Digital Commons Network^™

Cultivating Spaces For American Citizenship In Pauline Hopkins’S Contending Forces, Jonathan Puckett

Honors Theses

Rediscovered through archival recovery in the late 1970s, Pauline E. Hopkins (1859-1930) was an African American author, journalist, and activist at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Hopkins’s African American characters craft spaces, both sacred and secular, where they can freely exercise their citizenship in the Jim Crow era. As Hopkins utilizes the sentimentalist genre to portray realistically life at the turn of the century, my thesis highlights the historical and literary significance of sacred spaces like Boston’s black Baptist churches. I also review two minor characters …

Racialized Tax Inequity: Wealth, Racism, And The U.S. System Of Taxation, Palma Joy Strand, Nicholas A. Mirkay

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article describes the connection between wealth inequality and the increasing structural racism in the U.S. tax system since the 1980s. A long-term sociological view (the why) reveals the historical racialization of wealth and a shift in the tax system overall beginning around 1980 to protect and exacerbate wealth inequality, which has been fueled by racial animus and anxiety. A critical tax view (the how) highlights a shift over the same time period at both federal and state levels from taxes on wealth, to taxes on income, and then to taxes on consumption—from greater to less progressivity. Both of these …

Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol

English Faculty Publications

This chapter draws attention to the lack of parks and nature recreation amenities during the 1920s and 1930s in predominantly African American city neighborhoods through Langston Hughes’s political poetry, specifically his blues-inflected ballad “Park Bench,” as well as “Chicago’s Black Belt” “Restrictive Covenants,” and “One Way Ticket.” Through the figure of the tramp/vagrant/bum, “Park Bench” voices a protest against inequality mapped into city space. Asserting that access to nature should be a fundamental condition of a democratic society, the poem situates the park bench as a charged site for public dialogue. The chapter argues that this poem and other Hughes …

"The Headwaters Of A River Of Failure": Detroit As An Icon Of American Decline, Jae H. Roe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay analyzes films (8 Mile, Gran Torino, It Follows) and television series (Hung, Low Winter Sun) that use the setting of Detroit to depict characters who are dealing with deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and whose choices and relationships reflect their difficulties in, and anxieties about, adjusting to such conditions. While the familiar icons of Detroit's decline appear in all of these texts, the narratives evolve from working class realism to satire and ultimately horror, or from anxieties about white working class displacement to the displacement of such anxieties. The history of Detroit illustrates the complex ways …

If It Looks Like Scholarship..., Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

This Month, Jennifer N. Figueroa

Theses

This Month is a series of collages that depict police violence at civil rights and Black Lives Matter protests. By pairing events from 1964 to contemporary protests that occurred in the same month, the collection draws a connection between the past and present.

The Cultivation Theory And Reality Television: An Old Theory With A Modern Twist, Jeffrey Weiss

Capstone Showcase

George Gerbner, a Hungarian-born professor of communication, founded the cultivation theory, one of the most popular and regarded theories in the communications world. Developed in the mid 20th century, the theory focus on the long-term effects of television on people. Longer exposure to signs, images and people on television cultivates their perception of reality in the real world. The television became a household staple during this time. Families often spent time together watching programming together, however, it played out different effects for each person. Television's constant visual and auditory stimulation on a person made it easier to cultivate certain messages, …

The Legacy Of Uncle Tom : The Transformation Of Black Masculinity And Racial Politics, Lauren R. Weeks

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The main aim of this thesis is to reveal the immense effect that literature can have on society spanning generations. It explores the restriction of black men’s political possibilities due to their perceived relationship with the character Uncle Tom, which not only causes harm to black activist projects by inciting disunity, but also becomes a source of inner turmoil for black men who struggle to be identified in society. This project offers to call these harmful standards that black men are judged by, due to the creation of Uncle Tom, as the binary of black masculinity. By analyzing how this …

Diversifying Representation In Film: An Examination Of Racial And Ethnic Inclusivity In Black Panther And Crazy Rich Asians, Alexandria Hatchett

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Although Hollywood films are distributed globally, they have historically featured white actors and reflected Western life. As Hollywood influences one’s understanding of race in the United States, Black Panther (2018) and Crazy Rich Asian’s (2018) inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities combat racism and xenophobia and reveal alternate ways in which power is manifested in society. This thesis project utilizes critical rhetoric as its method to give a voice to communities of color that have been marginalized due to colonization and persistent structural racism. It employs Critical Race Theory, postcolonialism, and Afrofuturism as its theoretical lenses to explain how race …

Affect And Manhattan’S West Side Piers, Ricardo J. Millhouse

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Derek P. McCormack (2010) argues, "Affect, is like an atmosphere: it might not be visible, but at any given point it might be sensed ... Emotion, in turn, can be understood as the sociocultural expression of this felt intensity" (643). This paper puts McCormack (2010) and Ben Anderson (2009) into conversation to think through the ways in which atmosphere in relation to affective and emotive life has been conceptualized. I center the affective atmospheres that happen with queer bodies that make New York's west side piers queerly affective. I use "queer bodies" to signal the dis-identification with heteronormativity or binaristic …

