Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Model Minorities: Asian Americans And The White-Black Racial Paradigm, Jason Tom

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the racial wedge driven by Whites between Blacks and Asian Americans during the Cold War on to the present. Model minorities is a term coined by whites in the 1960s to suppress Civil Rights protests and Black demands. By elevating a minority group through success stories, whites constructed a means to suppress Black people’s organizing for change against systemic racism and oppression.

Bomba And The Evolution Of Puerto Rican Activism In New York, Katherine Smith

Capstones

While Bomba, a traditional dance style that originated in Puerto Rico, has recently become more visible to a mainstream national audience, local activists in New York City have been working for years to promote the art and elevate the history of their community. For dance leaders like Milteri Tucker, Bomba dancing is not only a celebration of Puerto Rico’s African heritage, but an effective way to address social issues within the city’s local and Latino community. She is one of many activists in the city’s history that has used art and community try to uplift the culture and work on …

Repealed: Indigenous Fight For An Independent Press, Bryce A. Buyakie

Capstones

Indigenous Communities in the United States have historically been underserved by traditional mainstream news outlets. To fill this gap, many tribes created their own radio, television and print newsrooms to cover local politics and events, but between Supreme Court rulings and tribal law the press often falls under the influence of tribal governments that hold the purse and editorial strings. In the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, this was true. Their official news outlet, Mvskoke Media, fought to be independent of the government they cover for over a decade. Twice they succeeded. Twice they were under the thumb of censorship. …

Oer / Open Pedagogy Virtual Showcase Presentation, Remi Alapo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Invisible Inequalities: Persistent Health Threats In The Urban Built Environment, Kara M. Schlichting, Melanie A. Kiechle

Publications and Research

A city’s materiality creates health and illness. We both write about air – its movement and its temperature – as it affects human bodies. We offer two topics as case studies, heat and ventilation, and how they exacerbate the effects of each other, to illustrate the long history of seemingly new challenges posed by the novel coronavirus. The environmental inequalities of heat exposure and access to fresh air underscore that cities can only be considered ‘low impact’ on the environment from a top-down, large-scale approach. In writing about air and heat, we direct attention to the feel and the bodily …

Using Monuments To Teach About Racism, Colonialism, And Sexism, Susan Phillip

Publications and Research

This chapter examines how an interdisciplinary high-impact practice approach to teaching and learning using selected contested monuments can reveal intersections of racism, colonialism, and sexism, and lay the foundation for students’ civic engagement. In place-based and virtual experiences, students observe and investigate local and national monuments, integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines, including history, psychology, art, culture, and tourism. Students make critical analyses about how monuments reveal power relationships in our society. Students from various disciplines explore the origin of contested monuments, the evolving national and local debates around them, and their effect on students’ learning to evaluate historical, contemporary, and …

When It Comes To Racial Justice, Why Is It Wrong To Demand The "Impossible"?, Kristopher B. Burrell

Publications and Research

Asking “is what is being demanded politically realistic?” or “politically possible?” is a persistent problem with the ways many liberals who imagine themselves as progressive still think about ending systemic racial discrimination, and about protests against racism. Such questions ask us to measure “the realistic” and “the possible” prior to making political demands, and presume that the efficacy of social protest movements correlates with a tacit agreement between activists and those in power about what politics should look like. The demand for realism also betrays a particular racial and class privilege on the part of the person asking the question: …

Commemorating A Legacy Of Dissent: Revisiting Campus Activism 1968-1970, Annie E. Tummino

Publications and Research

On the heels of the student revolt at Columbia in 1968, Queens College students launched their own militant actions and demands for change on campus. Using primary source materials from the Benjamin Rosenthal Library’s Special Collections and Archives, the presentation covers the New Left and Anti-War movements, as well as an uprising led by Black and Puerto Rican students influenced by the ideologies of Black Power and self-determination. The role of archives in preserving activist history and educating current and future generations is also touched on.

