Mixtheory: Non-Linguistic Communal Expression in African American Literature

In this interdisciplinary study, I explore the role of non-linguistic communal expression in African American literature, including how representations of music, dance and quilting shape autobiography, novel and film. I argue that, across eras and genres, African American authors leverage power from forms that are communal, non-linguistic and culturally specific, rather than from language alone. My project breaks new ground by showing that this emphasis displays an operational strategy borne out by neuroscience. Placing the human and natural sciences into dialogue with one another, I demonstrate how non-linguistic forms of African American expression can catalyze action.I conceptualize corresponding notions of African American expression and subjectivity as "mixtery," an African American technique for combining fragments to generate new meanings. Its theoretical incarnation, mixtheory, can describe the process of creating African American songs, quilts or dances; however, it can also encompass the insertion of African American communal expression into African American literature. In addition, mixtheory provides a way to reconceive African American subjectivity as collaborative, yielding selfhood and community, or plural personhood, in tandem.I illustrate how a mixtery of neurological stimuli and cultural practices contributes toward the emergence of empowerment in texts from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Beginning with Frederick Douglass's autobiographies (1845, 1855, 1893), I contend that African American communal song motivated Douglass's eventual escape from enslavement. Further, Julia A. J. Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch (1879) mobilizes music and mixtery to create a singing, rather than talking, book. Its hybridity joins the popular nineteenth-century form of the hymnal with that of autobiography, exemplifying communal song as a modality of plural personhood. Almost a century later, Toni Morrison locates quilting as a source of mixtery that can counter trauma in her novel Beloved (1987). Finally, the film Rize (2005) chronicles young African Americans in Los Angeles who develop a form of dance called krumping to tell stories and build community simultaneously.By making visible forms that critique hegemonies of race, gender, class and language, this project establishes the integral importance of African American communal expression within and beyond African American literature.

Author

• Sieck, Jennifer Johns

Language

• en

Keyword

• neuroscience
• dance
• music
• quilting
• African American literature

Date created

• 2010

Type of Work

• Dissertation

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Human Sciences

Degree

• Ph.D.

Advisor

• James, Jennifer C.

Committee Member(s)

• Alexander, Adele Logan
• Wald, Gayle
• Weiss, Gail
• Zimmerman, Andrew

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/cv43nw911