Digital Commons Network^™

Asian Americans Challenge The Official Racial Nationalism Of The United States, Frank Wu

Publications and Research

The very definition of “Asian American,” which historically has been based upon the formal exclusion of this grouping, demonstrates the racial nationalism of the United States Racial nationalism is not new. It has been the norm in America (and arguably remains the norm elsewhere, including throughout Asia) to identify belonging to a shared race as essential to membership within a nation-state. This essay uses the Wong Kim Ark case, recognizing birthright citizenship for an individual of Chinese descent, and the Korematsu case, allowing the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, as a means of showing how government officials conceived …

Sonic Femininity: The Ronettes' Transgressive Gender Performance, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

Iconic sixties girl group the Ronettes are frequently (and justly) celebrated for anchoring the Wall of Sound and inspiring the Beatles, but in their own right, they transgressed social, gendered expectations in revolutionary ways. Framed by a notion I call the sonic feminine, a recuperative theoretical space for the revolutionarily transgressive work of female and femme artists, I argue that the Ronettes, and lead singer Ronnie Spector in particular, enacted a kind of cultural rebellion: they crafted their images to made-up heights that tease the boundaries of drag across the spaces of the stage, the recording studio, the bathroom, and …

Introduction To Filmf, Teresa Fisher

Open Educational Resources

This textbook provides an introduction into the history of film and the filmmaking process. It begins with the history of film and how to watch a film. It then looks at specific areas of filmmaking: cinematography, mis-en-scene, acting, sound, editing, and narrative. The book ends with a look at documentary films, experimental films, and animation.

On Writing Transnational Migration In On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) And Better Never Than Late (2019): An Interview With Chika Unigwe, M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

This interview with Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe, conducted in early 2020, addresses the ethics and aesthetics of representing sex trafficking and transnational migration in her award-winning novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and her latest short story collection Better Never Than Late, which appeared in the US in 2020. The author discusses the discourse on migration and trafficking in both works, bringing much-needed nuance to the conversation. She pays particular attention to issues of “agency” and “vulnerability”, as well as authenticity, stereotyping, the “white gaze”, the publishing industry, and the recent controversy on Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (2020). Drawing from …

From Brooklyn To “Brooklyn” The Cultural Transformations Of Leisure, Pleasure, And Taste, Emily Holloway

Publications and Research

To tell the story of Brooklyn’s complex history in hospitality and cuisine is to tell a story about the tensions of high and low culture, of the mobility of capital and residents, and of the tremendous influence yielded by macroeconomic change. A sleepy bedroom community for the eighteenth and much of the early nineteenth centuries, Brooklyn’s waterfront (both historically and today) is deeply tied to its nineteenth and twentieth-century industrial heritage. The ad hoc economies that supported factory and dock workers, included boardinghouses, saloons, brothels, food carts, and amusement parks and drew a stark contrast to those of factory and …

Defoe’S Robinson Crusoe: “Maps,” Natural Law, And The Enemy, Ala Alryyes

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

‘Framed And Clothed With Variety’: Print Culture, Multimodality, And Visual Design In John Derricke’S Image Of Irelande, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

This chapter argues that the twelve illustrative plates in John Derricke's Image of Ireland (1581) were the author's primary focus, aimed at readers who practiced the kinds of ‘laudable exercises’ demanded of committed Protestants: a kind of reading that was recursive, studious, and dynamic. This essay contextualises Derricke’s Image in relation to printer John Day’s output in the late sixteenth century as well as to contemporary illustrated texts from which Derricke may have drawn inspiration as a reader and woodcarver. I focus on the seven plates containing small alphabetical keys and their impact on how and in what order we …

The 241 Art Of The Theatre, Claudia Case

Open Educational Resources

An examination of the nature of live theatre: its forms, practices, and purposes, and its relevance to society.

