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Lingua Asia: Decolonizing Heritage Language Education, Collin Absher May 2024

Lingua Asia: Decolonizing Heritage Language Education, Collin Absher

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The emergence of APIA programs within higher education has assisted in posing the question of what should be included in the K-12 history curriculum as it is lacking in Asian American history, African American history, and other marginalized groups’ history and information. In tandem, heritage learning Mandarin classes, while they do attempt to bring the students' writing and reading levels up to their speaking levels, instead focus solely on Chinese history, culture, identity, and societal problems. This is valuable; however, what of the Chinese American identity? There has been a surplus of over 200 years of Chinese American history within …


France's Compliance Of The International Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Racial Discrimination: French Universalism Versus Group Rights, Alex Earls May 2023

France's Compliance Of The International Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Racial Discrimination: French Universalism Versus Group Rights, Alex Earls

Undergraduate Honors Theses

There exists a constant battle between universalism and anti-racism in France, where universalism is positioned as the predominant force of western values and anti-racism as a dog-whistle for ‘wokeness’. This thesis will position that France is predisposed to incomplete compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in part due to its rooted concept of French universalism and the nationalistic undertones therein that do not tolerate intermediate identifications between the individual and the Republic. The purpose of this argument is to generate an interpretive tool to observe and analyze France’s relatively weak civil …


Inalienable For Whom? Activism And The Politics Of Decolonial Restitution In French Museums, Alexandra Byrne May 2023

Inalienable For Whom? Activism And The Politics Of Decolonial Restitution In French Museums, Alexandra Byrne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis will interrogate the relationship between French museums, activists, and the government as it relates to postcolonial restitution of cultural heritage, often stolen from its country of origin under uncertain or exploitative circumstances. I will seek to understand 1) how museums address colonialism and restitution in their public rhetoric, 2) the legal and geopolitical barriers to restitution, and 3) the role of activists. I construct a theory of a pyramid of pressure, theorizing that museums push restitution issues beyond their galleries to larger legal and geopolitical barriers, but that these barriers are now being questioned by increased activism. I …


The Cost Of Curls: Discrimination, Social Stigma, And Identity Oppression Of Black Women Through Their Hair, Sydney Baylor Jan 2023

The Cost Of Curls: Discrimination, Social Stigma, And Identity Oppression Of Black Women Through Their Hair, Sydney Baylor

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This thesis analyzes the discriminatory practices facing Black women in a multitude of arenas and spaces as a result of their hairstyles and texture. A marker of, as well as a way to express, identity, Black women’s hair is more heavily policed than that of their White counterparts and manifests itself in the form of decreased job opportunities, public humiliation, and restricted stylistic choice. The highly visible nature of hair makes it a prime target for unfair targeting by authoritative bodies, working to further ‘other’ the Black female body along with skin-tone. Looking first at how Black women navigate the …


Mattanock Town Restoration Plan, Katlin Mccarter Grigsby Jan 2023

Mattanock Town Restoration Plan, Katlin Mccarter Grigsby

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Mattanock Town's Restoration Plan is a science-based restoration process that evaluates the site's history, the tribal history, and the most current research to maximize native habitats, enhance coastal resilience, and reconnect the Nansemond people to the local river. Restoration priorities include increasing native plant species, incorporating oyster habitat, and addressing erosion. This plan details how synthesizing existing and new physical, biological, and cultural information can help the Nansemond Indian Nation prioritize projects that benefit their community and the surrounding environment.


Disappearing Smoke: Why Black Pitmasters Are Being Left Behind By Commercialization Within North Carolina Whole Hog Barbecue, Charlotte Lucas May 2022

Disappearing Smoke: Why Black Pitmasters Are Being Left Behind By Commercialization Within North Carolina Whole Hog Barbecue, Charlotte Lucas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In North Carolina, there is only one Eastern whole hog establishment left that is owned by black pitmasters. As a result of historical context, black pitmasters have been left behind by the recent trend of commercialization within North Carolina whole hog barbecue. This exclusion can be explained by examining the history of whole hog barbecue, the struggles black entrepreneurs face in the restaurant industry, and the role that the media has played in ignoring black pitmasters. Historical background dives into the history of the whole hog from the plantation era to the Civil Rights movement and beyond in North Carolina …


Asking For Forgiveness: Negotiating The Creation Of Memory Through Public Memorialization, Alyssa Castronuovo May 2022

Asking For Forgiveness: Negotiating The Creation Of Memory Through Public Memorialization, Alyssa Castronuovo

