Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Cliffhanger, Micah Mickles

MFA in Visual Art

I am Micah Mickles, a mixed-media visual artist in St. Louis, Missouri. My artwork is deeply rooted in my personal experiences and serves as a memorial and monument to counteract the enduring effects of grief and loss. What sets my work apart is the transformative impact of my everyday encounters, inspired by my 14 years of experience working at Trader Joe's. These encounters have led me to reflect on my profound connections with diverse communities. By delving into the hidden narratives of mundane materials encountered in the workplace, I prompt a reexamination of convenience and supply chain origins. Inspired by …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

Decolonizing Chinese Literary And Cultural Studies In “World Literature”: Decolonial Translation And Magical-Traumatic Realism In Can Xue, Deanna Ren

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study takes a genealogical and historicized approach to Mandarin-to-English translations, including my own, of Can Xue through neoliberal discourses of “world literature.” I ground these Anglophone discourses in the legacies of Sinology, area studies and post-Cold War historiography. Arguing for the necessity of a decolonial translation practice in Mandarin-to-English translation, I propose magical-traumatic realism (an intersection of magical realism and traumatic realism) as an alternative lens with which to contextualize, decolonize and re-embody Can Xue’s works in both source and “world” contexts.

Resistance/Refusal Of Violence In The Neoliberal City: Black Lgbtq+ Communities In Chicago And New York (1989 – Present), Marc Ridgell

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Since the 1980s, Black queer and trans communities across U.S. cities have experienced racist and classist exclusion from gay neighborhoods, police and interpersonal violence in neighborhoods more generally, and medical racism in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Despite these forms of antiblack and anti-queer oppression, Black queer and trans people have performed acts of resistance and refusal to build community and experience better worlds. This research project examines how Black LGBTQ+ communities have responded to systems of racism, classism, queerphobia, and misogyny by claiming their “right to the city.” Specifically, this project explores how Black LGBTQ+ people in both Chicago and New …

La Cultura Que No Cambia, Karina Arreola-Gutierrez

MFA in Visual Art

In the text of La Cultura Que No Cambia, I mention how my work has been influenced by becoming more aware of generations of altar making that occur in my family. By collecting stories and photographs of altars, I can observe and create work based on how the legacies can change through generations or stay the same. The memory of my ancestors and family traditions is strengthened. Growing up seeing discrimination towards others has influenced me to highlight my Mexican heritage of traditions, culture, and language through several different methods. Using these elements, I can create work informing audiences about …

"Nothing But The Son Of A Black Woman": Anti-Blackness, Gender Dynamics, And Muslim Communities Of Memphis, Zari Muhammad

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is largely responsible for the growth of Islam in America during the 20th century. However, they are often isolated from their Muslim counterparts, being framed as an “inauthentic” Islamic school of thought by Sunni Muslim communities. This is due in part to the different practices of Islam, but also a result of American systemic anti-Blackness. Furthermore, Black Muslim women face numerous problems in the NOI , as the internal gender dynamics are based on white nuclear family systems that lead to further gendered ostracization within these same communities. This is exemplified in Memphis, Tennessee, where …

Un Guisado: Allí, Allá And The Space In Between, Quinn A. Briceño

MFA in Visual Art

I am a Guisado: a savory stew. A blend of two worlds: one of Nicaragua, and the other of the United States. I am both Nicaragaüense y Estadounidense. As an artist, I work with painting and collage as a form of image making that carefully takes inspiration from those traditions to create a new narrative. In my work, I examine both my struggle with identity and how I came to be the person I am today. As I am both Nicaragüense and Estadounidense it is important that my paintings reflect those two worlds.

