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Articles 1 - 30 of 72
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Stolen Valor: Mapping The Style Subcultures Of The Left, Lydia Mokdessi
Stolen Valor: Mapping The Style Subcultures Of The Left, Lydia Mokdessi
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
"Stolen Valor: Mapping the Style Subcultures of the Left'' performs an analysis of three observed style subcultures prevalent in American fashion between the 2000s and the 2020s and demonstrates how these distinct style languages each draw from the aesthetics of various 20th and 21st century Leftist political movements, discussing the extent to which each style subculture undergoes a process of appropriation by the dominant culture and subsequent subsumption into the mainstream compared to the extent to which the subversive communicative power of each subculture remains intact for the original adopting population. The three style vernaculars this text identifies will be …
The Four Seasons: Integrating The Big Four Sports, Joseph S. Brody
The Four Seasons: Integrating The Big Four Sports, Joseph S. Brody
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
After World War II, even though many African Americans served their country, policies of segregation were rampant throughout the United States of America. The aim of this Capstone is two-fold. First, to shed light on the men who followed the path of Jackie Robinson and give them their due. The most appropriate way to convey my research of these four athletes was by putting them all in the same fictional setting and discussing their trials and tribulations that made them the men they were in their day. Second, I want to highlight the many things I found in my research …
Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21st-century poets and their 20th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …
Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson
Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson
Student Theses and Dissertations
Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …
Bozo The Clown: An Icon As American As An Apple Pie In The Face, Gregory Kent Oswald
Bozo The Clown: An Icon As American As An Apple Pie In The Face, Gregory Kent Oswald
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
There is no single path toward the creation of an American icon, a person or item with resonance to all in the country as well as having an ability to serve as a symbol of America itself for those outside the borders. This thesis considers certain elements that propelled the journey of the entertainment for children, Bozo the Clown, into a representational figure in the minds of young and old. Like all things American, his roots include many elements from outside the country: the name derives from foreign tongues mostly in derisory terms, but in at least one instance as …
Children And The Cold War: Race & Hypocrisy Amid Fear Of Nuclear War, Richard D. Mctaggart Jr.
Children And The Cold War: Race & Hypocrisy Amid Fear Of Nuclear War, Richard D. Mctaggart Jr.
Theses and Dissertations
During the Cold War, American propaganda centered the wellbeing of the child in its messaging warning of atomic attack at the hands of the Soviet Union. However, despite American claims that all children were valued by the United States, this was proven untrue by its unequal treatment of Black children.
Football Can Save America, Francisco Attie
Football Can Save America, Francisco Attie
Capstones
Looking to cure the malaise of our day, I went to the football game, and, in the dying breaths of the match, found something much greater. https://medium.com/@Fran_Attie/football-can-save-america-2bb918f19a97
Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan
Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Following the 2016 American Presidential election, celebrity endorsements proved to be a more narrow gauge of public opinion than ever. The symbolic alignment with popular musicians, which had long abetted the Democratic Party’s standing with youth and particular identity groups, seemed only to reaffirm the party’s establishment status, drawing disavowal in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment on both the left and right. ‘Retromania,’ a term first coined by Simon Reynolds in 2010, can be tracked conceptually from the nostalgic inclinations of twenty-first century popular culture to the ideological sphere, where nostalgic, essentialized constructions of community, identity, and progress have coalesced …
Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass
Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Clowning with Identity examines the comedic performance of characters. The enjoyment of a character feels easy to accept uncritically, but these performances work because they deploy stereotypes and the cultural meanings surrounding them, often through acts of appropriation, as the performer makes the choice to embody an identity separate from their own. This project connects theory on drag and gender performance and its ideas about identity-remixing to rhetorical theory on comedy and clowning practices, sketching the ways American practices of drag, clown, and comedic character work are all deeply linked through their historical development. I theorize the productive ways that …
How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney
How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …
Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames
Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson
"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson
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.
