by: Grant Denkinson
Research Services Consultant
As part of Black History Month and Open Access Week, we took a look in Leicester Research Archive (LRA) for the research and scholarship about Black people that has been published at University of Leicester (UoL) and made available openly to the world.
Research Services Consultant
As part of Black History Month and Open Access Week, we took a look in Leicester Research Archive (LRA) for the research and scholarship about Black people that has been published at University of Leicester (UoL) and made available openly to the world.
Let's start with some UoL theses which LRA preserves in digital form, including digitised older theses:
Dhia A.H. Aljubouri’s 1972 thesis “The Medieval Idea of the Saracen as illustrated in English Literature, Spectacle and Sport”. A scholarship from the Study Leave Committee of Baghdad University helped give Dr Aljubouri the chance to write on: “Anti-Islamic Polemics and Crusade Propaganda in the Middle Ages”, “The Horrible Saracen” in “the Non-Dramatic Writings in Middle English with particular reference to the Romances” and in “Early English Religious and Folk Drama, Spectacle, and Sport”.
Brian George Holder’s thesis, also from 1972, examined the “Politics of Mississippi, 1900-1966” says “The most fundamental division in Mississippi has always been between the white race and the black race.” (pg. 210) and includes discussion of voting “Thus with the combined weight of law, administration and custom to rely on, the white politicians of Mississippi were successful in keeping the negro electorate to a bare minimum, thus ensuring that the essentially white electorate would elect white legislators and officials.” (pg. 147)
“Six approaches to the modern short story in the southern United States” is James Orin Anderson’s PhD thesis from 1977. His chapter on Black Writers looks at Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Diane Oliver, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.
Nahfiza Ahmed’s 1999 thesis “Race, class and citizenship : the civil rights struggle in Mobile, Alabama, 1925-85” in the Department of Economic & Social History is summarised in the abstract “Race, class and citizenship were three important factors which shaped African-American leadership, political goals and protest strategies to overcome the problem of racism during this century” and “Despite over a half-century of civil rights protest and accommodation in the 1980s however, it was clear that racism continued to determine the nature and problem of African-American citizenship in one of America's oldest cities.”
Allan LeRoy Branson’s 2011 Criminology thesis looks at “The Anonymity of African American Serial Killers: From Slavery to Prisons, A Continuum of Negative Imagery”. The abstract starts “Race-based perceptions regarding African American males have created the belief that, although these men are frequently associated with crime, they do not engage in serial murder. That conviction reflects a cultural bias whereby white male serial murderers arguably have been given an iconic status within popular culture, and the “anti-hero” traits accorded them are denied to their African-American counterparts, rendering the latter invisible.”
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| University of Leicester has been celebrating Black History Month throughout October |
Next, let's look at UoL research articles available without a paywall via LRA:
Emma Parker, Associate Professor (Reader) in Postwar and Contemporary Literature, interviews Valerie Mason-John, aka Queenie who “defines herself as a transracially-raised queer dyke of African descent” (Textual Practice, 2011, 25 (4), pp. 799-822) “Mason-John gave up journalism on the grounds that ‘it was impossible to tell true stories, the media didn’t want the truth, and it was these stories I wanted to tell’. Seeking ways to tell stories more truthfully, she studied clowning and took a course at the Desmond Jones School of Mime and Physical Theatre, where she ‘reclaimed the art of play...reliving some lost childhood years’. She started writing plays and through drama found liberation”
Stephen Pudney, now Professor of Econometrics at University of Sheffield, in “Pay Differentials, Discrimination and Worker Grievances.” From January 2000 (Papers in Public Sector Economics 00/5) argues “Using an econometric earnings model that allows for race- and gender-specific employer effects, we find little evidence from British WERS98 data of any association between pay differentials and the grievance process, suggesting that grievance and tribunal procedures are not very effective anti-discrimination instruments.”
Mark Jobling, Rita Rasteiro and Jon H. Wetton from Genetics and from History collaborated on “In the blood: the myth and reality of genetic markers of identity” (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2016, 39(2), pp. 142-161) where they “provide a primer on genetics, and describe how genetic markers have become associated with particular groups. We describe the conflict between population genetics and individual-based genetics and the pitfalls of over-simplistic genetic interpretations, arguing that although the tests themselves are reliable, the interpretations are unreliable and strongly influenced by cultural and other social forces.”
Dr. Corinne Fowler, Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature in “The Rural Turn in Contemporary Writing by Black and Asian Britons: The Case of English Country Houses’ Colonial Connections” (Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2017, 19(3), pp. 395-415) “revisits a number of canonical works in order to explore how contemporary writing by black Britons responds to earlier writing about country houses and empire. Works such as The West Indian (1771), Jane Eyre (1847), The Moonstone (1868) and The Way We Live Now (1875) provide an important literary context for a rural turn in writing by black and Asian Britons, a turn which was inaugurated by V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987). My essay situates post-millennial writing by John Agard, David Dabydeen, Sene Seneviratne, Tanika Gupta and Tyrone Huggins in the context of the current renaissance in country house research…”
Akwugo Emejulu, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, and Leah Bassel, New Blood Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University of Leicester published “Minority women, austerity and activism” (Race and Class, 2015, 57 (2), pp. 86-95) and also the website which links to their books, papers and writings in the press. They say, “Our research project explores minority women's activism in the context of the on-going economic crisis and austerity measures in Scotland, England and France. We examine the differing ways in which minority women seek to advance a politics that names complex and multiple inequalities and the dilemmas they face when attempting to build new coalitions and new solidarities in these uncertain times.”