The ingredients making up my …

African American Opera Singers, 1850-1950: Ambition, Uplift, And Performance, Elena Arredondo Farel

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores African American engagement with opera in the United States between the 1850s—when Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, dubbed the “Black Swan,” drew comparisons to white superstar Jenny Lind—and the 1940s, when Black singers began to access “white” stages such as the Metropolitan. I foreground how musicians who knew they would never receive a fair hearing acted not just as singers, but as entrepreneurs, managers, composers, and collaborators in order to create careers for themselves. In order to do so, these singers navigated a complex set of aspirations and realities. Black opera singers engaged with ideologies of racial uplift, contemporary …

Representations Of The Cuban Revolution In The American Gaze: The Case Of African-American Activists, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For more than six decades, the Cuban Revolution has been the object of representation by foreign authors―historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and also poets and writers. After the triumph of Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959, his revolution captured the imagination of U.S. intellectuals and activists. Many of them traveled to Cuba to become witnesses of the radical transformations that were taking place there. In my dissertation, I suggest that visiting Cuba was important for them to authenticate their views. Writing from Castro’s Cuba lent legitimacy to their narratives, with which they hoped to influence U.S. public opinion.My focus is …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

Pero...Maybe, Adrian Gonzalez

Graduate School of Art Theses

Through collage, assemblage, and object making, I fit unlikely fragments that I call manchitas—stains—together. In my paintings and mixed media assemblages I incorporate references to Spanglish as un acto of making. To me, it’s like the visual work that I make: thinking in one language and speaking another, words start with English but end in Spanish. They sound like English but are Spanish or vice versa. The words look misspelled but are used in everyday conversation. Spanglish is idiosyncratic and is what I build my practice on. I collect materials around me, some I find and some I make. …

Racism-Based Trauma And Policing Among Black Emerging Adults, Robert Motley

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Community violence exposure (CVE) among Black emerging adults ages 18-29 in the United States is a major public health concern. However, an unknown is the nature of the relationship between Black emerging adults CVE and substance use when the perpetrator(s) of the violence are the police and the violence is experienced as a race-based traumatic event. The Classes of Racism Frequency of Racial Experiences (CRFRE) measure assesses individuals’ exposure to perceived racism-based events. However, the CRFRE hostile-racism scale does not capture the range of police violent events that are most salient for a population. To fill the noted gaps in …

Safekeeping: Slavery, Capitalism, And The Carceral State In Washington, D.C., 1830-1863, Brandon Wilson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the 1830s, incarceration emerged as a two-pronged solution for racial control and economic expansion. Local and federal government built jails around the District of Columbia to detain "rowdy negro boys," men, and women, as a means to stymie their rapid movement and fuel a burgeoning domestic slave trade. People were jailed, fined, and often sold to the Deep South, providing a wellspring of capital for enslavers, justified through the lens of criminality. For the crime of petty theft, missing free papers, or in at least one case "using foul language," black people of the Washington region could find themselves …

Rompiendo Alambres: Immigrant Youth Navigating School And Life In St. Louis, Julia Campus Macias

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project focuses on educational and life trajectories of Central American youth in St. Louis, Missouri, who have immigrated unaccompanied from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. By tracking and telling their stories, I hope to amplify these young immigrants’ voices, and complicate others’ perceptions of their place and worth in this country. Current immigration policies and enforcement practices have made the entry process more punitive, restrictive and deadly. The immigrant experience, especially for young people, confronts many state institutions, chief among them the educational system. Institutions like schools become entry points for immigrants but can also be spaces for …

Making Nebraska: The Pawnee, The United States, And The Transformation Of Space, 1803-1854, Ethan Reavis Bennett

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Making Nebraska is a history of foreign relations and power politics between the Pawnee confederacy and the United States over the control and governance of the greater Platte Valley between 1803 and 1854. These groups never fought a war, but struggled over the meaning and use of power to control space at a transitional moment of North American history. While nominally part of the United States post-1803, the region remained outside the federal territorial system. Yet, this space was central to larger strategic and policy concerns over Indian Removal, territorial expansion, and the survival of the Pawnee as a nation. …

Black Delilahs: Black Female Sexuality And Resistance In Progressive Era New York City, Kayla J. Smith

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Black Delilahs traces a history of policing and criminalizing of black women’s sexuality in Progressive Era New York City. By analyzing vaudeville posters, joke books, blues music, newspapers, vice committee records, and reformatory records, this project provides a historiography of respectability politics and the sociocultural norms and practices that limited American society’s freedom of sexual expression. It subsequently explores how working-class black women engaged with commercial, public, and private urban spaces normatively associated with vice, deviancy, and disreputability in ways that subverted these expectations of respectability and empowered them. These women used creative ways to express their sexuality within the …

