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Unraveling The Geographies Of The U.S. Public Education System: An Analysis Of Scale, Segregation, And Hegemony, Olivia Ildefonso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Other than one or two studies that focus on specific state-wide systems of public education, there has been no accounting for how the U.S. public education system came about in relation to space and scale. My dissertation research seeks to fill in this gap. Through focusing on the development of public education in the North and the South, I provide a foundation for understanding the grounded and contested processes of scale production that largely determined the U.S. public education system’s design and function.

In each of the seven chapters, I detail how fights over the structure and purpose of public …

Dear Black Child: A Discussion On The Formation Of Identity For African Diasporic Adolescents In The U.S., Sokhnagade B. Ndiaye

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this capstone project, I am using art, photography, and music to depict the experiences of African diasporic youth in the United States. I will explore the white supremacist systems that contribute to the anxiety that comes with being a black child in America. In this project, I plan to discuss the ways in which African diasporic adolescents develop their identity and consciousness and the ways in which living in American society helps and/or hinders the development of this identity and consciousness. I argue that living in the United States forces black youth to form double and triple consciousnesses, which …

Just A Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy And Racialized Performance In Black Vaudeville, The Chop Suey Circuit, And Las Carpas, Michael Shane Breaux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the practice of white musical variety clowns embodying stereotypes of African, Chinese, and Mexican Americans has been widely documented and theorized in scholarship on US American popular performance, it has been done largely in segregated studies that maintain the idea that racial impersonations in musical variety is a privilege of white performers. For instance, no study exists that focuses on more than one stereotype at a time, and the performer’s body is always either white or of the same “color” as the type being played. In addition, very little has been written about the tours and circuits run by …

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Military Citizenship In The Post-9/11 Homefront, Estefania Ponti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In discussion with the literature on the treatment of veterans in the United States and the nature of American citizenship ideology, the following dissertation asks how post-9/11 veterans are defining, (re)creating, and contesting citizenship in the contemporary U.S. By studying a localized community of post-9/11 veterans, my dissertation highlights the dilemmas of U.S. citizenship at a time when the U.S. is engaged in a global War on Terror using less than 1% of the U.S. population as paid volunteers. Soldiers and veterans occupy states and spaces of exception, marking military citizens as distinct from civilians. Military citizenship benefits the nation …

Women’S Suffrage In American Art: Recovering Forgotten Contexts, 1900-1920, Elsie Y. Heung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1920, women in the United States finally won the right to vote. The campaign for suffrage, which began in the 1848, with the first women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, NY, involved the efforts and enthusiasm of countless women who believed that they both deserved and needed the right to vote. This dissertation investigates the ways in which women artists both responded to and contributed to this divisive movement through painting and sculpture during the final decades of the campaign, when visual culture and propaganda played a crucial role in advancing the suffrage and anti-suffrage agendas. The literature …

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.

A Canada In The South: Marronage In Antebellum American Literature, Sean Gerrity

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers maroons—enslaved people who fled from slavery and self-exiled to places like swamps and forests—in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the …