space, Place, Citizenship, and Imagination
Towards a New Black Nation: Space, Place, Citizenship, and Imagination THESIS Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Terrance Leonardo Wooten Graduate Program in African American and African Studies The Ohio State University 2011 Master's Examination Committee: Simone Drake, Advisor Rebecca Wanzo James Upton Copyright by Terrance Leonardo Wooten 2011 Abstract Towards a New Black Nation: Space, Place, Citizenship and Imagination is a project dedicated to examining the ways in which race, geography, and politics intersect to create a sovereign space in visual art and popular media for African Americans to imagine full citizenship. By examining black politics and black nation building through these various lenses, I argue that African Americans use popular media and visual art as channels to acquire access to citizenship rights. With the disappearance of a visible black political movement, black Americans have innovatively used these channels to create an alternative space to deploy Black Nationalism and construct a black nation. I call this space the New Black Nation. Particularly, this project focuses on the viability of the Imagined South, a U.S. South that is dehistoricized, southernized, and recreated as a perfect melding of rural and urban culture, as a home for the New Black Nation. Towards a New Black Nation: Space, Place, Citizenship and Imagination interrogates black gender politics and the performance of black male sexuality in this New Black Nation located in the Imagined South. In order to engage this New Black Nation, Towards a New Black Nation: Space, Place,Citizenship and Imagination weaves together a discursive reading of Tyler Perry‘s Why Did I Get Married, the work of Tom Joyner of the nationally syndicated program, the Tom Joyner Morning Show, and various representations of black nonheteronormative bodies that exist (though not wholly) within the black nation.
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