Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Be: Fall/Winter 2023–2024 Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

Our fall/winter issue explores, with a cool and objective eye, memory and history; it may give you some necessary de ja vu, as we think of family, books, and films we want to preserve. This is our interview/review issue, and we’ve spoken to people or reviewed work that seems necessary for building better futures. Our interview with Amos White argues for the preservation of life-giving and life-affirming trees. We’ve also included reviews of heart-opening books — Tara Christina’s “More than a Drop” and Caron Knauer’s “American Slavery on Film” — that reinforce the significance of familial and collective memory. And …

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 …

Latino Voter Participation In The 2018 And 2022 Midterm Elections, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction

This study analyzes Latino voting participation, comparing the US midterm elections of the years 2018 and 2022.

Method

The study is a descriptive and comparative analysis using data from the 2022 Voting and Registration Data from the US Census Bureau.

Discussion

The study found that nationally, only 37.9% of eligible Latino voters took part in the 2022 midterms, compared to 40.4% in the 2018 midterms. Despite this decline in the percentage of registered voters casting ballots in 2022, the percentage of Latinos registered to vote rose from 53.7% in 2018 to 57.8% in 2022.

Excerpts From An Anti-Standardized “수능”: A Design-Fictional Approach To Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"Excerpts from an Anti-Standardized '수능'” experiments with design fiction to disrupt overly rehearsed ways of thinking about Korea’s past(s), present(s), and future(s).

Be: The Summer Issue, Be: A Journal Of Black Experimental And Interdisciplinary Work

Publications and Research

This season’s issue pays tribute to the #BlackLivesMatter summit at LaGuardia Community College (led by Kyle Hollar-Gregory, Esq., Jason Hendrickson, Rachel Romain, Allia Abdullah-Matta, Andre Ford, Sultan Jenkins, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wendy Nicholson, Charis Victory, Shaunee Wallace, Donniece Davis, and Jeffery Batts) and writer and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist.” We’re thinking about how to support each other, sustain commitment, and create change, while living with joy and complexity.

— The Editors: Ahmad Wright, Tara Christina, and Rochelle Spencer (LaGuardia Community College, English Department)

Decolonization Of Knowledge Production In African Societies: Contextual Analysis Of Language Of Instruction, Oluremi Alapo

Open Educational Resources

A discussion on knowledge independence or knowledge-production decolonization with the assumption that an epistemological base for knowledge creation exists in most African societies by drawing from indigenous praxis which includes language and history.

The background to this study highlighted the usage of colonial languages by post-colonial African Societies as the language of knowledge transfer in schools and educational institutions, to the neglect of the mother tongue and local language. This prevents an intellectual dislocation that negatively affects the identity, creativity, and works of learners.

The two major theories at the base of this paper are postcolonial theory and Lev Vygotsky’s …

Black Feminist Thought: Black Women's Emerging Power As Agents Of Knowledge, Oluremi Alapo

Open Educational Resources

To understand the black 21st woman’s struggle to reclaim herself from her experiences from the oppression of Structural Oppression. To discover the new standards of womanhood set after the years of the Atlantic slavery. To examine ways in which Black women can be empowered and also be known as an Agent of Knowledge.

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Engl 157: Great Works Of Global Literature, Scott R. Kapuscinski

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus for a general education course bringing together celebrated texts by Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, and Marjane Satrapi. Survey of perspectives beginning during the "scramble for Africa" via Conrad, through postcolonial writers Achebe and Head, and finally making a connection via dehumanization to Orientalism and undoing monocultural presumptions in the near East through Satrapi's Persepolis.