Hist 374 (Q-36911) Wi –Africa And The Atlantic Slave Trade, Oluremi Alapo

Open Educational Resources

COURSE DESCRIPTION: A study of the political, economic, social, and demographic challenges confronting Africa during the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (15th-19th centuries). The course will conclude with a CTLET approved OER / ZTC Active Learning Assignment. The course includes an opportunity to receive a certificate of recognition from the International Human Rights Commission (IHRC).

Invisible Strangers, Or Romani History Reconsidered, Kristina Richardson

Publications and Research

This essay proposes that the invisibility of so-called Gypsies in Middle Eastern and Central Asian historiography derives from two linked phenomena. First, the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and North American philologists, medievalists, and ethnographers delegitimized the Strangers’ languages, along with the cultures and histories that these languages expressed. The erasure of Strangers from modern historiography was nearly total. Secondly, the category of Strangers was transformed in the wake of the Holocaust as Roma activists drew on Nazi racial categories to base Roma identity on linguistic criteria.

The Political Aesthetic Of Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Judgment, And Culture, Quixote R. Vassilakis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The plan of this thesis is, first, to interpret Arendt’s critique of the modern age. Next, this paper outlines Arendt’s reconceptualization of Kant’s theory of judgment as the basis for a novel model of the public sphere in light of the conditions of modernity. Finally, this paper explores Arendt’s poetics as a means of activating the faculty of judgment in order to reconcile with the modern world. In order to address the political crises of modernity, Arendt develops a political aesthetic alive to the role of narrative and culture in reconstituting political communities. I argue that Hannah Arendt develops a …

The Berbers: Constructed Identities By Foreigners On African Soil, Zineb Askaoui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the textual evidence pertaining to the identity of the local North African population of Morocco. In examining the literature about North Africans and the inscriptions in North Africa, I wish to determine who their authors were. Since North Africa has been invaded and colonized multiple times throughout history, the available literature written by both the foreigners who colonized it and the locals yielded interesting and sometimes contrasting results.

The names that address the local North Africans are pertinent expressions of identity or of forceful submission. This study examines four different terms that have been used to describe …

Los Cuerpos En Conflicto Del Chavismo: Cuatro Obras Venezolanas En La Era De La Revolución Bolivariana, Rebeca Pineda Burgos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation, I study the novels Tiempos del incendio (2014) by José Roberto Duque, and Patria o muerte (2015) by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, the film Pelo malo (2013) by Mariana Rondón, and the performance El beso emancipador (2013) by Deborah Castillo. These works were created in a period of intense political and social transformations in Venezuela, in the context of the sickness and death of the president and leader of the Bolivarian Revolution Hugo Chávez (1999-2013). Because they contemplate nationalist symbols, historical events recovered by power, spaces taken by the State, and traditional claims in the country now exercised …

More Austerity Coming? Lessons From New York City's 1970s Fiscal Crisis, Marc Kagan

Publications and Research

Crises can be moments of opportunity, but it is not foreordained who will seize the ring. The Great Depression ultimately led to the New Deal/Great Society state and increasing equality. 1975 New York City fiscal crisis, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for decades of neoliberal austerity. Despite political vulnerabilities, bankers and their Washington allies acted boldly to protect imperiled assets and remake a city in which the working class wielded some power as a bastion of finance capital. Seemingly powerful unions abandoned the public they served, and followed a risk-averse strategy of concessions in exchange for junior-partner corporatism, …

The Women That No One Wanted To See: The Duality Of The Women Within The Holocaust, Valerie Cabezas-Iacono

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper is a brief historiography of the complexities of unraveling how gender constructs inform how society perceives both female perpetrators of the Third Reich and victims of sexual assault during the Holocaust. The women within these categories experienced vastly different power dynamics from 1939-1945 with the implementation of anti-Semitic ideology that would go on to forge the genocidal policies of the Nazi State. Seemingly, Aryan and Jewish women had no traits that linked them besides their biological sex, and this one factor determined how their experiences would translate within the male-centered discourse of the Holocaust. The framework of Holocaust …