Hudson Yards: Hybrid Capital's New Home, Massimo D. Scoditti
Hudson Yards: Hybrid Capital's New Home, Massimo D. Scoditti
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis focuses on the material and metaphysical aspects of the Hudson Yards, the largest private development in US History. With its roots in the administration of Michael Bloomberg, the site is representative of neoliberal ideology. It is also one in which cultural production is central. This is in terms of the rationalization and mythos of the building of the space itself and the dreamworlds created to obscure the mechanisms of extraction and accumulation that make such a complex possible. The Hudson Yards is particularly interesting because, as Cindi Katz might suggest, topography lines connect it to transnational capital. And …
Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein
Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …
Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes
Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. Further Toward Minor Literatures operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. Minor literature is self-theorizing, perhaps even authotheoretical, in its expressing and fulfilling the mobile orientations of its minoritarian communities. This study …
Aloof: Black Divas Of Refusal, Kwame K. Ocran
Aloof: Black Divas Of Refusal, Kwame K. Ocran
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Aloof: Black Divas of Refusal” studies performers Lena Horne and Billie Holiday as the progenitors of a new tradition of authentic representation of Black female interiority in the entertainment arts. As interiority denotes the wide-ranging amalgamation of human expression, these divas equipped themselves with a sense of refusal and aloofness to strategically posture themselves in conditions that suited their personal predilections best and considered their status as representatives of the Black community. Lena Horne’s evolution as an aloof diva successfully saw the singer and actress escape classist thought of racial uplift to the full embracing of the totality of Black …
"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider
"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …
Fantasies Of Representation: Methods Of Feminist Literary Analysis, Alexandra Johnson
Fantasies Of Representation: Methods Of Feminist Literary Analysis, Alexandra Johnson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The push for diversity in media and literature has resulted in an increase in representation, at least on the surface. While the range of representation may have broadened in terms of subject identity – gender, sexuality, race, ability, etc. – the way this diversity has occurred has not necessarily encouraged ethical or allied development. The aim of my thesis is to develop and deploy five methods of feminist critique and analysis of representation in popular media. I begin by laying out the five methodologies, in a manner that allows for the use of these methods on other examples. Then, I …
Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis
Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis
Theses and Dissertations
Where similarities in class struggle have historically operated as a unifying force globally, the American crafted mythos isolates the individual and dehumanizes those that do not fall within the parameters of the cowboy archetype. The national protagonist is turned into a class traitor and an extension of government power.
Dancing Through Time: A Biographical Look On The Evolution Of Tap Dance, Jaimie Cranford
Dancing Through Time: A Biographical Look On The Evolution Of Tap Dance, Jaimie Cranford
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
A uniquely American art form, tap dance has often been misrepresented and under-appreciated when positioned alongside other dance forms. This is largely due to the form’s racialized history, which builds upon contributions from African-American culture. Unlike other dance forms, which stem from white European traditions, tap dance evolved out of a necessity for cultural preservation as enslaved Africans adapted to life in America. As tap dance evolved, its association with slave culture led to it not being taken seriously; if anything, tap dancers were viewed simply as “entertainers” – certainly not as artists. Using a biographical lens, this work looks …
Art After Dark: Economies Of Performance, New York City 1978–1988, Meredith Mowder
Art After Dark: Economies Of Performance, New York City 1978–1988, Meredith Mowder
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Art After Dark: Economies of Performance, New York City 1978-1988 examines the interwoven social and economic histories of New York City and performance in the late 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation traces the growth and visibility of performance art, moving from the recession of the 1970s and early years of public funding for the arts, to the downtown nightclub scene of the 1980s, the history of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and artistic experiments with television in the 1980s.Looking closely at the economic conditions under which performance occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s, this dissertation …
Girl In Action: Junior Bazaar, 1945-1948, Rose D. Bishop
Girl In Action: Junior Bazaar, 1945-1948, Rose D. Bishop
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis provides an overview of Junior Bazaar, a short-lived magazine for teenage girls published by Hearst between 1945-1948. Under the supervision of art director Lillian Bassman the magazine featured a variety of aesthetic devices — such as photomontage, asymmetrical layouts, the selective use of color, and playful placement of graphic forms — in efforts to distinguish itself from other publications on the market and construct a visual space specific to its teenage readers. Bassman’s unconventional stewardship of Junior Bazaar made room for an up-and-coming set of photographers, including Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Louis Faurer, and other …
Us, Abundantly: From Africa To The Americas, Karisma Jay
Us, Abundantly: From Africa To The Americas, Karisma Jay
Theses and Dissertations
"Us, AbunDantly," a Live theatrical dance performance and film, delves into the African Diaspora and its influences. An artistic and academic project built upon the amplification of Black excellence and Black pride, this paper contextualizes a work within the oral histories and contemporary dance studies of a powerfully ancestral community.