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The practice of spatializing culture, or “examining space through theories of embodiment, discourse translocality, and effect,” localizes the global and separates hegemonic narratives of space from how it is actually utilized by the people who interact with it. Setha Low argues that this perspective is especially useful to the anthropologist committed to challenging the discipline’s historically eurocentric approach to studying culture. She writes that a spatial focus “[draws] on the strengths of studying people in situ, producing rich and nuanced sociospatial understandings.” This project began with an interest in theorists such as Edward Soja, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre, …


Cultivation Through Excavation: Performing Community And Partnership In The Historic First Baptist Church Project, Eleanor S. Renshaw May 2022

Cultivation Through Excavation: Performing Community And Partnership In The Historic First Baptist Church Project, Eleanor S. Renshaw

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the relationships and partnerships developing around the First Baptist Church -- Nassau Street Archaeology Project in Colonial Williamsburg. Exploring the defining of "descendant community" and the contributions of tourists through the lens of Erving Goffman's stages and participant frameworks, this project looks at the past, present, and future of this project.


The Bodies Politic: Sex, History, And The Promise Of A Black Queer America, Jonathan Newby May 2022

The Bodies Politic: Sex, History, And The Promise Of A Black Queer America, Jonathan Newby

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This essay examines and critiques the ways in which Black, Queer, and Black Queer people's culture, politics, and lived experiences are experienced in the United States, historically and in the present day. The Bodies Politics calls for American history and culture to be reoriented to acknowledge and center the contributions of Black Queer people to the nation.


Arctic Assimilation: Settler Colonialism And Racialization In The Canadian Arctic And Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Samantha Kramer Jan 2022

Arctic Assimilation: Settler Colonialism And Racialization In The Canadian Arctic And Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Samantha Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Isolate and Assimilate: Settler Colonialism in the Canadian ArcticPrevious generations of Canadian historians have focused on welfare when examining the twenty-first century colonization of the territory of Nunavut. Patrick Wolfe’s theory of settler colonialism, on the other hand, presents a form of colonialism that allows for examination through a more cultural-centric lens, while still recognizing the exploitation of economics for purposes of assimilation. Using government reports, Truth and Reconciliation Committee findings, and first-hand accounts from local Inuit, this paper takes Wolfe’s theory and analyzes how his idea of “logics of elimination” were exemplified in the Canadian government’s actions after the …


Intergroup Perceptions Of Discrimination, Neelamberi Klein Jan 2022

Intergroup Perceptions Of Discrimination, Neelamberi Klein

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Efforts to effectively combat discrimination require an understanding of how groups in power think about those experiencing prejudice and discrimination. To study how White individuals think about the discrimination faced by different racial groups (Non-Hispanic White, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, Native and Indigenous, Latinx and Hispanic, and Mixed-Race men and women), 304 White participants completed an edited version of the Everyday Discrimination Scale and the Hypervigilance scale for each of these 14 groups to assess participants’ perceptions that these targets experience discrimination. Further, explicit attitudes towards each group were assessed with feelings thermometers. Results of our within subjects ANOVAs found …


Seeing Community Values And Resistance In The Grave: Burial Practices At Terre Haute African Cemetery, Annabelle Julia Lewis Jan 2022

Seeing Community Values And Resistance In The Grave: Burial Practices At Terre Haute African Cemetery, Annabelle Julia Lewis

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This thesis examines a group of 114 burials found within the Terre Haute African Cemetery in Midlothian, Virginia, using gender and resistance as frameworks through which to understand the relationships that members of the historically Black Huguenot Spring community had with the American funeral industry as it developed parallel to the cemetery’s use history from roughly 1800 to 1934. The movement for the beautification of death and increasing emphasis on material goods for funerary commemoration beginning in the nineteenth century did not occur in a vacuum; this work explores the ways in which Huguenot Springs community members chose to participate …


The Enslaved People And The Tylers Too: Why It Is Imperative To Discuss Slavery In Public History, Meredith Jackson May 2021

The Enslaved People And The Tylers Too: Why It Is Imperative To Discuss Slavery In Public History, Meredith Jackson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper focuses on the intersection of slavery and public history in the present day, specifically researching how the Tyler family perpetuated slavery and the Lost Cause and the enslaved people at Sherwood Forest Plantation as a microhistory.


