Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Poem For Ukraine, Linus Umbrasas, Audra Skukauskaitė

Literacy Practice and Research

No abstract provided.

Human Rights And Professions Museums As Interlocutors Of Buraku Identity In Japan, Lisa Mueller

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Members of the Buraku minority group in contemporary Japan are traditionally perceived as descendants of outcaste communities who performed work deemed impure according to Shinto and Buddhist taboos in Japan’s caste system during the Tokugawa Era (1603-1867). After receiving emancipation in 1871, they continued to experience severe discrimination. Following successful activism culminating in government-issued affirmative action “special measures” funding beginning in 1969, Buraku people have now approached social and economic parity with mainstream Japanese. Partially due to these successes, the Buraku Liberation League, the largest Buraku rights organization in the country, has now embraced a new globalized, UN-centric Buraku identity …

Our Representative On This Island: Local Belonging And Transnational Citizenship Among Syrian And Lebanese Cubans, 1880-1980, John T. Ermer Jr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Émigrés from Ottoman Syria and Cuba who, beginning in the late-nineteenth century, traveled not unidirectionally, from one nation to another, but between and within multiethnic, polycentric empires. Tracing their history opens a route to better understanding global legal regimes of citizenship. Weaving government records from Cuba, France, and the United States with associational records and oral history interviews, this dissertation reveals how vernacular understandings of citizenship in Cuba and the Levant, based on locally derived conceptions of belonging, but over time contended with liberalizing legal reforms meant to redefine citizenship as a state-focused and legible status. As a mobile population …

French Muslim Youth’S Perception Of Their Cultural Identity In A Post-Charlie Hebdo Reality In The 19th Arrondissement., Gaelle Flora Bernard

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On January 7, 2015, the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper in France, was attacked by two armed men, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, who shot and killed 12 staff members and injured another 11. The motive of the gunmen was the defense of their Muslim religion, in response to the newspaper’s history of publishing caricatures of the prophet Mohammed (AFP, 2015). This terrorist attack of January 7, 2015 continues to have a lasting impact on the lives of French people, most particularly French Muslims.

The purpose of this case study was to investigate the negotiation of Muslim youth identity …

Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics: An Ethnographic Study Of Transnational Chinese Corporate Culture In Southeast Asia, David A. Dayton

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Starting in 2001, China’s Going Out policy has encouraged Multinational Corporations (MNCs) and expats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to participate in the global economy at an unprecedented rate. Tens of thousands of Chinese businesses and millions of expats now span the globe. Despite the addition of this large, recent, and influential population to global capitalism there is little academic work on PRC corporate cultures or expats outside of China. Even in Thailand, home to the largest Chinese community outside of China/Taiwan, there is almost no corporate culture anthropology and no systemic study of recent Chinese business behaviors. …

Colonial Possessions: Producing The Zombie In Erna Brodber's Myal, Joanna Lee Valdes

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Erna Brodber’s 1988 novel Myal reveals the fatal injuries performed on the spirit by the colonizing efforts of others. In the novel, biracial Jamaican protagonist, Ella, experiences a profound devastation when her husband, Selwyn, creates a ‘white’ persona for her in his production Caribbean Nights and Days. In my thesis, I argue that Selwyn’s aggressions upon Ella’s spirit are only a fraction of the many conducted by those around her. Granted, while Selwyn’s play brings Ella’s zombified spirit into fruition with his distortion of her childhood— the Grovetown community, the Brassington’s and Mrs. Burns also aid in the process of …

The Sanctuary Of Acceptance: Love And Identity Through The Letters And Poetry Of John Keats, Amanda Caridad Estevez Ms.

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I propose to explain how it is that the life and work of John Keats assists us in answering the question of how we create ourselves through the presence of others. I aim to do this through an analysis of the work that his relationship with Fanny Brawne inspired. In doing so, I hope to prove that romantic love creates a sort of metaphysical sanctuary for us to inhabit as we shift through the various incarnations of our identity throughout our lives. By synthesizing the theories of phenomenology and transgression, I hope to demonstrate how Keats’ rapid …

The Border-Seas Of A New British Empire: Security And The British Atlantic Islands In The Age Of The American Revolution, Ross M. Nedervelt

