Livingstone Undergraduate Research Award in Diversity and Social Justice
Livingstone Undergraduate Research Award in Diversity and Social Justice
Tyler Perez
Beloved, Beyoncé, and the Burdens Of Our Past: A Critical Examination of Healing From Trauma in the African American Gothic
View Tyler’s project online
My project is a comparative literary analysis of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, focused on how each text answers the same essential question: how do we critically engage with the traumatic past in order to solve problems in the present and build a more positive future? I approach this question from two perspectives—the personal/individual and the national/communal—looking at how each author’s approach to this question has important ramifications for us today as we work to solve complex social issues caused by the legacy of unjust institutions.
What is your major and expected year of graduation?
I am a double major in secondary education and English with a minor in history. I will be graduating from Temple University on May 4, 2022.
What inspired you to pursue your project?
I embarked on this project after writing my capstone paper for my English major, which was a paper on time and memory in Beloved. I knew I wanted to engage with Beloved on a deeper level by this point, but I was not sure how until my mentor professor, Dr. Steve Newman, suggested pairing Beloved with another text. I decided to pair it with Lemonade, a contemporary text that, despite the difference in medium, interrogates the same questions as Beloved, and in doing so I came to very important significant conclusions about each text. From here, I plan to think about these texts from a pedagogical perspective by designing a unit plan for teaching Beloved and Lemonade alongside one another in the high school English classroom.
What does winning this award mean to you?
Winning this award helped me affirm my confidence in my abilities as a scholar of literature and an educator. This project is the synthesis of years of study at Temple University, and to see this work be honored through this award reminds me of all the late nights annotating novels and writing papers to get me to this moment here. I’m proud of my work as a student at Temple and thankful for the mentors who developed my abilities, and winning this award makes me even more enthusiastic to study literature in the future as both an educator and a graduate student one day.
How did the Libraries support your research?
Temple Libraries was a valuable resource throughout this research process. The library gave me an abundance of important books, scholarly articles, and other research tools that helped me refine my thesis and develop my argument. Given how contemporary Lemonade is, there is less research published on this text compared to Beloved, but Charles Library had a variety of essential scholarship on this visual album, all of which played a critical role in my paper. Simply put, without Charles Library, this project would not exist.
It has been a joy to watch Tyler’s project emerge from our class on the Trans-Atlantic Gothic last fall. Weaving together a fine-grained analysis of genre, theme, and historical situation, he not only shows how deeply he has thought about Morrison’s challenging novel, Beloved; he also extends the Gothic to make excellent sense of a very different kind of text, Beyoncé’s Lemonade. The result is a pairing that enlightens our understanding of both texts and the profound questions they raise about the trauma caused by racism and how those subjected to it might heal themselves.
—Steve Newman, Associate Professor, College of Liberal Arts
This category covers work utilizing humanities or scientific methodologies, involving creative work or literature reviews, but relating in some way to the overall theme of diversity and social justice.
This award is generously sponsored by Gale, a Cengage company.