Black And White Notes: Segregation, Integration, And Urban Renewal Through Pittsburgh's Locals 60 And 471, Nathan Seeley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores Pittsburgh’s Locals 60, 471, and 60-471 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1960s. Local 60 was founded in 1896 for white musicians and Local 471 in 1908 for black musicians. While other studies of the AFM take a “top-down” approach, this study examines these Locals from the “bottom-up.” In doing so, it re-examines the causal relationship between music/musicians and the social, political, and economic conditions intersecting with them. This dissertation is built upon seventy-two interviews conducted between former Local 471 members in the 1990s, photographs from Teenie Harris Collection …

Saving Pocahontas: A Conversation On Gender, Culture, And Power In The Storied Saving Moment, Claire Ehr

Undergraduate Honors Papers

Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.¹ Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and …

Rui(N)Ation: Narratives Of Art And Urban Revitalization In Detroit, Jessica Ks Cappuccitti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation considers the City of Detroit as a case study for analyzing the complex role that artists and art institutions are playing in the potential re-growth and revitalization of the city. I specifically look at artists and arts organizations who are working against the popular narrative of Detroit as “ruin city.” Their efforts create counter narratives that emphasize stories of survival and showcase vibrant communities. By focussing on artist-led and institutional initiatives, I emphasize the importance of art in both community and narrative-building.

This research has taken the form of a written dissertation and two adapted projects, and positions …

Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …

Stuff White People Like...To Keep: Re-Appropriation And Whiteness In America, Trevor Schmitt

Augsburg Honors Review

This paper evaluates the effect of Whiteness on the re-appropriation of cultural traditions through the blog Stuff White People Like. It is the contention of this research that the dominant racial identity in U.S. culture appropriate cultural traditions to re-enforce its cultural control. The manner in which this process occurs is evaluated through the two separate cultural traditions of Yoga and Natural Medicine as highlight by the blog. The resulting conclusion of this research finds that Whiteness erases marginalized cultural tradition meanings through popular culture and consumerism in order to apply new meanings which are more accessible to the dominant …

'Race, Racism, And American Law': A Seminar From The Indigenous, Black, And Immigrant Legal Perspectives, Eduardo R.C. Capulong, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Flagrant racism has characterized the Trump era from the onset. Beginning with the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has inflamed long-festering racial wounds and unleashed White supremacist reaction to the nation’s first Black President, in the process destabilizing our sense of the nation’s racial progress and upending core principles of legality, equality, and justice. As law professors, we sought to rise to these challenges and prepare the next generation of lawyers to succeed in a different and more polarized future. Our shared commitment resulted in a new course, “Race, Racism, and American Law,” in which we sought to explore the roots …

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

The Sigh Of Triple Consciousness: Blacks Who Blurred The Color Line In Films From The 1930s Through The 1950s, Audrey Phillips

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will identify an over looked subset of racial identity as seen through film narratives from the 1930’s through the 1950’s pre-Civil Rights era. The subcategory of racial identity is the necessity of passing for Black people then identified as Negro. The primary film narratives include Veiled Aristocrats (1932), Lost Boundaries (1949), Pinky (1949) and Imitation of Life (1934). These images will deploy the troupe of passing as a racialized historical image. These films depict the pain and anguish Passers endured while escaping their racial identity. Through these stories we identify, sympathize and understand the needs of Black …

Italian/Americans And The American Racial System: Contadini To Settler Colonists?, Stephen J. Cerulli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the relationship between ethnicity and race, “whiteness,” in the American racial system through the lens of Italian/Americans. Firstly, it overviews the current scholarship on Italian/Americans and whiteness. Secondly, it analyzes methodologies that are useful for understanding race in an American context. Thirdly, it presents a case study on the Columbus symbol and the battle over identity that arose out of, and continues over, this symbol. Finally, this thesis provides suggestions using the case study and methodologies to open up new ways of understanding Italian/Americans and the American racial system.

White Plight: A Review Of White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege In A Racially Divided America, Angela S. Farmer

Journal of Research Initiatives

The United States of America offers the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, even as fellow Americans find themselves firmly ensconced in the 21st century, it is clear that equality of opportunity is not available for all.