An Empire Among Empires: America's Relationship To "The Other" In The Historiography Of Empire, Lynne C. Goldhammer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper outlines two different threads in the historiography of empires regarding their treatment of “the other.” The first thread begins with the early Chinese empires, the Qin and Han, which used diplomacy and tributes as well as repression to incorporate “others” under their imperial umbrellas. This thread was then picked up and modified later by the Mongols and Mughals, both of which showed a fair amount of flexibility and openness towards cultural difference. The second thread begins with the Romans (the Republic and Empire), who were largely flexible and inclusive towards “others” until the late Empire, when Christianity took …

Digital Occult Library, Alexis Brandkamp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a website, titled Digital Occult Library, hosted by the CUNY Commons and built with WordPress. The site address is:

digitaloccultlibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu

It features (in this iteration) twenty-five unique pages with information on and discussion of occult and esoteric topics. It also hosts a forum that can be accessed and utilized by anyone, not just those registered on the Commons. The purpose of the site is to inform three types of interested parties on the highlighted topics: a general audience with no current knowledge of the occult, practitioners of esoteric traditions, and academics. Not only is the …

Thoughts Of Becoming: Negotiating Modernity And Identity In Bangladesh, Humayun Kabir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a history and conducts an analysis of Bangladeshi political thought with the aim to better understand the thought-world and political subjectivities in Bangladesh. The dissertation argues that political thought in Bangladesh has been profoundly structured by colonial and other encounters with modernity and by concerns about constructing a national identity. Negotiations between the incomplete and continuous projects of modernization and identity formation have produced certain anxieties about becoming that permeates political consciousness and ideas in the country. Though such anxieties of becoming are also shared by other postcolonial countries, the specific, though not necessarily exclusive, character of …

Building Baghdad: The Construction Of Urban Space In Iraq, 1921–1963, Andrew S. Alger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the production of space in Baghdad during the monarchical and early republican eras (1921 – 1963). As the capital of the new nation of Iraq following the First World War, Baghdad expanded along the banks of the Tigris River into new residential and commercial spaces, establishing schools, boutique stores, sporting venues, electricity and running water that transformed how Iraqis conceived of the mundane activities associated with daily life. Employing a theoretical framework drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, I argue that participation in the creation of new neighborhoods and streets was uneven across differences of class, …

For Tony Feliciano, A Friend And A Union Man, Marc Kagan

Publications and Research

My friend Tony Feliciano, transit worker 1984-2020, and a union man all his life, died a few weeks ago; he had just turned 61. While transit workers were dying this spring, he actually made it out of the 207th St. Overhaul Shop, where he worked virtually his whole career, in May; he put in his papers and retired to his house in Rockland County.

But he died of a heart attack, before he could even collect his first pension check.

Documenting Latinx Communities: Podcasting And Oral History In The Time Of Covid-19, Nelson Santana

Publications and Research

Living through a worldwide pandemic is not easy. As of June 22, 2020, more than 8.8 million cases have been confirmed and more than 465,700 people have died from COVID-19. Oral narratives are powerful tools that for audiences paint a picture of that person’s perception of an event, especially since it is the narrative of the interviewee’s unique lived experience that is captured. This paper discusses the early stages of an oral history project that documents COVID-19 through the lens of Latinx communities.

Agency And Contemporary Recording Production, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Recording production is a complex, multistep, typically collaborative process that entails a shifting set of individuals inhabiting changing roles within spaces that house consider­ able amounts of specialized technology. As these roles and technologies feature promi­ nently in the aesthetics of Anglophone and Francophone popular music, they have been studied within such milieus for the longest period. This scholarship tends to understand the creative act as either the result of a prominent individual or something determined by the technologies used within studios. However, recent ethnomusicological scholarship has shown it is much more difficult to clearly situate agency within recording production, …

