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Articles 1 - 30 of 429
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson
“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation seeks to play with the similarity between the queer and the mystical, and in the process, defines something I call “queer mysticism.” I include four cardinal figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Duncan. Beginning with Walt Whitman, I show how each of these poets bear witness to an experience of the divine that is both immanent and immanently queer. Through historical and biographical research, I uncover their poetic inspiration in popular modes of expression and in the esoteric and arcane. By establishing a connection with a few Catholic mystics …
Beyond Me: Class, Sexuality, And The Work Of The Autobiographical Fragments Of Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, And Eileen Myles, Erin E. Heiser
Beyond Me: Class, Sexuality, And The Work Of The Autobiographical Fragments Of Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, And Eileen Myles, Erin E. Heiser
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation looks at what I am calling the “autobiographical fragments” of three working-class, lesbian (or queer) authors: Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles whose writing is stylistically quite different from one another’s, but who nonetheless have all produced bodies of work that represent bits of their lives over and over and in different ways, sometimes overlapping in time and narrative detail. While there are certainly other writers whose work shares many of the same characteristics, I argue that the autobiographical fragment has special significance for marginalized subjects. Woven throughout the dissertation are many of my own autobiographical fragments …
Placemaking And Placewashing In Manhattan's Chinatown: Capitalist Vs. Community Interests, Mary Chu
Placemaking And Placewashing In Manhattan's Chinatown: Capitalist Vs. Community Interests, Mary Chu
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Since the late 1890s, there have been internal and external placemakers in Manhattan’s Chinatown. They take the form of city government, real estate developers, and community organizations vying for space, and seeking to define what this neighborhood should be, for whom it should serve, and how it should look. Sometimes these would-be placemakers operate with neoliberal goals and overt orientalist and/or racist views. They push those narratives through via media representations and as a tactic to attract tourism, but with little regard for how it affects the community. In this work, I examine connections between historic ideas of placemaking and …
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 Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino
The Redemption Of History: Poetics And Politics In The Modern Epic, Giacomo R. Bianchino
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation, “The Redemption of History: Poetics and Politics in the Modern Epic.” provides a materialist theory of the modern epic, focusing on the way that the poets deployed this form towards political ends. Building on theories of the epic going back to the German Romantics, it argues that the modern form is predicated on the idea that it has departed from the conditions that made the ancient form possible. It examines the way that writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century developed the idea that the immediacy of the social “totality” expressed by the ancient epopee was …
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 …
Analyzing The Enduring White Reception Of Raisin In The Sun: Defining And Reexamining The “Universal” Label, Kayla J. Baur
Analyzing The Enduring White Reception Of Raisin In The Sun: Defining And Reexamining The “Universal” Label, Kayla J. Baur
Student Theses
Hansberry’s intent to centralize the Black American family while simultaneously addressing divisive topics of race and gender positioned Raisin as a prescient, continuously relevant work that is open for interpretation for years to come. With this intent in mind, critics acclaimed Raisin and hailed it as a universal play for every theatergoer to enjoy. However, this enduring sentiment of Raisin as “universal” is a construct created by the predominantly-white theater industry. This perceived universality is dependent on the audience’s ability to find entertainment value in the story, even if the idea of only deriving amusement from the story undermines Hansberry’s …
Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur
Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur
Publications and Research
Zitkala-Ša (Lakota: Zitkála-Šá, meaning Red Bird) was among the first to write about the experiences of Native American children in the U.S. Indian boarding school program to an English-speaking audience. As a writer and political activist, Zitkala-Ša uses emotional appeals and cultural ideas she learned through her white education to expose the very boarding school institutions that taught her. In American Indian Studies (1921), Zitkala-Ša critiques the violence that the Indian boarding school system inflicts on young Native Americans. She presents these critiques through emotional appeals that take two forms: one, a more traditional sentimental appeal associated with middle-class white …
Cinema And Ritual: Decolonial Feminist Approaches To Image-Making In The Americas And The Caribbean, Natalie M. Erazo
Cinema And Ritual: Decolonial Feminist Approaches To Image-Making In The Americas And The Caribbean, Natalie M. Erazo