The Life And Death Of Mambo: Culture And Consumption In New York's Salsa Dance Scene, Carmela Muzio Dormani
The Life And Death Of Mambo: Culture And Consumption In New York's Salsa Dance Scene, Carmela Muzio Dormani
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In recent decades salsa dancing has become a global phenomenon, spawning a variety of styles and levels. Although formerly passed from person to person through Latinx family and community networks, salsa dance has long been practiced in a more codified way. Today, salsa is largely reproduced in dance studio classes, congresses, and competitions collectively referred to as “the salsa scene”. In New York City, the salsa scene retains vestiges of Nuyorican and Afro-Caribbean identity, though it is practiced by people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and marketed to a global base. Building on long term participation observation and nearly …
Revisioning Popular Narratives Of Trans Lives, 1952–1976, Melina A. Moore
Revisioning Popular Narratives Of Trans Lives, 1952–1976, Melina A. Moore
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation calls for a reconsideration of popular narratives and visual media created by or written about trans people in the United States prior to Stonewall. Grounded in research conducted at the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California, the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the Transgender Collection at Yale University, “Revisioning” argues that the texts that trans readers collected, exchanged within communities, and engaged with in their own writing and scrapbooking are essential to the historicization of trans identity at midcentury. By extending …
Dear Black Child: A Discussion On The Formation Of Identity For African Diasporic Adolescents In The U.S., Sokhnagade B. Ndiaye
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 …
Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore
Promoting The Consumer Citizen: Seals, Spectacles, And The Gendered Consumer In Depression-Era America, Danielle B. Wetmore
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis will argue that New Deal legislation accounted for increased importance placed on consumers and the articulation of consumer citizenship as female during the Great Depression. Once New Deal programs and legislation determined and legitimized the consumer citizen, the consumer citizen exercised influence though purchasing power. Analyzing the ways the federal government defined women as consumer citizens through programs like the National Recovery Administration’s Blue Eagle Campaign offers important insight into who was considered to have a voice. Notions of citizenship define groups by who has the necessary attributes and qualifications—in this case the means to purchase goods—to be …
Fair World 64: A Text-Based Game Of The 1964–1965 World's Fair, Christofer R. Gass
Fair World 64: A Text-Based Game Of The 1964–1965 World's Fair, Christofer R. Gass
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The project is a text-based game of a typical day during the first season of the 1964 World’s Fair in what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The 1964-1965 World’s Fair, that Robert Moses presided over as president, was one of the largest and most expensive fairs ever created, but only days after the last fairgoer left through the turnstile most of the many pavilions that brought education, entertainment, and joy to so many people were destroyed to leave a vast open space that is relatively empty to this day. Although most of the pavilions were either relocated or demolished, there …
American Novels Amidst The Rise Of New Media: Emergent Publics And Forms, Sarah Ruth Jacobs
American Novels Amidst The Rise Of New Media: Emergent Publics And Forms, Sarah Ruth Jacobs
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines long-term shifts in the quantities and demographics (namely the race and educational attainment) of twentieth-century American literary readers alongside the rise and popular consumption of new media (namely television and the internet). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are testament to a great expansion in the numbers and demographics of literary readers, and in turn an increase in the variety and intended audiences of literary publications. Examples include the rise of “middlebrow” readers and books in the 1940s and the rise of African-American, feminist, and countercultural small presses in the 1960s and 1970s. However, even as the variety …