African American Fiction and Fictions of the Founding Fathers
| Project/Area Number |
20K00459
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Review Section |
Basic Section 02030:English literature and literature in the English language-related
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| Research Institution | Kansai University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2024-03-31
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| Project Status |
Completed (Fiscal Year 2023)
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| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,510,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥810,000)
Fiscal Year 2022: ¥650,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000、Indirect Cost: ¥150,000)
Fiscal Year 2021: ¥1,430,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥330,000)
Fiscal Year 2020: ¥1,430,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥330,000)
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| Keywords | Afro-pessimism / Frantz Fanon / Franck B. Wilderson, III / David Marriott / Frederick Douglass / WEB Du Bois / African American / Universalism / Founding Fathers / Agency / US Constitution / Constitution / Property |
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| Outline of Research at the Start |
Situated at the intersection of African American literature, history and political science, my research project is quite interdisciplinary and requires extensive theoretical background reading. I will therefore devote my first year to building as complete a bibliography as possible. Over the second year, I intend to develop my argument in the form of essays, and then chapters. The Founding Fathers’ principles, and most particularly the notion of property, will constitute the golden thread of my project throughout. In the third year, I want to start contacting potential academic publishers.
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Initially, my research aimed to explore the Founding Fathers’ unfulfilled promise of freedom, equality, and justice for all. Gearing my project toward Afro-pessimism has helped me develop a state-of-the-art analysis of the issue. I devoted this final fiscal year to my upcoming monograph, Black Hopes/Black Woes: Early African American Aspirations and Twenty-first Century Afro-pessimism, which final draft I will submit to my editor (Routledge) in October 2024. This last year, I wrote a chapter on how contemporary African American scholar Frank B. Wilderson promotes the tenets of Afro-pessimism and another chapter on how Afro-pessimists David Marriott, Fred Moten, and Jared Sexton have appropriated the notions of violence and tabula rasa in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1962). I have also laid the groundwork for my conclusion, which will show how Afro-pessimism percolates mainstream culture and to what effect. In addition to this monograph, I co-edited The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century (Brill, upcoming), a collection to which I contributed a long chapter, “Agency and Property in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad,” whose contents overlap with some of the concepts I develop in my monograph project.
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Report
(4 results)
Research Products
(14 results)