Forging A People: Visual Culture In The Illustrated Press Of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, Pablo Martin Zavala

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I trace the methods by which different sectors of society – from writers, journalists, photographers, political militants, graphic artists, activists, and intellectuals, to the State – imagined collective subjectivities in the illustrated printed press while negotiating with

current phenomena like modernization processes and political ideologies. With the stroke of the pen, pencil, or carving tool, these image makers had the power to craft what it meant to be a worker or a peasant. At times tinged with satire, and at others with realism, the images were part of various efforts to forge a people. I argue that …

The Rupture Repeats, Jennifer Everett

Graduate School of Art Theses

Rupture repeats without regard. Occurring on macro and micro scales, these historical, financial, and social upheavals continue throughout our lives, remaking our worlds and leaving us to respond as best we can. Rupture is a condition of human existence. For marginalized communities and Black Americans specifically, rupture is familiar and precarious. Historically, Black people respond to the space that rupture makes through a rigorous, interdisciplinary, creative tradition which serves as a strategy for survival and a way to produce and transmit knowledge. These methods of knowledge production exist in excess of formal training and are evident of quiet and expansive …

In A Child's Place: Centering Black Girlhood In Black Feminisms Through The Bildungsroman, Taylor L. Bailey

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines the effects of misogynoir— a specific form of oppression Black women experience due to the intersection of being deemed inferior in both race and gender— on the development of Black girlhood. In Black feminist theory and criticism, though, the language used often subordinates Black girls and does not ascribe adequate import to their experiences. Using the Black girl bildungsroman, specifically The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, as a way to survey the effects of misogynoir and the significance of homosocial, intraracial bonding, I argue that Black feminisms should center Black girlhood …

Understanding Adolescent Physical Activity In The Early Nutrition Transitioning Country Of Haiti, Haley V. Becker

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The nutrition transition is underway in Haiti, giving rise to the dual burden of malnutrition. Physical activity (PA) plays an important role in mitigating the negative health consequences of nutrition transition and the dual burden, but heretofore this data has been unavailable for Haiti. This dissertation undertook an exploratory needs assessment providing baseline PA data for Haitian adolescents. It evaluated two different PA data collection methodologies: a cross-sectional survey adapted from the IPAQ long-form and objectively measured PA via Actigraph GT1M accelerometers. Next, it identified initial covariates of self-reported and objectively-assessed PA behaviors; data was operationalized as meeting the World …

The Role Of Personality In The Development Of Health Disparities During Late-Mid Life, Juliette Mcclendon Iacovino

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: The current study examined race/gender disparities in initial levels and trajectories of self-reported physical and mental health, and health care utilization, as well as the impact of personality and stressful life events on race/gender disparities. We hypothesized that health disparities would remain stable or decrease over time; that at-risk personality traits (e.g., high neuroticism) would have a more robust negative impact on health for black participants; that trust would mediate racial disparities in health; and that personality traits would moderate the association between stressful life events and health trajectories differentially across race/gender. Methods: Analyses utilized the first six waves …

The Nature Of My Nature; A Story About Relationships, Andrew Mcilvaine

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

As a second generation Hispanic, I am a painter whose work is informed by my personal experience of displacement and longing to belong. In turn, I hope, this longing inspires an important dialogue about place, memory, otherness and belonging. I work in small, intimate scale, evoking narratives of vastness yet also of solitude. The landscape and the natural environment I represent, become populated by anonymous creatures. Both animal and human, posed in semi-natural and semi-artificial settings.

