Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Con Pluma Propia: Nación, Patria E Identidad En Los Escritos De Gertrudis Gómez De Avellaneda, Salomé Ureña Y Clorinda Matto De Turner, Beatriz Muller-Marqués

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nineteenth-century women were part of the social commitment of building their nations, which in turn, was also a critical element for a new social feminine consciousness. Women writers played a pivotal role in establishing national identities and communities as oftentimes they were the first ones to address controversial and purposely ignored topics such as slavery, social and political corruption, unequal opportunities, and religious limitations, even before their male contemporaries. Although late twentieth century scholarship initiated an important conversation about the significance of these women writers, their real work as political and social figures still needed a more comprehensive and transnational …

Sephardi Identity & Legitimacy In The Age Of Direct-To-Consumer Dna Tests, Caitlyn Rose Campana

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, individuals may purchase genetic tests that promise to “reveal” one’s “true self” through ancestry composition reports, health reports, and lists of DNA relatives. Such tests add another dimension to the ongoing debate about what it means to be Jewish, but also what it means to be “legitimately” Sephardi. Through qualitative interviews, this thesis illuminates the experiences of Sephardim who received identity-affirming DNA test results and Sephardim who received identity non-affirming DNA test results. Findings suggest that contemporary Sephardim consider a link to the Iberian Peninsula as indicative of Sephardi identity, despite expanding definitions of the label. They also suggest …

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. …

No New World, Von Wise Ii

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

NO NEW WORLD is a collection of poetry that follows the establishment, development, and decline of an imagined mid-Atlantic town. Using a blend of historical fact and fiction, the poems open up space for reflection on the historical progress of civilization as a making and unmaking process. The collection explores themes of colonialism, settlement, nature, survival, erasure, civic development, and cyclical forms. The poems take on a variety of styles and tones, shifting between poems from personal life and more oracular poems, creating an oscillation between the human and non-human perspectives that situate and collectively establish the cohesive organism of …

The Nomad Selves: The American Women Of The Spanish Civil War And Exile, Maria Labbato

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As witnesses to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its ensuing streams of exile Americans Muriel Rukeyser and Janet Riesenfeld understood the conflict as symptomatic of larger European and antifascist struggle. Weaving biography, intellectual history, and cultural studies this dissertation reveals how the art and activism of these two North American women in the Spanish Civil War can expose an overlooked element in the antifascist movement and its fate with the rise of Cold War anti-Communism. Their experiences—one a writer and poet, and the other a dancer and screenwriter—with the Spanish conflict and exile informed their lives and creative works. …

The Pedagogy Of The Youth Teachers Of The Cuban Literacy Campaign, Yuleisy Mena

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961 turned teenagers into teachers. This study interviewed three former youth teachers and recorded their experiences through the oral history lens and method. The study focused on the pedagogical components of their lived experience, often overlooked by scholars who have mainly focused on the campaign’s political and economic history from the top down. In turn, issues of identity surfaced that helped explain the personal motivations for participating in the campaign and produced counter-narratives in the process. The interviews compiled allowed a bottom-up history to be archived, highlighting the stories of people omitted from the …

The Death Of Superman, Shane F. Mcfarlane

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN is an autobiographical novel that covers the years from 7 to 17 in the life of Shane McFarlane, who struggles to overcome the effects of his inner-city environment and an addict father in and out of incarceration. The title is a metaphor for the decaying presence of the narrator’s father in his and his older brother’s life and the resulting consequences of that absence.

With the narrator’s father in prison, new threats emerge, including his mother’s ruthless boyfriend and his brother’s attraction to the allure of fast money. The narrator must ultimately make decisions governed by …

Girl With Broken Car Sings, Brianne M. Griffith

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GIRL WITH BROKEN CAR SINGS is a full-length collection of free verse poems that explore an obsession with celebrity status, culture, and power; the speaker longs for and imagines new lives for herself, all the while examining the wickedness of American commercialism and capitalism through a reality TV lens.