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Advocate, Fall 2016, Vol. 28, No. 2, Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Features:

- Trump, Brexit, and the Abject Poverty of Liberalism. Gordon Barnes (p. 3)

Debate:

- Demonetization in India: The Political Economy of Waiting Time. Bhargav Rani (p. 26)

Book Review:

- The Dark Side of the American Revolution: A Review of Robert Parkinson’s “The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution.” Evan Turiano (p. 36)

- Writing Resistance in the Age of Survaillance: A Comparative Review of Steven Salaita’s “Uncivil Rites” and Moustafa Bayoumi’s “This Muslim American Life.” Erik Wallenberg (p. 41)

In Search Of A Grand Narrative: The Turbulent History Of Teaching, Judith R. Kafka

Publications and Research

For this review of research on the history of teaching, I use the instructional triangle as an organizing tool and frame of analysis to explore what we know about who taught, who was taught, and what was taught across space and time.

In the first section of this chapter I review historical research on who taught in American classrooms. One overwhelming theme throughout this literature is that policy makers, school leaders, and the general public have historically cared a great deal about who a teacher was, often basing their preferences on the belief that a teacher’s social characteristics would shape …

The Mcgowan Trilogy (Plays), Seamus O'Scanlain

Publications and Research

The McGowan Trilogy is a psychological journey of violence, sorrow and love lost. Set in 1980s Ireland after the Brighton Bombing which targeted Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet it follows the exploits of Victor M. McGowan - a new breed of IRA enforcer - in love with puns, guns and the pogo. The Trilogy won awards for Best Actress, Best Director and Best Production in 2014 and played for 20 nights in New York. In 2015 it played in the UK at the Kino-Teatr, An Taibhdhearc, The Town hall Westport and The Town Hall Galway.

At Home In The Bronx: Children At The New York Catholic Protectory 1865-1938, Janet Butler Munch

Publications and Research

The N.Y.C.-based New York Catholic Protectory was established in 1865 as the home of destitute or truant children. This article deals with such topics as the protectory's establishment, operation and management, education and industrial training, as well as societal factors leading to its changing mission and closing in the Bronx in 1938-- after serving the needs of over 140,000 boys and girls.

The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

From Michel de Montainge’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship …

The Ideological And Organizational Origins Of The United Federation Of Teachers' Opposition To The Community Control Movement In The New York City Public Schools, 1960-1968, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

This article explores the origins and ideological practice of public school teacher unionism as it was articulated and revealed in New York City before and during the epochal strike against an experiment in community control of neighborhood schools undertaken by the United Federation of Teachers in the fall of 1968 that closed down the city’s massive public school system for weeks and put almost 1 million school children in the street. How and why did unionized New York City public school teachers support the particular kind of trade unionism that the UFT and its president, Albert Shanker, embodied and practiced …

As Close As You'll Ever Be, Seamus O'Scanlain

Publications and Research

Short story collection featuring Victor McGowan - set in Galway, Belfast, Boston and New York. Irish crime fiction noir collection.

Advocate, May 2014, Vol. [25], No. [5], Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

From the Editor’s Desk: Diversity at CUNY: Statistics vs. Reality (p. 3)

CUNY News in Brief: As Workers Grumble, a New Master (p. 5)

Letter to the Editor: Objections About Reparations (p. 6)

In Memoriam: Alas Enormes: Gabriel García Márquez, José Chevarry (p. 7)

Mentoring Future Faculty of Color: A Brief Conversation with Chris Eng and Melissa Phruksachart, Kristina Huang (p. 8)

Edifying Debate:

- Speech and Sanctions: Highlights from the CUNY Forum on the BDS Movement and Academic Freedom, Bill Mullen and Sherry Wolf (p. 10)

- Marching for Immigrants’ and Workers’ Rights, CUNY Internationalist Marxist …

Surviving The City: Resistance And Plant Life In Woolf’S Jacob’S Room And Barnes’ Nightwood, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

In Jacob’s Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacob’s Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education …

Ireland Trip Exposes Students To Turbulent History, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

On Kripke's Puzzle About Time And Thought, Rohit J. Parikh

Publications and Research

We discuss a variant of a puzzle introduced by Saul Kripke.

