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Articles 1 - 30 of 144
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini
Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini
Doctoral Dissertations
Revenge of the Nerds provides a cultural history of the evolution of white nerd masculinities in American culture through interpretations of a wide variety of texts and representations using the methods of literary studies and American studies. The dissertation is organized around four overlapping stages of nerd masculinity based on changes in technology and their effects on culture, as well as white male nerds’ efforts to remain culturally relevant and gain the benefits of being close to hegemonic masculinity. The four nerd types are the computer nerd, the gamer, the gatekeeper nerd, and the maladaptive nerd which reflect the following …
Combating Narratives: Soldiering In Twentieth-Century African American And Latinx Literature, Stacy Reardon
Combating Narratives: Soldiering In Twentieth-Century African American And Latinx Literature, Stacy Reardon
Doctoral Dissertations
The neglect of the stories of African American and Latinx soldiers of color, combined with the relative absence of direct testimony by such soldiers, is very much on the minds of writers who achieve what Toni Morrison calls a “literary archeology” that fills in the gaps of the historical record. By closely examining John Oliver Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder, Alfredo Véa’s Gods Go Begging, and John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities: A Love Story, in this study I argue that twentieth-century African American and Latinx war fiction penned between the start of the Civil Rights …
The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard
The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard
Doctoral Dissertations
The Burdens of Responsibility traces the emergence of moral responsibility as both a concept and problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, philosophy, domestic manuals, newspaper archives – I show how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Although ethicists today take this distinction for granted, it was an emergent and problematic space in the nineteenth-century United States, brought into being by historical forces, including the rise of market capitalism, abolition, changing women’s roles, and increasing concern …
Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt
Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’S Speculative Fiction And The Restructuring Of Blackness, Chloe Hunt
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation, Conjuring New Worlds: Black Women’s Speculative Fiction and the Restructuring of Blackness, examines Black speculative fiction as a site of theorization within worlds where Black existence has not already been pre-determined by the forces of slavery and ideologies of race and culture in a white supremacist world. In this sense, my dissertation models ways of reading Black literature that demonstrates how Blackness can disturb, rather than reproduce, notions of racial meaning and the Human. I argue that writers of Black speculative fiction go beyond the creation of alternative realities to produce sites that allow for nearly limitless …
Marked At Sea: Race, Class, And Tattoo Culture In Melville's Early Sea Fiction, Connell D. Swenson
Marked At Sea: Race, Class, And Tattoo Culture In Melville's Early Sea Fiction, Connell D. Swenson
Masters Theses
This thesis explores the role of Euromerican maritime tattoos in Herman Melville’s early sea fiction. Through layers of historic and scholarly obfuscation, Euromerican maritime tattoos have been delimited to a marginal role in the cosmopolitan shipboard culture of 19th-century Pacific whaling and trade networks. This project extracts and contextualizes that cultural practice as formative in the creation of sailors’ hybrid embodied identities. With this intervention in mind, Euromerican maritime tattooing emerges as a small but important feature in Melville’s first six books. Probing issues such as race, class, slavery, and colonialism, this project deploys an intimate reading practice, …
'Y Mi Rebelión Se Convirtió En Arte’ Raúl Salinas Y Su Poesía Política: Una Historia Literaria Chicana, Santiago Vidales
'Y Mi Rebelión Se Convirtió En Arte’ Raúl Salinas Y Su Poesía Política: Una Historia Literaria Chicana, Santiago Vidales
Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation I present a literary history of poet and revolutionary Raúl Salinas. Born in 1934, Salinas left a major legacy for Latinx and Chicanx letters. I focus on narrating, for the first time in Spanish, the relationship between his prison radicalism and his poetic production. The time Salinas spent as a political prisoner in Leavenworth Penitentiary (1967-1972) was foundational to his political transformation and (re)education. Along with members of the Black Panthers, AIM, Puerto Rican Nationalists, and other radicalized Chicanos, these inmates formed study groups, networks of support, and established a newspaper to both combat the oppressive conditions …
Dirty Minds & Failed Endings: Uses Of The Bawdy In Jewish Comedy, American And Israeli Perspectives, Eyal Tamir
Dirty Minds & Failed Endings: Uses Of The Bawdy In Jewish Comedy, American And Israeli Perspectives, Eyal Tamir
Doctoral Dissertations
The connection between Jews, Jewish culture, and comedy in the twentieth century has long been established. The dissertation looks at Jewish comedy, comedians, and comediennes who have made the bawdy a central feature of their work. Moreover, it argues that the bawdy and the lewd have played an important role in the history of Jewish comedy and humor in the United States and in Israel. Aside from simply documenting various uses and occurrences of the bawdy in Jewish comedy, the dissertation seeks out some symptoms, as well as some underlying causes for the proclivity for such material in the work …
Indigenous Impositions In Contemporary Culture: Knotting Ontologies, Beading Aesthetics, And Braiding Temporalities, Darren Lone Fight