Hannah Arendt’S Vision Of Politics: Exemplary Negativities And The Ostjuden, Jacob E. Pearce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hannah Arendt’s vision of politics is one of the most enigmatic, perplexing, thoroughly analyzed, and potentially generative aspects of her philosophic corpus. It is marked by insightful analysis, cutting deconstructions of pressing moral issues, and confusing vernacular wherein her analytic boundaries, topics, and categories appear obfuscated. Although it has been observed that Arendt’s late-career theory of the political owes a debt to her earlier writings on Jewish history, including her Kantian-influenced theory of political judgment and storytelling, in this thesis I would like to narrow down this debt to a specific trope: The Ostjuden, or the imagined associations with Eastern …

Bones, Burials, And The Riddle Of Truth: Reconstructing The Past Through What Has Been Left Behind, Jelena M. Begonja

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mortuary archaeology is known to be the study of human remains and burials. The primary focus of this work has been to study all of the elements associated in burials to learn more about the burial practices and rituals in a group’s culture, however, there is much more potential in studying burial sites than just learning about a group’s burial rituals and practices. This thesis will demonstrate that it is indeed possible to make different inferences about the rest of people’s daily lives, and the truth, based from materials found in studying burials alone. For some groups without much existing …

“The Amazing Iroquois”: Haudenosaunee History In Myth And Memory, 1776–1955, John C. Winters

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is a history and memory study of Iroquois exceptionalism. This is an idea that shaped our understanding of the Iroquois as the “most studied” Indian nation and that they, as the debunked Iroquois Influence Thesis claimed, influenced the structure and scope of the U.S. Constitution. My study examines the lives of four related (by blood and by claim) Seneca leaders: Red Jacket, Ely S. Parker, Harriet Maxwell Converse, and Arthur C. Parker. These four stand out because each was one of the most famous Native Americans of their generation who worked within and against American colonial society and …

Shock And Awe, Sectarianism, And Violence In Iraq Post-2003, Sarim Al-Rawi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The violence systematically deployed upon the prosperous nation of Iraq in 2003 was directly influenced by the Shock and Awe doctrine set forth by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade in their 1996 book Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. The experimental methods of warfare and violence outlined in the text describe methods for the systematic destruction of every major aspect of a nation and society, militarily, economically, and socially. In the wake of the US Invasion of Iraq, we saw the direct implementation of these methods by the occupation forces, setting off a brutal cycle of violence that …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Devotional Literature Of The Prophet Muhammad In South Asia, Zahra F. Syed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many Sufi poets are known for their literary masterpieces that combine the tropes of love, religion, and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). In a thorough analysis of these works, readers find that not only were these prominent authors drawing from Sufi ideals to venerate the Prophet, but also outputting significant propositions and arguments that helped maintain the preservation of Islamic values, and rebuild Muslim culture in a South Asian subcontinent that had been in a state of colonization for centuries. The continued practice of both ritualistic and literary veneration of the Prophet became a key factor in this preservation and rejuvenation …

Fair World 64: A Text-Based Game Of The 1964–1965 World's Fair, Christofer R. Gass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project is a text-based game of a typical day during the first season of the 1964 World’s Fair in what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The 1964-1965 World’s Fair, that Robert Moses presided over as president, was one of the largest and most expensive fairs ever created, but only days after the last fairgoer left through the turnstile most of the many pavilions that brought education, entertainment, and joy to so many people were destroyed to leave a vast open space that is relatively empty to this day. Although most of the pavilions were either relocated or demolished, there …

The Piety Movement In An American Suburb: The Experiences Of Women Of The Islamic Circle Of North America On Staten Island, Aisha Raheel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The participation of women in fundamentalist movements has always posed a problem for feminist analysis because it disrupts the belief that all women see themselves as victims who share a common interest in ending this oppression. More broadly, portrayals of fundamentalists as people who are uniquely opposed to modern life are simplistic and dehumanizing. They are particularly problematic for Muslims because often, all Muslims whether they are fundamentalists are not, are portrayed as adhering to the same uncompromising, fanatical, and violent form of faith.

The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) was founded in 1971 to provide its members with …