Meeting The Lumpia Filipino: Self-Orientalism In Filipino America, Jamelah Jacob May 2021

Meeting The Lumpia Filipino: Self-Orientalism In Filipino America, Jamelah Jacob

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Due to the persisting legacies of U.S. colonization, the Filipino American identity is shaped not only by migration but forces of neocolonialism that is felt generationally. Asian American scholarship largely conceptualizes the Filipino American identity as merely reactive to historical factors, however the colonial project continues to influence and define the agency of Filipino Americans and affects the way they present their culture in transnational spaces. Therefore, I suggest that Filipino Americans engage in self-orientalization by presenting their cultures in a commodified manner. To analyze this, I turn to Filipino student organizations to look at the ways Filipino Americans have …


"Epic Poems In Bronze": Confederate Memorialization And The Old South's Reckoning With Modernity In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Grace Ford-Dirks May 2021

"Epic Poems In Bronze": Confederate Memorialization And The Old South's Reckoning With Modernity In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Grace Ford-Dirks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Scholars of the American South generally end their studies of Confederate memorization just before World War 1. Because of a decline in the number of physical monuments and memorials to the Confederacy dedicated in the years immediately following the war, scholars appear to regard the interwar era as a period separate from the Lost Cause movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, to fully understand the complexity of developing Southern identities in the modern age, it is essential to expand traditional definitions of Confederate memorialization and the time period in which it is studied. This paper explores …


Two Sides Of The Same Token: An Examination Of Segregation, Memory, And White Supremacy In Contemporary Church Schools, Vania B. Blaiklock Jan 2021

Two Sides Of The Same Token: An Examination Of Segregation, Memory, And White Supremacy In Contemporary Church Schools, Vania B. Blaiklock

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This thesis is a portfolio containing two essays about private Christian church schools with an introductory essay to connect both projects. The first essay, “A Convergence of Purpose: Segregation and White Supremacy in Contemporary Church Schools,” is a comprehensive examination of the development and creation of church schools that first looks at the distinction between church schools and segregation academies, and then assesses the relevance that the distinction, or the lack thereof, plays in maintaining white supremacy in contemporary church schools. The second essay, “The Trauma of Tokenism: Desegregation, Memory, and White Supremacy in Contemporary Church Schools,” considers the modern …


From Pejuta To Powwow: The Evolution Of American Indian Music, Kelley Lyn Smith Jan 2020

From Pejuta To Powwow: The Evolution Of American Indian Music, Kelley Lyn Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In the current climate of American Indian culture in the United States, the impact of the internet on powwow music and the electronic sharing of music has superseded the more traditional sharing of music in Native cultures. Due to the unique history of American Indian cultures, Native music changed, or evolved, from medicinal uses, pejuta, to expressionism, a method in which to cope with and express the effect history has had on the American Indian people and a way in which to bond with one another in these shared experiences. The evolution of Native music is a traditional form of …


"It's Not Meant For Us": Exploring The Intersection Of Gentrification, Public Education, And Black Identity In Washington, D.C., Shea Winsett Jan 2019

"It's Not Meant For Us": Exploring The Intersection Of Gentrification, Public Education, And Black Identity In Washington, D.C., Shea Winsett

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation discusses themes of racial identity, meaning of space, and class through an exploration of the intersection of gentrification and public education in Washington, D.C. Through analysis of middle-class responses to gentrification I argue, 1) that the public education system is a site of gentrification, as it has become a site of capitalistic development and Black displacement; 2) that the American concept of race, including race relations, is not an aberration of typical American society, but a defining cultural feature; and 3) the best way to understand race and class in America is to use theory constructed from the …


“When I Put On My Firespitter Mask”: Jayne Cortez’S (R)Evolutionary Musical Poetic Collaborations, Renee Michelle Kingan Jan 2018

“When I Put On My Firespitter Mask”: Jayne Cortez’S (R)Evolutionary Musical Poetic Collaborations, Renee Michelle Kingan

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

From the 1960s, through the Black Arts Movement, until her sudden death in December 2012, Jayne Cortez used her dynamic voice to fight oppression. as the first multiple-chapter study of Cortez’s musical collaborations, this dissertation adds to a growing body of critical work that examines Cortez’s radical poetry. In her “African Confluences” keynote address at Rutgers University, Cortez described herself as a member of a global community of black writers “protesting and calling for an end to self degradation, self fragmentation, self-corruption, and self-fear and selfishness… Poets using the image of Blackness to mean continuity, confidence, creativity and new possibilities.” …