Indigenous Impositions In Contemporary Culture: Knotting Ontologies, Beading Aesthetics, And Braiding Temporalities, Darren Lone Fight
Doctoral Dissertations
This work covers Indigenous philosophy, history, aesthetics, ethics, axiology, pedagogy, temporality, and language. This is the necessary result of a central but implicit claim made throughout the project, which is that any exploration of Indigenous culture that does not work within such a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach and instead parses and isolates these elements from each other runs the risk of attenuating the complex-systems features of the Indigenous culture it examines. Indigenous cultures are a processual holism. I offer here a piece of cultural analysis/synthesis that is Indigenous from the inside and, as such, does not neglect philosophical foundations. Rather, …
Negritude Feminisms: Francophone Black Women Writers And Activists In France, Martinique, And Senegal From The 1920s To The 1980s, Korka Sall
Doctoral Dissertations
Negritude Feminisms: Francophone Black Women Writers and Activists in France, Martinique and Senegal from the 1920s to 1980s reframes debates about the participation and conversation of francophone women writers in the Negritude movement. I use the Negritude movement as a model to highlight its capacities and limits. Through an intergenerational analysis of the writings and personal experiences of Paulette Nardal and Suzanne Césaire from Martinique, Annette Mbaye d’Erneville and Aminata Sow Fall from Senegal, my dissertation charts common themes of racial consciousness, gender issues and the colonial problem developed by these women. Nardal, Césaire, Mbaye d’Erneville and Sow Fall played …
Toni Morrison: Biography, A Yęmisi Jimoh, Phd
Black Men Who Betray Their Race: 20th Century Literary Representations Of The Black Male Race Traitor, Gregory Coleman
Black Men Who Betray Their Race: 20th Century Literary Representations Of The Black Male Race Traitor, Gregory Coleman
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation, Black Men Who Betray Their Race, gathers a literary archive in order to identify and introduce the “race traitor” as a heretofore unrecognized yet important trope within 20th century African-American Literature. In addition to coping with the burden of racism, African Americans have had to put considerable energy toward negotiating the possibility of being perceived as race traitors by others within the African American community. This study tracks the possibilities and perils of black group identity in literary representations of black men, neither privileging opposition to the white world, nor celebrating black unity beyond it. Focusing …
Interpreting Access: A History Of Accessibility And Disability Representations In The National Park Service, Perri Meldon
Interpreting Access: A History Of Accessibility And Disability Representations In The National Park Service, Perri Meldon
Masters Theses
This thesis illustrates the accomplishments and challenges of enhancing accessibility across the national parks, at the same time that great need to diversify the parks and their interpretation of American disability history remains. Chapters describe the administrative history of the NPS Accessibility Program (1979-present), exploring the decisions from both within and outside the federal agency, to break physical and programmatic barriers to make parks more inclusive for people with sensory, physical, and cognitive disabilities; and provide a case study of the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site (HOFR) in New York. The case study describes the creation of …
The Politics Of Feeling And The Work Of Belonging In Us Immigrant Fiction 1990 - 2015, Lauren Silber
The Politics Of Feeling And The Work Of Belonging In Us Immigrant Fiction 1990 - 2015, Lauren Silber
Doctoral Dissertations
“The Politics of Feeling and the Work of Belonging in US Immigrant Fiction 1990 – 2015” presents readers with a distinct optic: if we are to fully grasp contemporary US racial politics, we must recognize the narrative work emotion performs in popular US diasporic fiction. Comparing the work of authors who have become mainstays in the multi-ethnic US literary canon such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, Lan Cao, Achy Obejas, Cristina Garcia, Kiran Desai, and Nora Okja Keller, I explicate how these popular authors exhume the complex entanglements of racialization, US empire, and global capitalism by narrating the …
Charting The Terrain Of Latina/O/X Theater In Chicago, Priscilla M. Page
Charting The Terrain Of Latina/O/X Theater In Chicago, Priscilla M. Page
Doctoral Dissertations
There is a rich tapestry of Latina/o/x theater in Chicago. Through in-depth interviews, I use first-voice narratives to construct four decades of Latina/o/x theater history with the artists who were founding directors and/or members of these companies: Latino Chicago, Latino Experimental Theater Company, Teatro Vista, Teatro Luna, and Urban Theater Company. My aim with this project is to listen carefully to Latina/o/x artists in Chicago so that I can play a role in amplifying their voices as they articulate their experiences in this Midwestern city they call home. I organized my findings into three chapters and have kept the artists’ …
Do Not Separate Her From Her Garden: Anne Spencer's Ecopoetics, Carlyn E. Ferrari
Do Not Separate Her From Her Garden: Anne Spencer's Ecopoetics, Carlyn E. Ferrari
Doctoral Dissertations
Though she is primarily associated with the New Negro Renaissance, Anne Spencer’s writing career spanned over seventy years, and her archive consists of unpublished, undated poetry and prose about the natural world written on ephemera. This project centers Spencer’s unusual archive and writing practice to demonstrate both the range of her artistry and the degree to which her relationship with the natural world informed both her poetics and sense of being. In this project, I employ “ecopoetics” as an analytical framework that both encourages exploring the place of nature in black women’s writing and facilitates the method of close-reading and …
Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal
Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal
Doctoral Dissertations
We can learn and gain a lot by putting Dominican women writers at the center of our attention. Yet they rarely have that place. This dissertation looks at Dominican women authors who have lived and written in the United States —Josefina Báez, Marianela Medrano, Yrene Santos, Aurora Arias, Nelly Rosario, Annecy Báez, Ana Maurine Lara, Raquel Cepeda— and how they fit within the spaces of contemporary American society, and more broadly within world flows of peoples and cultural productions. I draw on the theories and methodologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and her generation of feminists of color, as well as subsequent …
Asian American Heritage Seeking: Personal Narrative Performances Of Ancestral Return, Porntip Israsena Twishime
Asian American Heritage Seeking: Personal Narrative Performances Of Ancestral Return, Porntip Israsena Twishime
Masters Theses
Asian American belongings, migration patterns, and transnational identities are largely constructed in the United States as static, unidirectional, and invisible. Asian Americans complicate these constructions through the practice of ancestral return. In this thesis, “ancestral return” is constituted through one’s participation in a university study abroad program to a specific place to where one traces her heritage. I use “return” not necessarily to account for a form of reverse migration; rather “return” here names the multiple, sometimes contradictory kinds of return, including “return” to a place that one has not yet been. This project examines how Asian American identities are …
Sex And Difference In The Jewish American Family: Incest Narratives In 1990s Literary And Pop Culture, Eli W. Bromberg
Sex And Difference In The Jewish American Family: Incest Narratives In 1990s Literary And Pop Culture, Eli W. Bromberg
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation investigates protective representations of white male Jewish masculinity in the 1990s, via the lens of celebrity incest narratives. In chapters on Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr, and Henry Roth, I demonstrate how media coverage of their respective incest denials (Allen), allegations (Barr), and confessions (Roth) intersect with a history of sexual anti-Semitism. Though prevalent in nineteenth century Europe, sexual anti-Semitism, which simultaneously emasculated Jewish men and rendered them as sexual threats, no longer permeates discourse in the same fashion as the sexualizing component of antiblack racism. I examine how these iconic Jewish artists, news media, and artistic contemporaries, negotiated …
Demanding Spaces: 1970s U.S. Women's Novels As Sites Of Struggle, Kate Marantz
Demanding Spaces: 1970s U.S. Women's Novels As Sites Of Struggle, Kate Marantz
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation offers a new view of 1970s gender and race politics in the United States by analyzing struggles in and over space in four women’s novels: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977). My project reads space as a dynamic, politically charged realm of interactions between lived bodies, physical landscapes, and imaginative territories—including the formal characteristics of fiction. Using this critical lens, I highlight how these authors interrogate conditions of sexism and racism by representing their characters making and responding to “demands” for …
“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman
“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman
Doctoral Dissertations
The central claim in this dissertation is that much contemporary African American cultural expression would be better conceptualized not as “post-black,” as some would have it, but as what I call “meta-black.” I use the preface “meta-” because while this contemporary black identity also resists sometimes constrictive conceptions of “authentic” black identity from within the African American community, I diverge from theorists of “post-blackness” in observing the ways that, as Nicole Fleetwood observes, blackness necessarily “circulates” within a technologically-driven mediascape, and these postmodern black subjects work within and against the constraints of this aural-visual regime of blackness in order to …
We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens: Black Feminist Visuality In African American Women's Art, Kelli Morgan
We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens: Black Feminist Visuality In African American Women's Art, Kelli Morgan
Doctoral Dissertations
ABSTRACT WE ARE ROSES FROM OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS: BLACK FEMINIST VISUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ART MAY 2017 KELLI MORGAN, B.A., WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERISTY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Manisha Sinha We Are Roses From Our Mothers' Gardens posits that in differing historical periods African American women visual artists employed various media and create from individual political thoughts, intellectual views, and aesthetic interests to emphasize the innate unification of a Black woman’s race, gender, sexuality, class, and selfhood and how this multifaceted dynamic of Black women’s identity and material reality produces a …
A Site Of Nation: Black Utopian Novels In The Late 19th And Early 20th Centuries, Xianzhi Meng
A Site Of Nation: Black Utopian Novels In The Late 19th And Early 20th Centuries, Xianzhi Meng
Doctoral Dissertations
ABSTRACT Contrary to the traditional view that there is lack of utopian dimension in African American literature, this dissertation argues that African American literature not only develops an exuberant utopian tradition, but also forms its own utopian uniqueness. Based on this conclusion, the dissertation specially focuses on the period between the 1880s and the first two decades of the 20th century that witnessed the first peak of African American utopian writing. Meanwhile, this era has been claimed as the “Golden Age” of Black Nationalism. Through the examination of the historical background of the co-existence of these two conflicting strains, …
‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor
‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’: Black Female Sexuality Unhinged In The Fiction Of Frances Harper And Pauline Hopkins, Crystal Donkor
Doctoral Dissertations
Race-sex narratives that dominated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries permeated the political, scientific, and social fabric of the nation, but did not solely center on black bodies. These narratives demeaned and degraded a race of black citizens, characterizing them as sexually deviant social pariahs. Consequently, these same notions elevated whites to the highest rungs of society, marking them as moral and desirable. This crafting of racial identity acted as just one way to justify racial subordination through the creation of notions that proved detrimental to black life and worthiness. Writer-activists penning their tales of fiction after the Civil War …
The Economy Of Evangelism In The Colonial American South, Julia Carroll
The Economy Of Evangelism In The Colonial American South, Julia Carroll
Masters Theses
Eighteenth-century Methodist evangelism supported, perpetuated, and promoted slavery as requisite for a productive economy in the colonial American South. Religious thought of the First Great Awakening emerged alongside a colonial economy increasingly reliant on chattel slavery for its prosperity. The records of well-traveled celebrity minister and provocateur of the Anglican tradition, George Whitefield, suggest how Calvinist-Methodist evangelicals viewed slavery as necessary to supporting colonial ministerial efforts. Whitefield’s absorption of and immersion into American culture is revealed in his owning a plantation, portraying a willingness to sacrifice the mobility of the disfranchised for widespread consumption of evangelical thought. A side effect …
Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding And (Re)Imagining Street Lit And Culture, 1990-2007, Jacinta Saffold
Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding And (Re)Imagining Street Lit And Culture, 1990-2007, Jacinta Saffold
Doctoral Dissertations
“Stories Written on Concrete: Understanding and Re-imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007,” coalesces around stories of urbanity and coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the Hip Hop generation reflected on the social, economic, and cultural shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, they took up paper and pen to immortalize the conflicting duality of the gritty and glamorous experience of growing up on a concrete cityscape in America. I interrogate how street lit disrupts normative literary representations of black life in print. Specifically, I consider how urban fiction writes against the African American literary canon in …
The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki
The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki
Doctoral Dissertations
Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of …
Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo
Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …
Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott
Master's Tools And The Master's House: A Historical Analysis Exploring The Myth Of Educating For Democracy In The United States, Timothy Scott
Doctoral Dissertations
Over the past forty-years, neoliberal education reform policies in the U.S. have spurred significant resistance, often galvanized by claims that such policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy. Within this narrative, many activists call to “save our schools” and return them to a time when public schools served the common good. With these narratives in mind, I explore the foundational and persistent power structures that characterize the U.S. as a means to reveal the fundamental purpose of its public education system. The questions that guide my research include: (1) With an understanding that capitalism, white supremacy, …
Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin
Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation argues that scholarly inquiry into American poetry of the Great Depression is incomplete without a critical understanding of poems produced within the labor movement. Through archival research and methodologies drawn from American studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and labor history, this dissertation demonstrates that autoworkers from 1935-1941 developed a rich poetic discourse that championed their cause. Autoworker poets—including autoworker song lyricists—used humor and borrowed extensively from popular, religious, and “folk” cultures to craft their own poetic styles and trope sets. They wrote about a diverse range of topics from their hopes for the unionization movement, to scab conversions, …
From What Remains: The Politics Of Aesthetic Mourning And The Poetics Of Loss In Contemporary African American Culture, Kajsa K. Henry
From What Remains: The Politics Of Aesthetic Mourning And The Poetics Of Loss In Contemporary African American Culture, Kajsa K. Henry
Doctoral Dissertations
While critical analyses of loss and mourning in African American studies have tended to focus on narratives that primarily concentrate on the Atlantic slave trade/slavery and music, particularly blues and gospel spirituals, this project advocates reimagining the boundaries of our discussions of loss to include other art forms, including assemblage art and performative dance. From What Remains: The Politics of Aesthetic Mourning and the Poetics of Loss in Contemporary African American Culture includes the assemblage art of the 1966 exhibition Signs of Neon and Tyree Guyton’s ongoing Heidelberg Project that respond to the violence of urban rebellions and decay and …