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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Silent, Or Silenced: Repression Of The Middle Eastern Subaltern, Amanda Arodes May 2024

Silent, Or Silenced: Repression Of The Middle Eastern Subaltern, Amanda Arodes

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper employs subaltern theory to examine the socio-political landscapes of Palestine and Syria within postcolonial discourse. Drawing from the works of scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ranajit Guha, and Juan R. Cole, this study uncovers the silenced narratives and marginalized perspectives of the Palestinian and Syrian people. Through a critical analysis of historical, cultural, and political dimensions, the basis of this research explores how subaltern groups in Palestine and Syria navigate structures of power, resistance, and identity formation. The experiences of various subaltern groups, including refugees, women, and ethnic minorities whose voices often remain obscured within dominant discourses are …


Zamrock: Negotiating Masculine Urban Identity In Zambia And Music Success In A Postcolonial World, Emeline Avignon Apr 2024

Zamrock: Negotiating Masculine Urban Identity In Zambia And Music Success In A Postcolonial World, Emeline Avignon

Senior Theses and Projects

This thesis analyzes, through predominately an ethnomusicologist approach and methodology, the lyricism, instrumentation, performance, and album art of the movement of Zamrock in Zambia from 1970 to the mid-1980s. I explore the agency and construction of urban youth masculinity by Zamrock artists in the context of Zambia’s colonial history of the Copperbelt, into its decades after independence. First, I look at the socio-political and economic context of colonized and independent Zambia, and how out of these conditions Zambian rock music was fused and forged. I break down the negotiations and desires of Zamrock artists in their identity construction via their …


Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar Jun 2023

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …


Western Corporations And Colombian Labor: Cycles Of Transhistorical Colonial And Economic Oppression In Colombia, Isabella Lazzarino-Buendia Feb 2023

Western Corporations And Colombian Labor: Cycles Of Transhistorical Colonial And Economic Oppression In Colombia, Isabella Lazzarino-Buendia

Senior Theses

The relationship between colonial and colonized nations is entrenched in modern politics and history; remaining a transhistorical site of economic, social, and political imbalance. The United States and Colombia have a trans-colonial relationship that is shadowed by colonial gains at the expense of colonized livelihood. Western corporations mimic the patterns of the governments that preside over them, using the land and labor of the colonized “Other” to maximize profit. I investigate postcolonial Colombia through the lens of the transhistorical United Fruit Company and the mass corporation Coca-Cola. The accountability of these corporations and the systems that have allowed them to …


Hija De La Chingada: Visibility And Erasure Of La Malinche In Contemporary Mexican Discourse, Tania Del Moral Jan 2023

Hija De La Chingada: Visibility And Erasure Of La Malinche In Contemporary Mexican Discourse, Tania Del Moral

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

The mystification and subsequent reduction of La Malinche in Mexican national discourse presents a problem in which patriarchy and colonialism bind the native Mexican women into two archetypes: either traditional or treacherous. Historical accounts have fallen short of describing the woman behind the myth of La Malinche, further compartmentalizing her into a traitor to her people. Scholars such as Octavio Paz and Gloria Anzaldúa have illustrated her subjugation and erasure, highlighting this binary. This paper, however, considers a postcolonialist perspective to analyze La Malinche's story as one of erasure; particularly the ways that language was used by the Spanish Crown …


Engl 157: Great Works Of Global Literature, Scott R. Kapuscinski Jan 2023

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.


Translation, Weather, And Erasure In Bhanu Kapil’S Schizophrene, Flore Chevaillier Jan 2023

Translation, Weather, And Erasure In Bhanu Kapil’S Schizophrene, Flore Chevaillier

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

For Bhanu Kapil, the drafting process of writing involves the translation of non-linguistic realities into storytelling, the nature of which must leave room for the performative experience that shapes writing. In Schizophrene (2011), Kapil engaged in adventitious composition processes when she sealed her manuscript in a Ziploc bag and threw it in the garden to spend months outdoors in the Colorado winter. The text, full of gaps created by the erased parts of the “winterized” manuscript, documents schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities. The decaying process of the book that created a void in her writing also impacts the …


Living In The Ruins Of Utopia: The Collapse Of The Soviet Union And The Formation Of Russia's Postcolonial Identity, Erik G. Livingston Jan 2022

Living In The Ruins Of Utopia: The Collapse Of The Soviet Union And The Formation Of Russia's Postcolonial Identity, Erik G. Livingston

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.


