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The Role of Harlem in the Development of African American Urban Culture: Cultural Capital versus Ghetto
Kárová, Julie ; Raková, Svatava (advisor) ; Calda, Miloš (referee)
Harlem is an emblematic neighborhood in New York City, historically perceived both as the center of African American culture and a black ghetto. This thesis explores the African American urban culture at its birth and analyzes it through the portrayals of Harlem in black literature, music, and visual art of the period. The era of the 1920s through the 1940s illustrates most distinctly the dual identity of Harlem as a cultural capital versus a ghetto as the 1920s marked a period of unprecedented cultural flowering embodied by the Harlem Renaissance, whereas the 1930s and 1940s were characterized by the Great Depression and its aftermath. During these years the living conditions in Harlem significantly deteriorated. The aim of this work is to critically analyze the period of African American cultural boom of the Harlem Renaissance years and discuss its relevance for the period in comparison to the artistic reactions to the experience of life in the ghetto. The proposed argument is that the way Harlem was depicted in African American culture and the artistic reflection of its duality characterized African American urban experience and culture in the period of 1920s through the 1940s, concentrating on the problem of urban reality in contrast with urban fantasy.
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Other Places: Visions of Utopia in Selected African-American Novels
Hamšíková, Marie ; Veselá, Pavla (advisor) ; Robbins, David Lee (referee)
1 Abstract The thesis analyzes three novels with utopian features written by African American authors: Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899), George S. Schuyler's Black Empire (1936-1937) and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997). The novels and their description of alternative all-black spaces are analyzed on the background of Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopias. In the first part of the thesis, I provide the introduction to the genre of utopia and its brief history, and I state a definition of utopia for the purposes of the thesis. Next I discuss the specificity of American context and introduce the concept of heterotopias as opposed to traditional utopias. The crucial features are simultaneity, juxtaposition, mutual relationships and mirroring. In the latter part of the thesis, I proceed to the analysis of the novels themselves, stressing mainly their treatment of race and racism. In Griggs's Imperium in Imperio, I describe the parallels between the white and black world in their use of rhetoric and in the Imperium's inspiration by the American War of Independence. I also examine the role of Du Boisian double-consciousness and its working in the concept of heterotopia. In the analysis of Schuyler's Black Empire, I focus on the fascist rhetoric resembling that of Italy in Italo-Ethiopian War,...
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