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Memories Of Hope And Loss: “Kerhi Maa Ne Bhagat Singh Jameya”, Sheher Bano

Masters Theses

My Masters thesis focuses on socialist Indian freedom fighter Bhagat Singh’s memory in contemporary Pakistani Punjab. I use the analytical category of memory to argue that Bhagat Singh is invoked by various groups and individuals, specifically those who identify as leftists or Marxists, in contemporary Pakistan to serve a range of political purposes. My analysis particularly sheds light on how activists and writers use the figure of Bhagat Singh to highlight the erasure of regional and lingual identities in Pakistan. Their remembrances underline a perceived historical injustice; the imposition of a national identity based on Urdu language and Sunni Muslim-ness, …

Ploy : An Immigrant Daughter's Archival Survival Strategy, Porntip Israsena Twishime

Doctoral Dissertations

Transnational human migration is commonly conceptualized as the moment a person crosses national borders. In “PLOY : An Immigrant Daughter’s Archival Survival Strategy,” I advance a framework of migration in which migration is an ongoing embodied and relational process, one that continues after a person crosses national borders. This framework maintains that migration exists as a meaningful concept because of the social, political, cultural, and historical contexts that gives this type of mobility meaning. I use a performative novel methodology to construct and represent this argument; a performative novel methodology uses fiction and the novel as a performative text …

In-Between Spaces: Atmospheres, Movement And New Narratives For The City, Paul Alexander Stoicheff

Masters Theses

We often think of architecture as distinct buildings, yet as we move through the city we continuously pass through a built environment that is a collage of buildings. These spaces between buildings are underestimated as influences on our experience of everyday life in the city. Considering architecture as linked existential experiences through spaces rather than confined to individual buildings is more in line with our experience of the city as a series of interconnected spaces and places. Rather than describing a single, static architecture through words, how can we express this linked experience of spaces dynamically through narratives? Can writing …

Mothertongue 2022 (Full Issue)

mOthertongue

The full mOthertongue issue

Accumulations Of (Not) Doing, Richenda Cope

Masters Theses

As I encounter life during a global pandemic, caused by a virus that has us all homebound, I continue my own struggle with a different virus that keeps me not only homebound, but bed bound as well. In this thesis project, I make my way around and through the questions of chronic illness, self-worth, productivity and a changing relationship to time that arise in this dual viral experience - situating the personal within a larger social/political context.

Mothertongue 2021 (Full Issue)

mOthertongue

The full mOthertongue 2021 issue.

Mothertongue 2020 (Full Issue)

mOthertongue

The full mOthertongue 2020 issue.

Mothertongue 2019 (Full Issue)

mOthertongue

The full mOthertongue 2019 issue.

Karaoke At The Train Station, Joseph Crescente

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

An American singing prodigy escapes to Russia following the death of his bandmate and stays after his last close relative – his mother – dies. It’s the late 1990s and he’s found a new home. After a decade in obscurity he makes a comeback by joining a Russian musical collective, but when they embark on a tour during the events in Crimea in 2014, accusations swirl about his past as a democracy promoter for a U.S.-funded NGO in Vladivostok. Condemned by the media as a spy, he’s eventually denounced by Rokko – the man who rediscovered him, mentored him, and …

Ain't Dere No More, Zachery Elbourne

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

Ain't Dere No More is a poem

Transit, Christopher Janke

Masters Theses

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution.

The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes …

Infants Of The Spring: Disrupting The Narrative, Ifa Bayeza

Masters Theses

This written portion of my thesis will document and codify how I as dramaturg, writer and director adapted and staged the classic Harlem Renaissance novel Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman. I walk the reader through how seeing as a director influenced my creative choices through key aspects of production: script development, design, and building the ensemble. The thesis will conclude with a post-production reflection and summary.

Mothertongue 2018 (Full Issue)

mOthertongue

The full mOthertongue 2018 issue.

Golden Palimpsests: America, Cervantes, And The Invention Of Modernity/Coloniality, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada

Doctoral Dissertations

While many theories of colonial discourse emphasize an imperial power imposing its way of thinking and modes of expression onto colonial cultures and peoples, in this dissertation I consider that this imposition affects members of the colonies and the metropolis in different but related ways. In core and periphery alike, the subjects of Spanish colonialism produced documents in which we recognize overlapping, conflicting narratives. I call this strategy for narrative resistance “golden palimpsests” because, as the epigraph suggests, they appear to tell the story of donkeys covered in gold, while in fact they hide the true story of noble horses …

Last Night In Americaland, Tom Mccauley

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

Last Night in Americaland is a collection of poems of life, death, terror, refusal, confusion, America, music, geography, place, love, friendship, hope, and the past.

Snug Harbor, Sean Jeffrey Bates

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

Snug Harbor is a collection of poetry dealing with a collective working history and the personal working history of growing up in various restaurants around Upstate New York.

Orphan Eye, Megan Wilson

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

These are poems written by M. M. Wilson between the dates of August 2015 and March 2018. These poems were written in Belchertown, MA and Amherst, MA.

Racing Fire To The River, Alexandra Itzi

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

Racing Fire to the River is a novella about a poverty-stricken community in the Southwest navigating hardship, violence, and the tantalizing mania of an unclaimed lottery ticket jackpot.

Roughly Speaking: A Performance Autoethnography Of Occupation, Aesthetics, And Epistemology, Tyler Boudreau

Doctoral Dissertations

Roughly Speaking is a performance autoethnography that explores both conditions of storytelling and narrative strategies for producing alternative interpretations and representations of experience, in particular, the occupation of space and subjectivities. Through creative manipulations of voice and style, this narrative performance attempts to challenge dominant notions of authorship, identity, and epistemology, especially those that mask the situatedness of knowledge production and reproduce systemic marginalization of non-normative bodies, voices, and perspectives. Taking as a starting point the narrative form of identity and building upon the mutually constitutive character of social and personal narratives, with an emphasis on embodiment, performativity, and the …

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …

Untitled, Jordan Bekenstein

mOthertongue

short multilingual poem in Russian, translated into English

Crépuscule À La Gare D’Autocars / Dusk At The Bus Station, Mitchell Manning

mOthertongue

Multilingual poetry in French, with English translation

Die Sprache Der Frauen / The Language Of Women, Alexandra Roach

mOthertongue

Multilingual prose in German, with English translation

Tonąć / Sinking, Joanna Kalucki

mOthertongue

Short multilingual prose in Polish and English

Pour Toi, Mon Amour / For You, My Love, Joseph Pelletier

mOthertongue

Multilingual poem inspired by the work "Pour toi, mon amour" by Jacques Prévert, in French and English

בת ישראל / Daughter Of Israel, Clara Marino

mOthertongue

Multilingual poem in Hebrew, with English translation

Comment Vivre En Accord Avec La Démocratie / How To Live In Harmony In Democracy, Aine Folan

mOthertongue

Multilingual poem in French, with English translation

ね、ね、木の葉! / Hey, Hey, Leaves!, Clara Marino

mOthertongue

Multilingual poem in Japanese, with English translation

גאָט האָט געזאָגט / God Said, Clara Marino

mOthertongue

Multilingual poem in Hebrew and Yiddish, with English translation

Consolatio Catulli / The Consolation For Catullus: Homage To Catullus 8, Ariel Robinson

mOthertongue

Multilingual poem in Latin, with English translation