Colonization Of The Philippines: An Analysis Of U.S. Justificatory Rhetoric, Johansen Christopher Pico May 2021

Colonization Of The Philippines: An Analysis Of U.S. Justificatory Rhetoric, Johansen Christopher Pico

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The term “Filipino” offers more than a call to nationality; it also recalls the genesis of colonization in the Philippines. This thesis explores the colonial interventions of the United States in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, homing in on the Filipino education system as the United States’ primary method of colonizing the Filipino mind. Drawing from texts by Senator Alfred Beveridge, President William McKinley, the Philippine Commission, David Barrows, and Dr. Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, I offer an ideological criticism that demonstrates a cyclical nature between both justificatory rhetoric and ideology. Working with “ideological clusters,” this …


Broken Mirrors: Iterations Of The Other In The Post-Colonial Novel, Kelly Bowers May 2021

Broken Mirrors: Iterations Of The Other In The Post-Colonial Novel, Kelly Bowers

Master of Arts in Humanities | Master's Theses 1936 - 2022

This thesis explores the post-colonial notion of the Other as an iteration of the broader cultural tendency to make meaning via binary opposition. The study of Wide Sargasso Sea, Infidels, and At Swim Two Boys reveals the connective thread of empire and subjugation that transcends time and place. Furthermore, I examine the various attempts of characters to resist this reality by creating an alternate space within the dominant culture. My interest lies in exploring the ways in which various markers of identity form the “self,” and consequently how characters attempt to gain agency and fully realize identity despite marginalization and …


Treatise, Scripture, Manifesto: Reckoning With "Love Cake", Lalini Shanela Ranaraja Apr 2021

Treatise, Scripture, Manifesto: Reckoning With "Love Cake", Lalini Shanela Ranaraja

Audre Lorde Writing Prize

This essay was written in response to Sri Lankan-American writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha's poetry collection Love Cake, as part of a directed study I undertook in Spring 2021. A goal of the directed study, titled "The Empire Writes Back" was to engage with and build upon work by writers from South Asia and the diaspora, of which Piepzna-Samarasinha is a vocal member. In this essay, I explore not only the sense of connection I feel with this poet and her body of work as a result of shared experiences of otherness, trauma, and nationhood, but also …


Lives In Musicology: My Life In Writings, Kofi Agawu Jan 2021

Lives In Musicology: My Life In Writings, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Responding to an invitation from the editors of Acta Musicologica to tell the story of his life in musicology, Kofi Agawu describes his upbringing and early education in Ghana and his university studies in the UK and the US. In a career focused on teaching, research, and writing, he outlines a number of intellectual projects involving the analysis of African and European music. He ends by acknowledging renewed discussions of race and identity in the musical academy today, and hints at his own growing interest in African art music.


Un-Affirmative Action: The Persistence Of Anti-Black Racism In The Higher Education System Of Postcolonial Brazil, Zakiya T. Daniel Nov 2020

Un-Affirmative Action: The Persistence Of Anti-Black Racism In The Higher Education System Of Postcolonial Brazil, Zakiya T. Daniel

Honors College Theses

Public education systems institutionalize the socialization process which directly disseminates cultural and national values and assimilates the population through mass education. But how does colonial-era anti-Black racism persist in the higher education institutions of contemporary postcolonial societies? Using the Federative Republic of Brazil as a case study, I examine the effects of incomplete decolonization, anti-Blackness, and the role of history, economics, and pedagogy on social outcomes that exclude and marginalize Black and other minority groups. The Brazilian higher education system follows a pattern centered around anti-Black racism which serves to disempower Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations during the colonial and …


Nguyễn An Ninh’S Anti-Colonial Thought: A New Account Of National Shame, Kevin D. Pham Oct 2020

Nguyễn An Ninh’S Anti-Colonial Thought: A New Account Of National Shame, Kevin D. Pham

Political Science Faculty Publications

A source of national shame can be the perception that one’s nation is intellectually inferior to other nations. This kind of national shame can lead not to despair but to a sense of national responsibility to engage in creative self-renewal and to create national identity from scratch. An exemplar of someone who recognized and engaged with this kind of national shame is Nguyễn An Ninh (1900–1943), an influential Vietnamese anti-colonial intellectual in French colonial Vietnam. Ninh’s account of national shame challenges existing assumptions in political theory, namely that national identity requires national pride, that national shame comes from bad actions …


Our Greatest Weapon: The Rhetoric Of Invasion In Arrival And Independence Day, Emma G. Schilling Oct 2020

Our Greatest Weapon: The Rhetoric Of Invasion In Arrival And Independence Day, Emma G. Schilling

Student Publications

Inside of every alien invasion story is a central ‘us vs. them’ mentality that carries the thematic and moral weight of the story. Because of this, alien invasion films can be viewed through a postcolonial lens that reveals the destructive implications of colonialism, including a fear of the foreign and the figure of the white savior. Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) are no exception to this. Although both films are about aliens coming to Earth, the perspectives they follow in telling the story, their depictions of the military and scientists, their commentary on the role …