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis project is composed of an open-access syllabus hosted on a CUNY commons site, as well as a paper that examines various films and texts responding to the theme of cinema and ritual. Referenced films will focus on ritual as a decolonial feminist methodological framework, rooted primarily in Afro-descended and Indigenous cosmovisions within Latin America and the Caribbean. From a dance ritual spell warding off U.S. imperialism in present-day Puerto Rico, to a poetic visual eulogy for murdered women in rural Mexico, to a community prayer to Yemaya bringing relief for water scarcity in Cuba to a cautionary tale …
Power And The Press: Reimagining The World By Producing Information Together, Jen Hoyer
Power And The Press: Reimagining The World By Producing Information Together, Jen Hoyer
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This study of three collectively-organized activist printing projects examines how information production is a strategy for communities to reimagine and reconfigure oppressive power structures. I consider the High School Student Union and their newspaper, the High School Free Press; the women’s collective that took over RAT Subterranean News; and WIMP, a radical printing collective that broke away from the New York City Students for a Democratic Society chapter and supported a variety of progressive movements in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research examines how dissatisfaction with oppressive power structures leads individuals to build collective …
The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman
The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thematic project examines the notion of self-division, particularly in terms of the conflict between cognition and metacognition, across the fields of philosophy, psychology, and, most recently, the cognitive and neurosciences. The project offers a historic overview of models of self-division, as well as analyses of the various problems presented in theoretical models to date. This work explores how self-division has been depicted in the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe, Don DeLillo, and Mary Shelley. It examines the ways in which artistic renderings alternately assimilate, resist, and/or critique dominant philosophical, psychological, and scientific discourses about the self and its …
Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble
Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble
Publications and Research
English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …
Possible Futures For Colonial Collecting Institutions: A Study Of Historical Societies In The United States, Jen Hoyer
Publications and Research
This article explores how collecting institutions with deeply colonial roots can move into a decolonial future existence, through an in-depth study of historical societies in the United States. Examining their historic roots in colonialism of the United States and the persistence of these colonial identities in spite of a variety of evolutionary trends over the 20th century, this article asks: what decolonial possibilities exist for their future? If institutional shifts have not undone the colonial identities of some collecting institutions, what can? Turning to Sarah Ahmed’s theory on queer use and Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, I suggest practical …
Hall Of Fame For Great Americans Collection, 1894-2008, Allen Thomas, Cynthia Tobar
Hall Of Fame For Great Americans Collection, 1894-2008, Allen Thomas, Cynthia Tobar
Finding Aids
Finding aid for the Hall of Fame for Great Americans collection prepared by Bronx Community College Archives.
Hall Of American Artists Collection, 1923-73, Allen Thomas, Cynthia Tobar
Hall Of American Artists Collection, 1923-73, Allen Thomas, Cynthia Tobar
Finding Aids
Finding aid for the Hall of American Artists Collection prepared by Bronx Community College Archives.
A Study Of Geo-Regional Place-Consciousness In American Literature, Eugene Slepov
A Study Of Geo-Regional Place-Consciousness In American Literature, Eugene Slepov
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The ancient Greek notions of topos, or place, and choros, or region, emerge from a an oral, narrative-based tradition that predates geography. These concepts remind us that that best source of material to study place is to be found in literary fiction. American fiction in particular will give us the evidence by which we can compile a qualitative, experiential understanding of the role of place in people’s lives. This dissertation inquires into the formation of the imaginative constructions that characters put upon place—such as through the process of consolidating and dwelling in places—and the way place puts …
Situating The Child’S Voice Within Children’S Fashion: An Interdisciplinary Examination Of The Child’S Engagement With The Clothing They Wear, Melinda Byam
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This paper examines the child’s relationship with children’s fashion, the clothing they wear, and their fashion consumption practices. Using a wardrobe approach to fashion, and an understanding of the child as the expert in their own lives, the author questions how the child engages, interacts, and experiences children’s fashion considering that how they use, think, and speak about their clothing is minimally consulted. Situating this research within a theoretical foundation set by Goffman and Simmel (social behavior), Featherstone (consumer culture), and Merleau-Ponty and Entwistle (embodiment), this text examines fashion from the point of view of the child, hypothesizing how future …
White Supremacist Print Culture And The Creation Of White Working-Class Ideology In 1860s New York City, Anna Meyer
White Supremacist Print Culture And The Creation Of White Working-Class Ideology In 1860s New York City, Anna Meyer
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
