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" Representing Black Women’s Activism: Understanding Social Change Through Autobiographical Narrations of the Civil Rights Era "
Alqahtani, Beshaier Mohammed
Watson, Veronica
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1055703
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| Doc. No
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TL54820
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| Main Entry
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Alqahtani, Beshaier Mohammed
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| Title & Author
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Representing Black Women’s Activism: Understanding Social Change Through Autobiographical Narrations of the Civil Rights Era\ Alqahtani, Beshaier MohammedWatson, Veronica
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| College
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Indiana University of Pennsylvania
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| student score
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2020
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| Note
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163 p.
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| Abstract
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This dissertation examines African American female activists’ representations in autobiographies, memoirs, fiction, and film within the context of performing activism in different ways. Presenting black female activism as a reaction to the struggles which they have both endured and overcome, I will explore how they carried out the activism, and what set of strategies and techniques they used. My interest in these black female activists includes their individual issues, concerns, and challenges regarding gender, race, and class discrimination in American society and politics, as well as how these elements shaped their subjectivities, and to what effect this impacted their forms of activism and their understanding of it. By understanding these conditions more fully, I hoped to develop a language that allows us to examine the work of collaboration in different social contexts such as Saudi Arabia. I am looking at the primary texts of this project for how women’ subjectivities have been shaped by the conditions in which they live because I want to understand how we can look at these conditions within the Saudi context. Therefore, in this project, I argue that the role of collectivity is important in female activism, which can go beyond any kind of boundary because of the following points. First, I argue that black women’s subjectivities have been changed in response to the support that they get from other social activists in autobiographical texts such as Melba Pattillo Beals’ Warriors Don’t Cry, Daisy Bates’s The Long Shadow of Little Rock, and Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman. Second, I argue that the role of community that is investigated in two short stories, including Paule Marshall’s Reena and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Organizer’s Wife, are crafted to suggest that the fictional genre allows for authors to be didactic, to bring about particular responses in the reader, and to make the reader want to be a part of the social change movement. Third, I examine how activists become community leaders and influencers that help others envision a better future. I intend to use Saudi women's reactions to Tayte Taylor’s film The Help to examine the ways that a film featuring African American women, specifically the way the film has affected me and how my personality is changed before and after majoring in African American Literature, through the use of autoethnography. My aim is to illustrate how the importance of collectivity could be transferred to other women from different nations through analyzing African American women’s legacy in different nations and cultures. Overall, this project works to make obvious how, in most of successful black women activists’ writings, they transform the word “I” to “We” as a way of expressing their collectivity to illustrate that the role of collectivity is important in females' activism and success.
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| Descriptor
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African American studies
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Biographies
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Black studies
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Comparative literature
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Film studies
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Literature
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Sociology
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Womens studies
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| Added Entry
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Watson, Veronica
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| Added Entry
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Indiana University of Pennsylvania
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