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Border-seas of a New British Empire” explores the relationship between the rebellious thirteen colonies and the British Atlantic Islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas, and how the “on the ground” impact of the American Revolution explains not only why they did not join the rebellion—despite initial sympathy for the cause—but illustrates also the long-term political, cultural, commercial, and military transformation wrought by the war and its aftermath. To understand the British Atlantic islanders’ allegiances during the American Revolution and the impact of the islands’ loss on the United States, this dissertation employs Atlantic, borderlands and border-seas, and security interpretive …

Memoria, Identidad Y Literatura Del Yo: Narrativas De La Segunda Generación De Escritores Exiliados Por La Guerra Civil Española, Juan Antonio Godoy

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The victory of the dictator Francisco Franco, after the Spanish Civil War (1936- 1939), resulted in the political repression of thousands of citizens who had been loyal to the Republican government, and the exile of more than 200,000 civilians. The studies of Spanish Civil war exile literature have paid more attention to the first generation of exiled writers. However, the purpose of this dissertation is to study the construction of the self in the autobiographical and auto-fictional works written by the second generation. These authors -- born between 1920 and 1938-- left Spain as children and reached adulthood in different …

Identity Formation And The Stranger In William Shakespeare's Othello And The Merchant Of Venice, Rodney Castillo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to probe the question of the stranger as engaged by William Shakespeare in the plays Othello and The Merchant of Venice. It will introduce predominant views held during Tudor England towards foreigners and other marginalized groups, to ascertain the forces that influenced Shakespeare’s works, and to provide a historical frame of reference. Further, the thesis will engage with issues of identity formation through postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity and hospitality as expressed by critical theorists Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, and Jacques Derrida. While racism and anti-Semitism are the most common readings of these …

The Dancing Policeman And Other Stories, Satyaki Kanjilal

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Dancing Policeman and Other Stories, a collection of short stories set in India and the United States, looks at ordinary people facing challenges in societies undergoing economic and social change.

Some have historical settings. In “Faithful Naren,” a young man learns the complex political realities of British rule in early 20^th century Natihati, West Bengal, while in the same town in the 1960s, a teenager deals with injustice in “Sabotage.”

Others take place in a present where past practices persist. "Shit Gibbon" centers on a store clerk driven to gambling rather than sacrifice his son's future. In “Road …

Material Girls: Consumption And The Making Of Middle Class Identity In The Experiences Of Black Single Mothers In The Washington, Dc Metropolitan Area, Aysha L. Preston Ph.D.

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which black single mothers in the Washington, DC metropolitan area use material goods and consumption practices to inform their identities as members of the middle class. Black middle class women are challenging stereotypes surrounding single mother households, the idea of family, and class status in the United States, as more women overall are having children while single, delaying or deciding against marriage, and are entering the middle and upper-middle classes as a result of advanced education and career opportunities. Because of these demographic and sociocultural shifts, the romanticized “nuclear family” which consists of a …

The Room You Just Left, Bertha I. Crombet

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

THE ROOM YOU JUST LEFT is a poetry collection written from the perspective of a female speaker as she navigates relationships, culture, and identity via the lens of the Cuban-American experience. The collection is divided into three sections: Paleotempestology, Machete, and Saturn Returning. The first illustrates the often turbulent nature of romantic relationships, the second highlights the speaker’s culture, and the third is a singular long poem offering both insights and questions about what it means to arrive at the age of twenty-seven.

The collection is composed of free verse, prose, experimental, and formal poetry, and includes code-switching to illuminate …

Reimagining African Authenticity Through Adichie's Imitation Motif, Ivette Rodriguez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie …

Border Crossings And Transnational Movements In Sandra Cisneros’ Spatial Narratives Offer Alternatives To Dominant Discourse, Raquel D. Vallecillo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My study aims to reveal how ideologies, the way we perceive our world, what we believe, and our value judgments inextricably linked to a dominant discourse, have real and material consequences. In addition to explicating how these ideologies stem from a Western philosophical tradition, this thesis examines this thought-system alongside selections from Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Caramelo or Puro Cuento. My project reveals how Cisneros’ spatial narratives challenge ideologies concerning the border separating the United States and Mexico, which proves significant as the project of decolonization and understanding of identity formation is fundamentally tied to these geographical …

Hunger: Essays, Monica I. Restrepo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

HUNGER: ESSAYS is a collection of lyric essays that present the coming-of-age story of a young woman growing up in a Panamanian family where identity is defined by patriarchal notions of femininity (e.g., physical appearances) and economically-oriented career aspirations. In an attempt to fit into this family rather than explore her difference, the narrator undergoes psychological trauma that results in anorexia during her young adulthood. As she works towards healing, the narrator grapples with Western dichotomies of body and mind in an effort to become a more integrated self.