J. H. Van Evrie believed in the biological basis of white racial supremacy and Black inferiority beliefs which he spread in his publications throughout the 19th century. He generated support for Copperhead politicians, pro-slavery Northern Democrats, who would enact his racial policies, in his newspaper the Weekly Caucasian, published in New York City during the Civil War. He adapted the presentation of his racial theories to appeal to the economic concerns of among working-class white men and Irish immigrants by using allegories about the Civil War. The newspaper created a sense of white nationalism and racial solidarity with …
Justice, Pandemics, And Museums In Cyberspace: Archaeology Museums’ Decolonization Projects During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samuel Besse
Justice, Pandemics, And Museums In Cyberspace: Archaeology Museums’ Decolonization Projects During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samuel Besse
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This paper explores three Archeology Museums (Historic St. Mary’s City, James Madison’s Montpelier, and the American Museum of Natural History), their attempts at addressing the colonial narratives that museums are built on, and how the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over George Floyd’s death affected these projects. I place a special effort on the online presence of these museums, as this is the main way visitors interacted with the museums during the pandemic. After discussing the origins of museum’s decolonization efforts and their efforts to make an online presence, I talk about the Covid-19 pandemic and the events around George Floyd’s …
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 …
The Persephone Series: Storytelling, Art, And Making Sense Of Myself, Katie M. Frank
The Persephone Series: Storytelling, Art, And Making Sense Of Myself, Katie M. Frank
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
What can I do with what I already have? How can I make of it something beautiful, or useful, or interesting? Over the past two and a half years, I have been creating wall sculptures and collages out of found objects that speak to the history of my family, the way the earth reclaims its space after being used by humans, and how our individual lives have impact beyond our recognition. The people we love, the things we have lost, the garbage and grief we try to bury: it doesn’t go away. It comes back to the surface in shapes …
There’S No Space In History: Affiliation, Eros And Colonial Entanglements In North American Nuclear Poetry, 1945-Present, Marguerite Daisy Atterbury
There’S No Space In History: Affiliation, Eros And Colonial Entanglements In North American Nuclear Poetry, 1945-Present, Marguerite Daisy Atterbury
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation investigates “affiliation” as a socio-spatial poetics and spatial ontology, a departure from the past and future to the material, landed present. The author’s experience growing up proximate to federally ordered uranium mining and nuclear weapons research on Indigenous land and at Los Alamos National Labs drives this work’s aim to render visible the economic, social, and ideological structures governing social-spatial dynamics in the North American context. This dissertation argues for a poetics of affiliation as a methodology, to move beyond theoretical and discursive questions in scholarship to negotiations of the social at scales that affect systems beyond the …
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 …
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. …
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.
Blacklash: Phenomenological Hermeneutics In Black Dance, Darvejon A. Jones
Blacklash: Phenomenological Hermeneutics In Black Dance, Darvejon A. Jones
Theses and Dissertations
The horrors inflicted on Black bodies, souls, and spirits in the United States during the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and the current era (2023) have a lasting legacy of trauma metabolized through the body and transmuted generationally. Jones uses this data to contextualize the work of Black dance artists as hermeneutic phenomena in which the Black dance artist is a hermeneut tasked with delivering a message of the Black body/spirit complex: “I AM HUMAN. DO NOT KILL ME.” This paper examines how Black dance artists frequently petition for their survival — incessantly subjugated to the interpreter’s empathy, …
Negotiating Liberty: Fine Ceramics For The U.S. American Market Before 1860, Presley Rodriguez
Negotiating Liberty: Fine Ceramics For The U.S. American Market Before 1860, Presley Rodriguez
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis argues that the rise of the consumer market toward the end of the eighteenth century led to the production of decorated fine ceramics that became powerful modes of popularizing new ideas in the United States regarding independence, national symbols, and abolitionism.
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 …
Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender
Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
music lessons is a digital chapbook that explores the relationships between James Baldwin’s writing and Beauford Delaney’s paintings through music. From Delaney’s “Composition 16” (1954-56) to Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), their collaboration with the core elements of jazz music gives their work rhythm and melodic contour that any/body can vibe with. Absorbing the influences of artists Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and putting them to paint and text, music lessons demonstrates how music not only transforms the ways we experience and move our bodies but also the ways that we perceive space, relationships, and time. What’s …
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.