Humanism In The Americas, Carol W. White Jul 2020

Humanism In The Americas, Carol W. White

Faculty Contributions to Books

This chapter provides an overview of select trends, ideas, themes, and figures associated with humanism in the Americas, which comprises a diversified set of peoples, cultural traditions, religious orientations, and socio-economic groups. In acknowledging this rich tapestry of human life, the chapter emphasizes the impressive variety of developments in philosophy, the natural sciences, literature, religion, art, social science, and political thought that have contributed to the development of humanism in the Americas. The chapter also features modern usages of humanism that originated in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. In this context, humanism is best viewed as a contested …


"You Your Best Thing”: The Anti-Colonial Power Of The Mind In Black And Chicanx American Literature, Grace Keir May 2020

"You Your Best Thing”: The Anti-Colonial Power Of The Mind In Black And Chicanx American Literature, Grace Keir

English Honors Theses

In the year 1987, two of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, Toni Morrison and Gloria Anzaldúa, published what many consider to be their respective magnum opuses: Morrison’s Beloved and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In these groundbreaking texts, Morrison and Anzaldúa boldly confront the complex legacies of American imperialism and slavery, examining the effect colonization has had on their respective communities, ancestors, and selves. In this essay, I argue that literature emerging from marginalized communities within the United States can and should be considered among global postcolonial texts; Morrison and Anzaldúa illustrate the ways …


World, Worlds, Worlding: A Review Of Pheng Cheah's What Is A World? On Postcolonial Literature As World Literature, Chris Hall May 2020

World, Worlds, Worlding: A Review Of Pheng Cheah's What Is A World? On Postcolonial Literature As World Literature, Chris Hall

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Review of Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Presents an overview of Cheah's argument regarding normativity and temporality in worlds and worlding, a summary of chapters, and an assessment of the book's contribution to philosophy, world literature, and postcolonial studies.


Re-Vision And Re-Representation : An Exploration Of Awarness And Voice In Marxism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism And Psychoanalytic Theory, Stacy Sexton Jan 2019

Re-Vision And Re-Representation : An Exploration Of Awarness And Voice In Marxism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism And Psychoanalytic Theory, Stacy Sexton

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Awareness and voice are explored through case studies of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Karl Marx’s unaware and voiceless lumpenproletariat, Gayatri Spivak’s possibly aware but voiceless subaltern, and Saul Williams’ losers are compared. Williams’ loser may or may not have access to and engage in re-vision and re-representation, since the loser may exist at any point along the continuum of awareness and voice. Capitalism and the superstructure make everyone a loser. Thus, there is an inherent solidarity among losers, and it is this solidarity that may bring re-vision and re-representation to those who are unaware and voiceless. Unlike the …


Behind The Mask Of Morality: (E)Urochristian Bioethics And The Colonial-Racial Discourse, Jennifer L. Mccurdy Jan 2019

Behind The Mask Of Morality: (E)Urochristian Bioethics And The Colonial-Racial Discourse, Jennifer L. Mccurdy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The discipline of bioethics is insufficient and ineffective in addressing the persistent issues of racism and racial inequalities in healthcare. A minority of bioethicists are indeed attentive to issues such as implicit bias, structural racism, power inequalities, and the social determinants of health. Yet, these efforts do not consider the colonial-racial discourse -- that racism is an instrument of eurochristian colonialism, and bioethics is a product of that same colonial worldview. Exposing mainstream bioethicists to the work of anti-colonial scholars and activists would provide bioethicists a framework through which they would be better equipped to address issues of race through: …


Diasporadical: In Ryan Coogler's 'Black Panther,' Family Secrets, Cultural Alienation And Black Love, Terri P. Bowles Oct 2018

Diasporadical: In Ryan Coogler's 'Black Panther,' Family Secrets, Cultural Alienation And Black Love, Terri P. Bowles

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This is a review of the film Black Panther (2018) by Ryan Coogler, which traces the arc of the comic book hero as he faces an unanticipated challenge to his power by a man who threatens not just his throne but also the future of his nation. The review explores the ways in which the legacy of slavery and colonialism inform the distinct political and philosophical ideologies of the two main characters, and how inequality drives political thought.


Antropofagia, Calibanism, And The Post-Romero Zombie: Cannibal Resistance In Latin America And The Caribbean, David S. Dalton Sep 2018

Antropofagia, Calibanism, And The Post-Romero Zombie: Cannibal Resistance In Latin America And The Caribbean, David S. Dalton

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

This study uses zombie theory to flesh out common themes between Oswald de Andrade’s The Cannibalist Manifesto and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán. While both of these canonical Latin Americanist thinkers theorized literary and cultural cannibalism as a resistant act that could challenge the hegemony of Western cosmologies and aesthetics, very little scholarship has thought to reconcile—or even juxtapose—these men’s thought. The article asserts a shared camaraderie between Latin American people of color and the zombie’s of the region’s cultural production by emphasizing both entities’ association (fair or not) with cannibalism in the Western imaginary. When viewed through this framework, …


Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen Aug 2018

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …


Jane Hiddleston. Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature In Transition. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017., Beatrice Guenther Jul 2018

Jane Hiddleston. Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature In Transition. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017., Beatrice Guenther

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jane Hiddleston. Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. vii + 291 pp.


