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Theses/Dissertations

City University of New York (CUNY)

American Studies

Racism

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With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson May 2022

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the systematic biases embedded within this genre, highlighting the ongoing battle between tokenism and inclusive storytelling. Thesis will also emphasize the importance of this genre, its tight grasp on popular culture, and showcase positive representations introduced by new creators over the years.


The Sigh Of Triple Consciousness: Blacks Who Blurred The Color Line In Films From The 1930s Through The 1950s, Audrey Phillips May 2019

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 …


Contested Development: A Poor People's Movement For A Better Los Angeles, 1960–2018, Deshonay R. Dozier May 2019

Contested Development: A Poor People's Movement For A Better Los Angeles, 1960–2018, Deshonay R. Dozier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Zooming in on the historical development of Downtown Los Angeles’s (LA) Skid Row, this dissertation traces a continuity of abolitionist alternatives made by homeless and poor Angelinos from the 1960s to our present day. Skid Row is an important entry way into Los Angeles urban politics, particularly with respect to how forms of difference, at the axis of race, gender, class, and ability shape regional relations of property and the built environment. I show how these relations shape Downtown Los Angeles’s geography through carceral practices. These carceral practices, made by social services and policing, shape space by routinely containing and …


"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen Jun 2017

"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My thesis explores and analyzes the Federal Theater Project’s cultural and political impact during the Depression, as well as the contested legacy of this unique experiment in government-sponsored, broadly accessible cultural expression. Part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration, the FTP aimed to provide jobs for playwrights, actors, designers, stagehands, and other theater professionals on relief in the stark period from 1935 to 1939. But the project became a nationwide political and artistic flashpoint, spurring fierce debate over the leadership, politics and impact of this “people’s theater.” The FTP gave professional theater an unprecedented reach into working-class and black …


Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones Jun 2017

Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …