All Abstracts

The scholarly discussion on colorism has focused primarily on the disadvantages dark-skinned African Americans face, while highlighting the advantages light-skinned African Americans have such as having a higher chance of being hired at a job or having a higher salary. For this research, I am focusi...

This presentation explores American hip-hop’s interaction with immigration policies in the contemporary era marked by Donald Trump’s presidency. Hip-hop will be used as a cultural genre, providing the framework to examine some of the political voices of American Black people surrounding immigrat...

Edgar Allen Poe’s work is typically categorized as Gothic fiction, a genre that often conveys stories of death and romance through their relationship to fear. In Poe’s short stories, fear is an embodied emotion; however, the means by which this fear is expressed differ depending on circumstance...

  In an interdisciplinary analysis of Black women’s diasporic geographies entitled Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick argues, “Black matters are spatial matters…Black women’s histories, lives, and spaces must be understood as enmeshing wit...

The Black experience, both within and outside of the United States, has been consistently problematized by those outside of the culture. The associated issues range from violent language and images to physical violence. As a result of this, ideologies and created identities -- neither of which are w...

Representation of Black characters in animated television opens new possibilities for questioning tropes and stereotypes. This presentation analyses the way tokenism impacts the development of Black character portrayals across animated television shows whether the program aims at children or adults....

This presentation will examine the construction of Blackness through Middle Class Black Men as depicted in Lethal Weapon (2016) and Black-ish (2014). By taking a case study approach this presentation will explore social codes and visual culture used to show the dynamics of legible and illegible masc...