Imagined identities: Adapting white imaginings of black female identity in African American literature before the renaissance

Black women in America are a population wedged between the larger marginalized African American population and the white American mainstream. They are literally and figuratively set apart from all other Americans, and possibly all other women of color because of their circumscribed socio-economic and political position. I believe this phenomenon can be tracked to original racial and economic conditions within a specific era in American social and literary history; that its chronological development and evolutionary transmission into the empowered segment of the black community during the nineteenth century---namely, African American men---can be traced; and that the resulting effects of the imagined identity assignments on the daily lives of black women can be connected to these other factors. Therefore, without negating other identity structures in the U.S., this project is an exploration of the literary representations of the imagined identities assigned to black women as a result of patriarchal American philosophical, racial, and economic stratifications. Thus, the dissertation investigates the literary aspect of this phenomenon in African American literature between 1840 and 1900 operating within three interrelated fields: literature, history, and cultural studies.