Theories Of Anzaldua And Fanon: The Battle Of Algiers To Black Lives Matter, Maren Carey May 2018

Theories Of Anzaldua And Fanon: The Battle Of Algiers To Black Lives Matter, Maren Carey

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Cultural theorists have analyzed and exposed many elements of culture that were otherwise out of plain sight. Two theorists, Gloria E. Anzaldua and Franz Fanon, that have done exceptional work attempting to shatter the norms of how concepts such as decolonization, violence and activism could truly work to create progress. Fanon discusses concepts of black existentialism in the early 20th century. He explores how difficult it is, primarily for people of color, to express and develop an identity within the structures of inequality embedded globally through colonization. Anzaldua, on the other hand, does similar work but through micro-cultural changes that …


L’Espace Géographique Et La Perspective Postcoloniale Chez Félix Couchoro (1900-1968), Laté Lawson-Hellu Jun 2017

L’Espace Géographique Et La Perspective Postcoloniale Chez Félix Couchoro (1900-1968), Laté Lawson-Hellu

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The writing of Félix Couchoro, member of the first generation of the Francophone African writers, problematizes the historical, cultural, political and geographic background of the railway system built at the beginning of the twentieth century in Togo. In that problematizing, Félix Couchoro’s writing is in accordance with the geocritic principles as well as those of the postcolonial perspective. By putting those two perspectives together, however, in the reading of that writer’s work, one should go beyond the epistemological frame of the geocritic perspective itself, notably its use of the western postmodern paradigm of indetermination, when it comes to the Francophone …


The Intellectual Woman’S Cage: Complicating Ideals Of Fanon’S “Native Intellectual” In Nervous Conditions, Alyssa J. Mountain Apr 2017

The Intellectual Woman’S Cage: Complicating Ideals Of Fanon’S “Native Intellectual” In Nervous Conditions, Alyssa J. Mountain

The Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Research

This paper examines—through a post-colonial lens— Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions. In particular, this paper analyzes the characters of Tambu, Nyasha, and Maiguru and how their Western education allows them to fit into their roles as “native intellectuals.” Imposing Franz Fanon’s phases of becoming a “native intellectual” onto these strong, educated female characters greatly complicates his term and process. The idea of the native intellectual is most often applied to men. However, in terms of Dangarembga’s work, it is the female characters that rise to this title. In this acquisition of education the female characters are truly “between two …


"Revealing Reality": Four Asian Filmmakers Visualize The Transnational Imaginary, Stephen Edward Spence Apr 2017

"Revealing Reality": Four Asian Filmmakers Visualize The Transnational Imaginary, Stephen Edward Spence

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation posits that four Asian filmmakers engage in “revealing reality” in unique but interconnected ways that employ innovative narrative and cinematic/visual techniques, including a direct address to the senses and an augmenting of their vision with fantasy or surrealism. My study argues that Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand) mobilize this visual and narrative strategy to participate in debates about globalization and to comment on the state of their respective nations, the concept of the nation, and the transnational. The films of each artist are examined in detail; I investigate their stylistic …


Toward A Reoriented Radicalism: Black Marxism And Orientalism, Alexandros Orphanides Feb 2017

Toward A Reoriented Radicalism: Black Marxism And Orientalism, Alexandros Orphanides

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 21st century has witnessed the unquestioned supremacy of late capitalism. It holds coercive power over nation states; it generates increased inequality within countries and around the globe. It can, today, exploit everywhere at once. The poorest countries in the world reside in the Global South. Of the twenty poorest countries in the world, seventeen are in Africa; the rest are elsewhere in the Global South. Of the hundred poorest countries in world, over 95 percent are in the Global South. In the United States, Blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous people have poverty rates that greatly exceed the national average. Poverty …


Sexual Violence As The Language Of Border Control: Protecting Exceptional Difference, Miriam Ticktin Dec 2016

Sexual Violence As The Language Of Border Control: Protecting Exceptional Difference, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

When I first arrived in the Paris region in 1999 to do research on the struggle by undocumented immigrants (les sans papiers) for basic human rights, discussions of violence against women were remarkably absent from the public arena. Nongovernmental organizations and researchers had begun to broach the topic, but with little public visibility. However, this changed in late 2000, with a media explosion on the issue of les tournantes, or the gang rapes committed in the banlieues of Paris. Such tournantes involve boys »taking turns« with their friends’ girlfriends, both parties usually being of Maghrebian or North …