| |
| author |
Cordelza D Haynes
| | title |
African American Cultural Memory: Birthing Our Collective Self-Consciousness
| | abstract |
This project incorporates historical-social analyses through the vision of African
American intellectuals who have provided resources for understanding the collective
cultural memory relative to self-consciousness. My argument considers the common
themes and, hence, the paradigmatic threads in the scholarship of these scholars. The
importance of their scholarship, individually and collectively, must be understood as
informative boundary markers. Although their work spans different periods, each, in their
distinctive manner, inherently is focused on what constitutes, impedes, nurtures,
revitalizes, traumatizes, and disintegrates the potentialities of communal agency and
creativity. Each chapter builds on the previous one to explore cultural memory's impact
on African American self-consciousness over time. It maps the contours that place
cultural memory in dialogue with collective trauma and the capacity to access self-
knowledge through burgeoning expressions of African American self-consciousness. One
of the key outcomes of this dissertation is to demonstrate the potential for African
American socio-historic treatises to function as intentional paradigms that analytically
intersect with psychological theories, ethics, and spirituality/religion in a semiotic manner
to give depth to the study of African American collective self-consciousness. Further, by
presenting an integrative exploration of communal cultural memory and expressions of a
vibrant life force as motifs, it is my intention to encourage further analysis of African
American collective self-consciousness in the academy and to urge a broader moral
imperative to engage our communities, especially those socioeconomically poor and
disenfranchised, with semiotic support for African American communal well-being on
many levels.
| | school |
The Theological School, Drew University
| | degree |
Ph.D. (2025)
|
| advisor |
Traci C West
|
| committee |
Phillis I Sheppard
Althea D Spencer-Miller
|
| full text | CHaynes.pdf - requires Drew uLogin |
| |