Pop culture is also used as a vehicle to discuss familial trauma. The gaps in the speaker’s life are filled with mainstream media references. GIRL WITH BROKEN CAR SINGS considers how people engage with media to understand or “see” themselves in the world.

While there are no sections in GIRL WITH …

The Mango Snores, Michael S. Garcia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

THE MANGO SNORES

by

Michael S. Garcia

Florida International University, 2021

Miami, Florida

Professor John Dufresne, Major Professor

Set in Miami at the start of the twenty-first century, THE MANGO SNORES is a seriocomic crime novel chronicling a week in the life of Sam Espada, Cuban-American writing professor and author of the Mango series of detective fiction. Reeling from the sudden dissolution of his marriage and the abject failure of his latest book, Sam finds himself embroiled in a plot right out of one of his novels when his newest pupil, private investigator Leonard Cobb, is …

Split At The Root, Robert S. Gryder

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by— and sometimes in conversation with— diverse literary voices such as Dorothy Allision (BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA), Harry Crews (A CHILDHOOD), and Mark Doty (FIREBIRD), SPLIT AT THE ROOT is a literary bildungsroman told primarily in the narrative mode. The memoir traces the narrator’s volatile beginnings in the trailer parks of rural South Carolina in the 1980s to the day he accepted, sight unseen, an offer of admission to Yale University, boarding a plane in 1993 for the first time in his life. This memoir explores the narrator’s quest for agency, deploying the essayist mode to interrogate along the …

Bycatch, Terin Weinberg

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

BYCATCH

by

Terin Weinberg

Florida International University, 2021

Miami, Florida

Professor Denise Duhamel, Major Professor

BYCATCH is a collection of poems that explore the speaker’s relationship with the natural world. The poems utilize a variety of forms, from traditional sestinas and sonnets driven by image, to puzzle-pieced stereoscopes that can be read grammatically in three different ways—left to right, or down one of either columns. Though the collection is rooted in nature, the emotional drive is rooted in the construction and deconstruction of the family and the body. Each section of the book will function as …

Shadows Of The Morning Twilight, Philip A. Lapadula

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shadows of the Morning Twilight is a collection of seven short stories and one novella about men who, facing transitions in their lives and in society, grapple with issues of sexual identity, residency, past traumas, and corruption. In the noir-influenced title novella, Nick Esposito, a mid-1970s journalism student, faces dangerous choices when he reports on the sale of a gay bar that is covertly owned by the mafia. Some characters see themselves as trapped. In “Final Score,” a former football player struggling with dementia finds a reason to live when he mentors a young gay man. In “Psyched,” “Phantoms of …

The Hard Way, David J. Sangiao-Parga

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Hard Way is a fiction thriller set in small-town West Virginia in 1997. It tells the story of a group of independent professional wrestlers who are waylaid in Chimney Corner while on their way to a big show in Richmond, Virginia. The group have a fight with a couple of local meth dealers at a diner in the middle of night. Other wrestlers come looking for them the next day. What happens after is a brutal fight for survival, as the wrestlers use all their skills to overcome a threat they were never prepared for.

Narrated in the third …

Objects/Slow Hours, Camila E. Saavedra

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

OBJECTS/SLOW HOURS is a collection of experimental poetry that aims to illustrate the reconfiguration of identity post-trauma. Using spatial play and non-linear storytelling, these poems follow the experiences of a chronic cancer patient through various cycles of illness and recovery. This narrative is told in three interwoven parallel structures, allowing the speaker to project consciousness into objects and animals, while simultaneously revisiting instances of isolated suffering and reflecting on medical treatment procedures.

OBJECTS/SLOW HOURS’s literary influences include Maggie Nelson, Lisa Glatt, and Audre Lorde, whose illness narratives have similarly confronted ideas of embodiment, subjectivity/objectivity, and social (in)visibility. In this collection, …