Tarrying With The "Private Parts", Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Publications and Research

Two-thirds of the way through Object Lessons (2012), Robyn Wiegman's provocative study of the institutional and ideological development of what she names identity-based modes of inquiry in US colleges and universities, the author recounts a 2003 trip she took to Leiden to attend the inaugural meeting of the International American Studies Association. There, she was regularly met with the claim that American studies, at least as it is practiced by citizens and long-term residents of the United States, was deeply provincial and too caught up with rehearsals of the humdrum difficulties of American social and cultural life, particularly our always …

Citizen Bunker: Archie Bunker As Working-Class Icon., Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

Archie Bunker, the central character and patriarch of Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” (1971-1979) has been referred to as an “everyman” and an “angry-man prototype” with “hard had prejudice.” The name Archie Bunker itself has become synonymous with a blue-collar, racially chauvinistic mentality. The title of the show’s pilot and theme song, “Those Were the Days,” emphasized Archie’s dream of a simpler (though idealized) time, a world that he could understand and upon which he could exert some control. In 1970s America, Archie seemed to feel that the world was against him – economically, socially, politically and culturally – …

Bad Girls And Biopolitics: Abortion, Popular Fiction, And Population Control, Karen Weingarten

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Beyond Friending: Buddypress And The Social, Networked, Open-Source Classroom, Matthew K. Gold

Publications and Research

Classrooms have always been networks, of a sort, with professors and students forming an interlaced series of nodes that take shape over the course of a semester, but tools like BuddyPress and WordPress can make those networks more open, more porous, and more varied. In very useful ways, the classroom-as-social-network can help create engaging spaces for learning in which students are more connected to one another, to their professors, and to the wider world.

¡Escriba! ¡Write! Volume 8, June 2010, Hostos Community College Library

¡Escriba!

No abstract provided.

Advocate, February 2009, Vol. [20], No. [5], Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

From the Editor's Desk: Putting Away Childish Things (p. 2)

An Open Letter to President Jennifer Raab, Hunter College, CUNY (p. 3)

In Memoriam: John Patrick Diggins (1935-2009) (p. 4)

Framing Shape: War Crimes and Paralysis, Alan Koenig (p. 6)

Adjuncting: Free Choice and Adjunct Equity, Renee McGarry (p. 8)

Afghanistan: The Use and Abuse of a Buffer State (Part 2), Christian Parenti (p. 9)

Gaza Forum: The War of Punishment and Frustration, Adel Safty (p. 12)

The Dark Days: Fortress Israel’s Final Stand, Naji Ali (p. 13)

Book Review: The Crisis of Labor, Carl Lindskoog (p. …

Creole Carnival: Unwrapping The Pleasures And Paradoxes Of The Gift Of Creolization, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank goes against the current in questioning the social and intellectual embrace of the poetics of creolization, in terms of its the efficacy in subverting biases that underpinned colonial subordination and exploitation.

Re-Inventing Sicily In Italian-American Writing And Film, Fred L. Gardaphé

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Broadway And The Paycock: The Broadway Musical Adaptation Of Sean O'Casey's Juno And The Paycock, Julia M. Furay

Publications and Research

The 1959 Broadway musical Juno, based on Sean O'Casey's 1924 classic Juno and the Paycock, is notable despite its ultimate artistic and financial failure. Musical adaptors Joseph Stein and Marc Blitzstein were inspired by the inherent musicality of O'Casey's play. However, O'Casey's linguistic complexity, profound characterization and political commentary were impossible to translate onto the Broadway stage. Instead, Stein, Blitzstein and de Mille emphasized ritualism and psychology within the story of the Boyle family, and were careful to conform O'Casey's world to that of 1950s Broadway. In doing so, however, the adaptation became different thematically from its predecessor. …

Discovering, Again, The Meaning Of "American", Peter Hegarty

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

In his essay, "The discovery of what it means to be an American," James Baldwin described how his exile in Paris led him to new self-knowledge about his national identity. Baldwin left the US to survive what he called "the color problem," but was surprised to find he shared a sense of being "not at home" with white Americans in Europe. He was American in ways he had not realized. Exile afforded him intellectual freedom, but his growing consciousness of the French-Algerian war led him to understand that "there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world." Leaving home …