I was born in Texas and grew up in Missouri. The images I produce are often tranquil and surreal yet are grounded through …

We Are A Fantasia: Violence, Belonging, And Potentiality In Transgender Latina Sexual Economies, Andrea Bolivar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation ethnographically centers the lives of sex working transgender Latinas in Chicagoland. Based on 14 months of research collected between June 2015 and August 2016, I introduce "fantasia" as a racialized queer analytic to illustrate the unique ways in which transgender Latinas are objectified, racialized, and dehumanized in sexual economies of labor and in U.S. nation more broadly. Fantasia conveys trans Latinas' sexual otherness on account of their race and gender. They are imagined as hypersexual because they are Latinas, and fetishized because they are transgender women. Fantasia also indexes their ephemeral presence--they are always at risk of disappearing …

Earthen Monuments And Social Movements In Eastern North America: Adena-Hopewell Enclosures On Kentucky’S Bluegrass Landscape, Edward Ross Henry

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Geometric earthen enclosures are some of the best known pre-Columbian monuments in North America. Across the Eastern Woodlands, many have been preserved as state and national parks. However, their chronological placement is poorly understood as they relate to the rise of complex social behaviors associated with the Adena-Hopewell florescence (500 BC–AD 500) in the Middle Ohio Valley. This is especially true for communities who built smaller enclosures referred to by archaeologists as ‘scared circles’. To better understand the timing, tempo, and nature of their construction I examined the Bluegrass Region in Central Kentucky using aerial and terrestrial remote sensing methods …

“Home Sweet Home”: Displacement And Belonging In Post-1960s Diasporic Chinese Literature, Melody Yunzi Li

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Situated at the intersection of Sinophone and Diaspora Studies and focusing on the rhetoric of “home,” my dissertation explores the ways in which Chinese immigrant Sinophone writers and Anglophone writers in the U.S. construct “imaginative homes” in response to the absence of their physical homes. Through detailed analysis of works by Yu Lihua (Again the Palm Trees, 1967), Yan Geling (The Criminal Lu Yanshi, 2011; A Woman’s Epic, 2006), Pai Hsien-yung (Taipei People, 1971), Shi Yu (New York Lover, 2004), Chen Qian (Listen to the Caged Bird Sing, 2010), Rong Rong (Notes of a Couple, 2004) and Ha Jin (A …

Seeing Shadows: Fbi Surveillance, Gender, And Black Women Activists, Kiara Sample

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This project, “Seeing Shadows: The Gendered Surveillance of Black Women,” explores the ways gender and race influenced the FBI’s surveillance of Black women activists. Previous scholarship has covered the role of surveillance in repressing revolutionary movements and neutralizing radical organizations. Male leaders such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton have been the overwhelming focus of surveillance research in social movements. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the ways the FBI monitored the lives of Black women. Historically, within many social movements, Black women have been marginalized, silenced, or reduced to only their gender because of …

Idealist Or Strategist? Isamu Noguchi In The Early 1940s, Qianran Yang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

One Epic Φf Stardusts, Y∞N Irene Hong

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A long time ago in a far away galaxy,

there was a star shining alone in the deep darkness.

The beautiful star aged and exploded into a supernova,

where her golden light scattered into the tiniest sparkles of dust,

pouring down to Earth.

Made of Stardust,

humans naturally have responded to the divine light that they carry inside their souls,

through diverse acts of enlightenment such as art, religion, and science.

.

.

.

As a Stardust, an artist, a Korean, and a woman,

I keep walking in between opposing forces and varying perspectives

until I transcend their boundaries and …

Black Matter, Kahlil Irving

Graduate School of Art Theses

History as we know it, is inherited. Racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Eurocentric dominance have been presented as normal and acceptable within our society for many years. This has allowed police officers to execute Black American’s and not be acquitted for their horrendous crimes. As an activist I want to challenge the status quo. As an artist I am interested in investigating how I can present ideas embody or reflect contemporary issues and concerns. Using different colors can aggressively change how an object is perceived. Historical objects hold many important.

I explore many mediums, but an anchor material that I …

Binding Freedom: Cuba's Black Public Sphere, 1868-1912, Alexander Sotelo Eastman

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation studies the cultural, social, and political associations linked to the civil rights movement in Cuba during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which witnessed the abolition of slavery, the crumbling of colonialism and the entrance of black intellectuals into formal politics. I trace the emergence of a black public sphere and analyze the networks of communication among people of color in Cuba and the wider Black Atlantic through sources that include antislavery narratives, the black press, court cases and secret police records. I argue that people of color in Cuba, enslaved and freed alike, engaged in political …