Stephen Dedalus' Search For Identity In Catholic Ireland, Cristina L. Cuevas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of my research was to explore the interplay between religion and art in James Joyce’s novel, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. My aim was to trace the development of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus by analyzing how Catholicsim is an institution that forms him, yet must reject to realize his artistic potential. I researched Joyce’s background to gain an understanding of the exilic experience on the literature. Through the exilic lens, I realized that Catholicism was the predominant influence on Stephen’s need to embark on a self-imposed exile at the end of the novel. …

Counter-Monumentalism In The Search For American Identity In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter & The Marble Faun, Carmen Mise

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the crisis of identity the United States was experiencing in the nineteenth-century through two of the major literary works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun. Hawthorne, who lived through this crucial and important developmental period, was concerned as to what this identity would be, how the United States would shape and define itself, and what its future would be if this identity was malformed. In addition, this study will look at counter-monuments as argued by James E. Young in his essay “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today” to expand on these …

The Central American Question: Nicaraguan Cultural Production And Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, Oscar A. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the cultural production and political history of Nicaragua from the 1960s to the early 1990s and interprets Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman alongside Central America’s literary boom period, the nation-building project of the revolutionary letrados, and race relations between Nicaragua’s Pacific region and its two autonomous sectors of the Atlantic coast. It is argued that Central American ways of seeing are colored by the interplay between a revolutionary past, the myth of the pure Indio or mestizo, and the erasure of national identity in the US contact zone. Rather than recuperating a Central American identity, it …

The World In Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress", Tiffany L. Fajardo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject …

Estrategias Desestabilizadoras En La Narrativa De Silvina Ocampo, Lorena Loguzzo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

La narrativa de Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) no goza del lugar que merece en la ficción argentina y latinoamericana como obra de la principal cuentista del siglo XX. Hace relativamente poco que su obra comenzó a despertar el interés de la crítica, atención que se evidencia en la cantidad de artículos y disertaciones recientes.

Mediante una disección de la narrativa ocampeana a partir de las grandes coordenadas que la intersectan se pueden caracterizar los aspectos peculiares y distintivos de su estilo. Desarrollada tras la consolidación del psicoanálisis y su influencia en la estética surrealista, la narrativa de Ocampo incorpora algunos de …

Images And Perceptions Of Muslims And Arabs In Korean Popular Culture And Society, Maria M. Jamass

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Interest in Muslim and Arab societies has been on the rise in South Korea, especially since 2001, with many books and various documentaries being published on the subject. Since 2005 there have been a number of television shows and documentaries that include Muslim, and sometimes Arab characters. This study will examine how images of Muslims and Arabs are presented in Korean popular culture through the analysis of various dramas and variety shows, as well as how these images fit into the context of Korean ethno-nationalism and the history of Islam in East Asia. In addition to this analysis this study …

Keep The Doors Open, Lauren C. Rivera

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My purpose in writing this collection of lyric essays is to examine my evolution during one decade, from age 19 to 29. Essential questions have guided me: What stimulated change? What formed my decisions? What predisposed me to my relationship with my partner? Why did I want to have a child? What kind of relationship do I have with my son? How did my relationship with my partner evolve? Why did we decide to leave Miami? Hopefully, I have given the reader a glimpse into my movement from self-centeredness to motherhood, from aloof adolescent to committed partner, from timid daughter …

Italianità On Tour: From The Mediterranean To Southeast Florida, 1896-1939, Antonietta Di Pietro

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Italianità on Tour is a cultural history of Italian consciousness in Italy and Southeast Florida from 1896 to 1939. This dissertation examines literary works, folktales, folksongs, artworks, buildings and urban planning as imprints and cultural constructions of Italianità on both sides of the Atlantic, with a special emphasis on the transformations experienced on that journey. The real and/or imagined geo-cultural similarities between the Mediterranean and the Caribbean encouraged pioneers in Southeast Florida to conjure in their new setting an idea of Italianità, regardless of the presence of Italians in the area. Therefore, assessing Italianità, constitutes an important feature …