Fandom, Racism, And The Myth Of Diversity In The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ashley S. Richardson Apr 2017

Fandom, Racism, And The Myth Of Diversity In The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ashley S. Richardson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is currently one of the most commercially successful entertainment brands in American popular culture, with a range of film franchises and television series under its banner. Although the brand maintains its popularity with various demographics, the casting choices in Doctor Strange (2017) generated controversy among Marvel fans and critics alike for excluding people of color or reducing them to villains and sidekicks. This thesis examines the online commentary surrounding the casting and marketing of Doctor Strange to evaluate how social media users on Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter come to understand race and gender through the Marvel …


Confrontation Of Prejudice Towards Multiracials And Monoracials, Gandalf Nicolas Jan 2015

Confrontation Of Prejudice Towards Multiracials And Monoracials, Gandalf Nicolas

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


Nineteenth Century Enslaved African Americans' Coping Strategies For The Stresses Of Enslavement In Virginia, Allison Michelle Campo Jan 2015

Nineteenth Century Enslaved African Americans' Coping Strategies For The Stresses Of Enslavement In Virginia, Allison Michelle Campo

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


"The Pretended Riot Explained": Citizen Sovereignty And The Mashpee Revolt, Michaela Kleber Jan 2015

"The Pretended Riot Explained": Citizen Sovereignty And The Mashpee Revolt, Michaela Kleber

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


Staging The Asian American In Hong Kong: Examining Transcultural Performances Of Asian American Identity In Hong Kong English Language Amateur Theatre Productions Of "Thoroughly Modern Millie" And "Yellow Face", Iris Eu Loa Mein Jan 2015

Staging The Asian American In Hong Kong: Examining Transcultural Performances Of Asian American Identity In Hong Kong English Language Amateur Theatre Productions Of "Thoroughly Modern Millie" And "Yellow Face", Iris Eu Loa Mein

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


Sea Of Change : Race, Abolitionism, And Reform In The New England Whale Fishery, Justin Andrew Pariseau Jan 2015

Sea Of Change : Race, Abolitionism, And Reform In The New England Whale Fishery, Justin Andrew Pariseau

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Bound together across lines of color and lass, Nantucket and New Bedford residents pursued the unique economic opportunities presented by whaling during the nineteenth century. Whaling was becoming a major industrial enterprise with few available options to fulfill the labor needs required for the whaling crews, ropewalks, blacksmith shops, and sail lofts that made it possible for Nantucket and New Bedford whaleships to transit the globe. Whaling thus generated the jobs that made it possible for free black communities to thrive. People of color consequently turned the need for labor to their advantage. Drawn by the financial opportunities that the …


African American Civil Rights Museums: A Study Of The R.R Moton Museum In Farmville, Virginia, Christina S. Draper Jan 2015

African American Civil Rights Museums: A Study Of The R.R Moton Museum In Farmville, Virginia, Christina S. Draper

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


The Life And Legacy Of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, And The Making Of A Free People Of Color Community In New Orleans., Elizabeth Clark Neidenbach Jan 2015

The Life And Legacy Of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, And The Making Of A Free People Of Color Community In New Orleans., Elizabeth Clark Neidenbach

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation recovers the life of Marie Justine Sirnir Couvent and the Atlantic World she inhabited. Born in Africa around 1757, she was enslaved as a child and shipped to Saint-Domingue through the Bight of Benin in the 1760s. In the tumult of the Haitian Revolution, Couvent fled the island, along with tens of thousands of Saint-Domingue inhabitants. She resettled in New Orleans where she eventually died a free and wealthy slaveholder in 1837. Although illiterate, Couvent left property to establish a free black school in her will. L'Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents was founded on her land in 1847 …


The Land Remembers: The Construction Of Movement Possibility Among Woodland Period Communities Of The Virginia Peninsula, Josue Roberto Nieves Jan 2015

The Land Remembers: The Construction Of Movement Possibility Among Woodland Period Communities Of The Virginia Peninsula, Josue Roberto Nieves

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


False Emissaries: The Jesuits Among The Piscataways In Early Colonial Maryland, 1634-1648, Kathleen Elizabeth Scorza Jan 2015

False Emissaries: The Jesuits Among The Piscataways In Early Colonial Maryland, 1634-1648, Kathleen Elizabeth Scorza

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.


The Technique Of The Poquoson-Style Log Canoe, David Andrews Moran Jan 2014

The Technique Of The Poquoson-Style Log Canoe, David Andrews Moran

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.