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International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera
International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …
For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford
For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford
Theses and Dissertations
This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.
Crafting Girlhoods, Elissa E. Myers
Crafting Girlhoods, Elissa E. Myers
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Crafting Girlhoods emphasizes nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American girls' agency and creativity within the prescribed limits of educational crafts—including sewing and periodical-making. My first section shows how girls use psychological means to resist the cultural and gendered imperatives of sewing and tidiness, while my second section shows how girls resisted the censorship and harassment that the newspaper and periodical forms allowed by creating intimate communities in the pages of their periodicals that could help them negotiate these difficulties. In both cases, I will show how the craft forms themselves were their own antidote to the constricting force …
This Month, Jennifer N. Figueroa
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 Sigh Of Triple Consciousness: Blacks Who Blurred The Color Line In Films From The 1930s Through The 1950s, Audrey Phillips
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
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.
Swimming In A Sea Of No's: Controlling And Managing The New York Public Pools, Mette L. Jensen
Swimming In A Sea Of No's: Controlling And Managing The New York Public Pools, Mette L. Jensen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Swimming in a Sea of No's: Managing and Controlling the New York Public Pools traces the genealogy of the regulations, surveillance, and rules employed at New York public pools. The thesis discusses the intent and implications of the spatial strategies created to order and control the environment surrounding the swimming pools, and discusses how municipal public pools as specific, local landscapes manifest broader social and cultural processes. The main focus is on the transformation of the pools during the 1980s and 1990s, two decades after the fiscal crisis in 1975, when the pools had become defunded, dysfunctional spaces. By tracing …
Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald
Tailoring Landscapes: Multivalent Terrain And The Politics Of Black Geography In Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Cara Fitzgerald
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis foregrounds the import of national geography in nineteenth-century African American literature. Authors like Elizabeth Keckley and Martin Delany confront problems of national geography by interrogating illusion, rewriting geographic space, and constructing themselves within both the physical and conceptual geography of the nation. In so doing, they challenge the fallacy of a uniform national geography and attend to the myriad historical conditions that exist within geographic spaces.
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Theses and Dissertations
This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …
Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy
Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My dissertation argues that white women played crucial roles in the economic, political, and cultural circuits that linked the United States and Cuba, and the hemisphere broadly, during the nineteenth century. It inserts white women into a historical account of U.S. imperialism by analyzing the literary works of a number of American women who traveled to or simply fantasized about Cuba during this period of intense and widespread interest in the island. It identifies white women not just as providing the symbolic rationale for Cuban annexation or intervention – the preservation of their chastity being a common justification for the …
Harriet Jacobs And Toni Morrison: A Tradition Of Narrative Resistance, Allyson L. Molloy
Harriet Jacobs And Toni Morrison: A Tradition Of Narrative Resistance, Allyson L. Molloy
Theses and Dissertations
This article considers historical constructions of power and the narrative as a mode of resistance. Working in different centuries, under extremely disparate circumstances, Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Toni Morrison in her novel The Bluest Eye, utilize specific narrative strategies to challenge and question institutionalized power which is evidenced through their deliberate employment of narrative strategies not only to challenge the institution of slavery or the hegemonic ideal, but also to question the racial and gender oppression systemic to those institutions of power.
Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman
Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …
What The Tides May Bring: Political "Tigueraje" Disposession And Popular Dissent In Samaná, Dominican Republic, Ryan A. Mann-Hamilton
What The Tides May Bring: Political "Tigueraje" Disposession And Popular Dissent In Samaná, Dominican Republic, Ryan A. Mann-Hamilton
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My dissertation is a historical and ethnographic project that delves into the conflictive relationship between the development of the Dominican state and the formation of the community of the port city of Samaná. The African diasporic community of Samaná has actively constructed the local space throughout shifting political projects, while sustaining their collective voices against the waves of dispossession crashing on their shores. Using a combination of archival research, participant observation, oral history and ethnography, I document multiple instances of state intervention to understand how the Samaná community has been coerced over time to consent to these processes. I juxtapose …
Reconstructing The Nation: African American Political Thought And America's Struggle For Racial Justice, Alex Zamalin
Reconstructing The Nation: African American Political Thought And America's Struggle For Racial Justice, Alex Zamalin
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines how twentieth-century African American intellectuals engaged American political cultural beliefs central to American identity. A prominent argument of American political thinkers has been that the liberal-democratic ideals of freedom, equality, representative government, the rule of law, tolerance and civic obligation are what make Americans a unique people. From the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to the late twentieth-century such an argument provided American politicians, social movements and intellectuals a strong justification for divergent political claims, from Cold War warriors calling for the containment of Soviet Communism, to Civil Rights activists calling for racial integration to …