Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Another Country: When Your Nation Doesn’T Consider You To Be A Citizen, William B. Daniels Ii

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

I plan to show how the characters in Another Country uncover the inherently racist and homophobic requirements for citizenship in a nation. The novel Another Country by African American author James Baldwin (1924-1987) exposes the fallible nature of hetero-normative and racial ideals that narrowly define a model citizen of a nation-state. The queer interracial relationships in the novel, particularly between the main character Rufus and his lover Eric, transgress the boundaries of nation, race, and sexuality, thus revealing the illusionary nature of categorizations that are defined and applied by nation-state apparatuses in order to discriminate and maintain uniformity. In addition …

The Transnational Rhetoric In Cabeza De Vaca’S La Relacion, Bincy Abdul Samad

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

Abstract on La Relacion by Cabeza de Vaca

Identity is an important concept in postcolonial literature, especially when one’s identity is achieved rather than inherent. It is interesting to pursue how Cabeza de Vaca, the protagonist of La Relacion undergoes a transformation from his initial identity as a Spanish colonizer to a transnational hybrid, the Spanish-American. Despite multiple critics’ argument that La Relacion is “a discourse of failure” that “subverts the established order,” my paper rereads the narrative as a transnationally successful rhetoric by incorporating multiculturalism and hybridity. Thus Cabeza de Vaca becomes a hero if we accept his story …

Postcolonial Disability In Mohesen Makhmalbaf’S Kandahar, Sukshma Vedere

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

Kandahar (2001), an Iranian film directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, details the journey of the protagonist, Nafas, to Kandahar to save her sister from committing suicide on the day of the solar eclipse. The film has gained recent attention by disability studies scholars for the representation of disability in Afghanistan; scholars have discussed the significance of prosthetics and international aid for the disabled in post-war zones of the Third World, but little has been said about disability as a postcolonial embodiment. I argue that Kandahar represents the postcolonial state as a disabled space both literally and metaphorically. It projects the veil …

The Perpetual Other: Native American Representation In Documentaries, Julia E. Largent

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

When an individual uses an Internet search engine to find images of Native Americans, the person will most likely find that most of the images are paintings of the Native American warrior or are older black and white portraits. After searching for other races, such as Asian American or African American, the search is more likely to come up with contemporary images of people playing sports, in school, or with their families. Why is there such a stark difference? Why are Native Americans so often thought about as only in the past? From the early days of books and portraits …