In newly published, "White Kids" (Hagerman, 2018), unveils the reality witnessed daily in schools across the nation. Some children are afforded enhanced benefits based on the school they attend and the settings in which they are raised. Rather than allowing this evidence to stand alone; however, the author spends years with a group of students who attend a variety …

The Girls And The Others: Racialized Anthropomorphism In The First Season Of The Powerpuff Girls, Jalen Thompson

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

The Powerpuff Girls (1998) chronicles the lives of three kindergarten-aged girls with superpowers. Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup were conceived in a laboratory by a scientist, Professor Utonium, out of “sugar, spice, and everything nice” with an accidental spill of “Chemical X” which in turn gives the girls their superpowers to “fight the forces of evil.” As protectors of Townsville, the suburban community in which they reside, each episode shows the girls battling with various villains (usually men) who are established as outsiders to Townsville. The villains are represented as ethnic minorities through racialized anthropomorphism which associates their evilness to their …

The Cape Fear Ran Red: Memory Of The Wilmington Race Riot And Coup D'État Of 1898, Jacob Michael Thomas

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

On November 10, 1898 the city of Wilmington erupted in racial violence as the members of the white population massacred anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred of the black citizenry. The result of the Wilmington Race Riot was the reassertion of white supremacy in North Carolina and a flip in Wilmington’s population, as whites became the majority. This paper will argue that the events of the Wilmington Race Riot and Coup D’état came about from the direct interference of Wilmington’s white elite along with outside interference from Democratic Party Leaders across the state of North Carolina as well as the …

“Liquid Sunshine, Or Something Else,” A Play By Kalli Anne Joslin, Kalli Joslin

Honors Program Theses

"Liquid Sunshine, or Something Else" is a historical play set in 1920s Florida that examines the intersections of race, gender, and immigration during American Prohibition. Set in an unnamed town that incorporates aspects of Tampa, Miami, and Key West, the owner of a local Cuban restaurant must grapple with increased police presence in her community as she is simultaneously asked to run an illegal still and shelter a family of Eastern European immigrants.

All That You Say Is Beautiful: Stories, Omaria Sanchez Pratt

Theses and Dissertations--English

From the city of High Point to New York City, this collection portrays a certain black experience. Through a sociological lens, the stories in All That You Say is Beautiful study intersections of class, race, family, and sexuality by bending forms, expectations, and seeks to understand what it means to be human when your experience is not that of mainstream American culture.

Mud Bog: Reconsidering Rural America, Michael Vincent Bodnar

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Mud Bog is an examination of the social and economic realities that present-day Americans living in rural communities endure, and how circumstances beyond their control have prodded them toward narcissistic displays – which can often be troubling expressions of darkness and intolerance.

I hasten to add that my artistic goal is not to wag a finger of disapproval at those depicted, or to punch down at them. I strive to treat this material with sensitivity and empathy. My intent is to shed a light on the conditions that have contributed to the current rancorous state of political and cultural division …

The New White Moderate: Bearing Witness To The Differend Of Race, Ethan T. Ashley

Honors Theses

As Frantz Fanon demonstrates in his text, Black Skin, White Masks, Sartrean existentialism fails to account for differences in racialized existence. Quite simply, the notion that “existence precedes essence” is reversed in the case of the black subject; he/she is living in a world that has rendered the black subject subservient to a predetermined essence. Ultimately, the fact that the white subject exists and may freely determine his/her essence while the black subject may not further demonstrates this gap or a chasm between black and white subjects that calls for further examination. In the first chapter, I will use …

"A Dark, Abiding, Signing Africanist Presence" In Walker Percy’S Dr. Tom More Novels, David Withun

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

Many of the tropes, commonplaces, symbols, and values used and reflected by American literary works written by white authors, as Toni Morrison writes, are “in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” The black/white racial binary and racial différance that mark this presence inform the use of racialized characters as signifiers in the novels of Walker Percy. In the Dr. Tom More novels Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy adopts racial symbolism as a means toward his critique of the American notion of “the pursuit of happiness.” In Love in the Ruins, Percy …

Entwined Threads Of Red And Black: The Hidden History Of Indigenous Enslavement In Louisiana, 1699-1824, Leila K. Blackbird

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Contrary to nationalist teleologies, the enslavement of Native Americans was not a small and isolated practice in the territories that now comprise the United States. This thesis is a case study of its history in Louisiana from European contact through the Early American Period, utilizing French Superior Council and Spanish judicial records, Louisiana Supreme Court case files, statistical analysis of slave records, and the synthesis and reinterpretation of existing scholarship. This paper primarily argues that it was through anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity and with the utilization of socially constructed racial designations that “Indianness” was controlled and exploited, and that Native Americans …

In Another Person’S Skin: Adaptations Of To Kill A Mockingbird And The Characterization Of Scout Finch, Eric A. Pitz

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Racial Constructions And Activism Within Graphic Literature. An Analysis Of Hank Mccoy, The Beast, Juan D. Alfonso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a post-modern lens, I will primarily focus on comics books published by Marvel Comics to demonstrate the myriad of ways in which graphic literature is used as a subversive tool of sociopolitical discourse. I will demonstrate this by deconstructing and redefining the role of myth as a means of transferring ethical practices through societies and the ways in which graphic literature serves this function within the space of a modern and increasingly atheistic society. The thesis first demonstrates how the American Civil Rights Movement was metaphorically translated and depicted to the pages of Marvel’s X-Men comics to expose its …