Digital Commons Network^™

Attempt At An Open Letter To The Bronx, Christopher Valdivia

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Open letter to and interrogation of the Bronx, in the form of autoethnographic writing.

¿Quién me encontrará a mí, en la noche, en el Bronx, a mis 22 años?

Kinship And Connection: Exploring Historical Nonhuman Exhibition Within Zoos To Form New Relationships, Alexandra Colon

Senior Projects Spring 2023

When I was a child going to the zoo seemed almost mystical. With memories featuring giant underwater passageways, sea lion shows, and a vague sense of awe and astonishment these times-though brief-remain locked in my memory almost lost. It’s been many years since I had visited a zoo, mostly because I forgot they existed if I’m honest. Living in NYC these spaces seemed so distant to my everyday life, to me zoos were spaces I went on vacation or maybe a class trip but were not really part of my world beyond those few instances. For many, zoos are spaces …

Eleguá Exits, Laughing: Revolution, Play, And Trickster Worship, Zoe Elizabeth Oro-Hahn

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Eleguá, the trickster god of Santería, shows up across religious divides, throughout communities of minorities in the Southern United States and the Caribbean– this project attempts to chase him through myth and literature, to find where he shows up, and look at how he inspires those in his religions into revolutions and revolts.

Les Six Continents: An Exploration Of Political Visual Rhetoric In Public Sculpture, Olivia Liu Guillotin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues …

“Pero, Díganme”: Don Felipe Guamán Poma De Ayala Y Su Relato De La Historia Del Perú, Kady Drorbaugh

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Principally, this project analyzes the indigenous Andean prince Don Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno de las Yndias, a historical account of pre-conquest Inca civilization, the consequent Spanish invasion, and colonial Peru up until 1613. His report of the injustice and mistreatment of the Andean people under Spanish colonial rule is established to then propose radical transformations to the colonial state and the place of indigenous people in it. I contextualize his work with a brief background of important features of both Incan and colonial Spanish society that he discusses, as well as specifically …

At The Nexus Of Resistance, Resilience, And Repair: Agricultural Violences And The Healing Promise Of Seed, Melina Ann Roise

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Mainstream campaigns for better food within the United States – including local, organic, and regeneratively grown – fail to contend with the violent realities of America’s foodways. Growing “good food” on stolen land in a system created by the exploitation of Black bodies, Native knowledge, and reproductive capacities requires complete reformation of current systems. As a counter to existing human-nonhuman relationships that emphasize extraction, ownership, and commodification, this paper explores the ways seed saving and sharing allows us to imagine alternative realities. Seeds are a source of matrilineal power, ancestral continuance, and community care and can be used to counter …

Systems Of Erasure: An Archival Analysis Of Gentrification In Hudson, N.Y., Danielle Ashley Ranieri

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Past analyses of gentrification have largely examined the phenomenon along the consumption-production theory binary; the former contending that the middle-class consumer is to blame for initiating the process, the latter illuminating the contributions of larger political entities. This oversimplifies the complex process of gentrification, boiling its causal factors down to a singular class, policy, event, or point in time. This tendency to homogenize the root cause of gentrification gives a narrow understanding of a city’s history and largely ignores the overarching, systemic patterns of class and race-based oppression that have played into a city’s development over time. Furthermore, colonizers and …

Painting A Modern India: F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain, & Artistic Identity After Independence, Shay Afsheen Kothari

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

The Origins Of Socialism In Cuba: A Question Uncontested, Liam G. Oberholzer

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This paper seeks to trace the origin of the shift towards Socialism in Cuba in 1961. It does so by providing three hypothetical answers to the question, the Cold War Answer, the Castro Answer, and Cuba's national identity as the Answer. These three narratives are put into conversation with each other, the first two ultimately holding some truth and value, but being ultimately defined as both subject to Cuba's historical national identity as the key identifying factor in the ultimate shift to Socialism in 1961.

(M)Other Lands, (M)Other Tongues: Resistance To The Linear In Two Postcolonial Moroccan Texts, Julia Charra

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This project focuses on French language novels by two Moroccan authors, Love in Two Languages by Abdelkebir Khatibi and With Downcast Eyes by Tahar Ben Jelloun. Both these novels were written in the 1980s. In Love in Two Languages, which is a novel with a deconstructed plot, the narrator deals with the struggles of having a French lover while being Moroccan, ie. from a country that was colonized by France, as well as his strained relationship with the French language. Ben Jelloun’s book, With Downcast Eyes, is about a young Moroccan girl who moves to France with her …

Inside The Fault Lines Of The Heart: The Poetics Of Exile In The Works Of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, And Etel Adnan., Shahong Jeanou Billault-Lee

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Still Sitting On Men: Understanding The Continuities Of Indirect Rule Through Pre-Colonial Forms Of Female Resistance, Ethnic Power Politics And Economic Violence In Southeast Nigeria, Evan Richardson

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This project exposes that Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria has had direct, significant ramifications on the Political Economic Development of Nigeria through the present day.

Textuality And Historical Crisis In John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire, Zelda Mazor-Freedman

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Ubi Bene, Ibi Patria - The Identities, Displacements, And Homelands Of The Juifs D’Algérie, Britt Shacham

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

De Manera Errante: Forging Decolonial Paths, Wailly Comprés

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

A Monumental Question: A Comparison Between The United States' And South Africa's Monument Debates, Page Benoit

Senior Projects Spring 2018

In the summer of 2017, Charlottesville Virginia became the focal point of the United States monument debate. The open racism and violence that transpired sparked the nation to re-evaluate its relationship to Confederate monuments and public spaces. Moving forward, the United States can choose to keep contentious monuments as they are, remove them, recontextualize them, relocate them or create new ones. Each choice changes the monument landscape to represent national identity in different ways. However, some choices are more successful at responsible diverse representation then others. This is evident because South Africa has been attempting to diversify their monument landscape …

Punishing Assemblages: A Queer, Decolonizing Theory Of The American Prison, Liam Hopkins

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

"By Gifts One Makes Slaves": Long-Term Effects Of Denmark's Colonization Of Greenland, Sofia Stærmose Hardt

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Greenland was colonized by Denmark in 1721. Although Denmark’s colonization had elements of racism and economic exploitation, it was not violent. This project explores the long-term effects of a paternalistic colonization on the establishment of extractive institutions and on social well-being and cohesion. I examine ways in which Danish colonial policy, from 1721-1953, on the one hand sought to “civilize” and modernize Greenlandic society and, on the other hand, attempted to maintain traditional hunting practices for economic gain. These complex and sometimes contradictory social engineering techniques of governance have been linked to long-term problems of Greenlandic identity. Greenland was officially …

Colonial Control And Power Through The Law: Territoriality, Sovereignty, And Violence In German South-West Africa, Caleb Joseph Cumberland

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Cuban Art In The 1980s, Rebecca Q. Sell

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Motherland, Melanie Joy Mignucci

Senior Projects Spring 2016

A novella about Puerto Rico.

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Bloodroot, Myra Basil Al-Rahim

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.