Arts and Humanities Commons^™

[Introduction To] Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own mid-life journey to lock his hair.

After leading a far-too-conventional life for forty years, Ashe began a long, arduous, uncertain process of locking his own hair in an attempt to step out of American convention. Black hair, after all, matters. Few Americans are subject to snap judgements like those in the African-American community, …

[Introduction To] Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love And Fear In U.S. Antebellum Literature, Kevin Pelletier

Bookshelf

In contrast to the prevailing scholarly consensus that understands sentimentality to be grounded on a logic of love and sympathy, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism demonstrates that in order for sentimentality to work as an antislavery engine, it needed to be linked to its seeming opposite—fear, especially the fear of God’s wrath. Most antislavery reformers recognized that calls for love and sympathy or the representation of suffering slaves would not lead an audience to “feel right” or to actively oppose slavery. The threat of God’s apocalyptic vengeance—and the terror that this threat inspired—functioned within the tradition of abolitionist sentimentality as a necessary goad …

[Introduction To] Posthumanism And Educational Research, Nathan Snaza, John A. Weaver

Bookshelf

Focusing on the interdependence between human, animal, and machine, posthumanism redefines the meaning of the human being previously assumed in knowledge production. This movement challenges some of the most foundational concepts in educational theory and has implications within educational research, curriculum design and pedagogical interactions. In this volume, a group of international contributors use posthumanist theory to present new modes of institutional collaboration and pedagogical practice. They position posthumanism as a comprehensive theoretical project with connections to philosophy, animal studies, environmentalism, feminism, biology, queer theory and cognition. Researchers and scholars in curriculum studies and philosophy of education will benefit from …

[Introduction To] Indians Playing Indian: Multiculturalism And Contemporary Indigenous Art In North America, Monica Siebert

Bookshelf

Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as “Native Americans” complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world’s immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization. Monika Siebert’s Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains …

A Note On 'Roderick Hudson' And 'La Traviata': Who Has Gone Astray?, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

Verdi Forum

No abstract provided.

Modern American Myth-Making In Mass Media Texts, Kassandra Andreadis

Honors Theses

What is an American myth? “Myth” can have many meanings and can refer to many different types of works. For example, Edwards and Klosa refer to Frankenstein as “an important mythic text” (Edwards and Klosa 34), which provides a middle point between ancient myths (e.g. the Odyssey) and current myths, showing that myths have continued to be produced and establishing myth-making as a continuous process. This process continues into the present, all over the world, so it stands to reason that the United States of America has its own myths. The identity of those myths is less certain. While ideas …