Kimberly Bain

The Great Migration, which involved the movement of six million Black people from the Southern to Northern United States during the period of Reconstruction, allowed for the standardization and cultivation of Black cultural art forms. As field hollers, work songs, and spirituals began in plantation fields in the agrarian South during the Transatlantic slave trade, the Great Migration allowed the evolution of these genres into Blues music on the concert stage in the urban North. What was once a collective song form used primarily for labour purposes, developed into a performative soloistic music that became standardized by an AAB song form. Eventually, the form and improvisatory aspects of Blues music later developed into Jazz music during the Harlem Renaissance. Previous scholarship has focused most heavily on either the Antebellum plantation song forms, or the roaring twenties Jazz age. This project analyzes literary forms written during or with fictionalized settings between 1863 and 1920, referred to as the Post-Bellum Pre-Harlem era, to examine the cultivation of Black art forms such as Blues music and oral folk storytelling during the Great Migration through its representation in historical accounts, literary fiction, and poetry. Centering Blues music within the framework of the literary and historical archive showcases the collection of cultural materials that make up what we know about Black history and genealogy.The methods involved include examining the historical background pre-emancipation through enslavement narratives and nonfiction texts, while identifying the importance of folktales within Blues music lyrics and the role of ethnographer’s archival collection practices. Additionally, Blues-related characters, lamentations, and themes appear throughout poetry and fiction texts that were either written during the 1863–1920-time frame or which are fictionally set in and depict the historical plantation South. Examination of these fiction narratives involves the fabrication of the historical past to fill the gaps in the archive of Black genealogy. A conclusive argument is made that this period in American History has been gravely overlooked by scholarship and this project is an attempt to spark interest in the origins of Jazz and Blues music.

View record

This thesis examines Jordan Peele as the creator of a transmedial story-world that is built both via the connections between his films and the various paratextual materials that surround them. These, I argue are not extraneous adjuncts to the films but a crucial part of the overall story-world itself that take on lives of their own. Embedded within my analysis of Peele’s work is both the socio-political critiques at the centre of each film and the curation of Peele’s image. As part of this attentiveness to the wider world of film, I argue that Peele sidesteps the usual pitfalls of Hollywood cinema and production to build a company that champions diversity and collaboration within the film industry. Moreover, using Alessandra Raengo’s critical framework of the representational shadow paradigm, I argue that the public image that Peele curates allows him to bolster the representation of Black and non-Black marginalised voices within the film industry without conforming to the indexing of Black cinema as mirror-image or self-portraiture.

View record