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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Racialized Masculinities In Professional Basketball: Utilizing Mixedness To Challenge Commonplace Black/White Media Discourses About Nba Players, Anthony C. Peavy
Racialized Masculinities In Professional Basketball: Utilizing Mixedness To Challenge Commonplace Black/White Media Discourses About Nba Players, Anthony C. Peavy
Communication ETDs
In this dissertation project, I utilize a Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) lens to examine how mixed-race Black/White players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) are represented, discussed, racialized, and gendered by major sports media platforms. More specifically, I utilize this project to elucidate how media centered on professional basketball continue to partake in hegemonic and essentialist rhetoric surrounding Black and White masculinity—that which has been used to discuss Black and White men in basketball throughout the entire history of the sport—to homogenize mixed-race Black/White men in the NBA and present them in a way that diminishes the potentially deconstructive …
Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez
Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez
English Language and Literature ETDs
There is a war for recognition happening on the Hollywood battlefield. Traditionally, in every war there is an enemy and an alley; in this study, the enemy is systemic racism, and the alley is Black culture. That is, this dissertation seeks to detail the past, present, and future implications of this battle for truth, inclusion, and recognition in American pop culture. This discussion examines how various multi-media forms like literature, film, television, and comic books work as tools to combat racism in American society. More importantly, the theories presented in this text are all linked to actual tactics of military …
Gathering Around A New Fire: The Bemo Family, Interracial Marriage, Race, And Power In The Mvskoke Nation, 1870-1897, Michelle M. Martin
Gathering Around A New Fire: The Bemo Family, Interracial Marriage, Race, And Power In The Mvskoke Nation, 1870-1897, Michelle M. Martin
History ETDs
“Gathering Around a New Fire: The Bemo Family, Interracial Marriage, Race, and Power in the Mvskoke Nation, 1870-1897” explores from an Indigenous and gendered perspective the lived experiences of the interracial Bemo family in the Mvskoke Nation located in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The marriage of Douglas Bemo, a Mvskoke/Semvnole student at Tullahassee Mission, to Katie Edwards, his white teacher, is the primary focus of this dissertation. My research seeks to restore Indigenous cultural agency to the complex Bemo family history. I merge Katie’s myopic narrative, federal Indian policy documents, missionary records, and nineteenth-century newspapers with Mvskoke/Semvnole oral histories, …
“The End Of One Shall Be The End Of All”: Solidarity In 19th Century African American Texts, David Puthoff
“The End Of One Shall Be The End Of All”: Solidarity In 19th Century African American Texts, David Puthoff
English Language and Literature ETDs
This project examines how African American authors imagined solidarity through documents before, during, and after the Civil War. While solidarity as a framework has yet to be elucidated for literary studies, I draw on political theory and especially the works of the authors themselves to examine how solidarity as a strategy operates to facilitate cooperation between people of different or similar races or occupations in the periods of abolitionism, war, Reconstruction, and Redemption. I argue that these authors remember, imagine, and articulate small scale acts such as listening, organizing, making material aid, promoting literacy, and fundraising in the pursuit of …
Blackdom: Interpreting The Hidden History Of New Mexico's Black Town, Austin J. Miller
Blackdom: Interpreting The Hidden History Of New Mexico's Black Town, Austin J. Miller
History ETDs
This master’s thesis recovers the history of Blackdom, New Mexico. Founded by an African American family from Georgia, Blackdom is a ghost town that existed in the early decades of the twentieth century near Roswell, New Mexico. Blackdom was initially imagined as both a refuge from the hostilities of Jim Crow society and as a for-profit enterprise. Entanglement in land-fraud scandals hindered the town’s early development, but Blackdom eventually grew to nearly three hundred residents, with its own school, Baptist church, post office, and general store. Blackdom settlers practiced a variety of agricultural methods, including dry farming and irrigation from …
Revisioning Reality: Normative Resistance In The Cultural Works Of The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Nella Larsen, And Allan Rohan Crite, 1915-1945, Andrea L. Mays
American Studies ETDs
Despite the fact that nineteenth and twentieth century biologist and Social Darwinists theories of race have been dispelled, the social residue of white supremacist ideologies continue to have social and political implications throughout American society. America's racial hierarchy, and whiteness as a social and racial construct instantiated within it, against which every other group of people has been relationally situated, has helped not only to define non-white racial subjects in inferior terms, it has also guaranteed a perpetuation of race-based structural and social inequalities in United States of America. African American Studies, Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, and most recently …
Intimate Gestures: Race, Photography, And Spectatorship In Tijuanas Dumps And Irregular Settlements, George Luna-Peña
Intimate Gestures: Race, Photography, And Spectatorship In Tijuanas Dumps And Irregular Settlements, George Luna-Peña
American Studies ETDs
Through a sustained engagement with the theoretical work of Roland Barthes and Frantz Fanon, this thesis traces the complicated lines of connection linking photography, racial difference, spectatorship, and self-making in Tijuana's dumps and irregular settlements. Understanding photography as a space and form of life and social death, this thesis explores the photographic work of two photographers in Tijuana that pictures the lives of those living in poverty: John Leuders-Booth and Ingrid Hernandez. Of these photographic projects, the thesis asks: How does the spectatorial relationship that is triggered by a photograph also initiate a relationship of value, where one side of …
Counter Culture Youth: Immigrant Rights Activism And The Undocumented Youth Vanguard, Rafael A. Martinez
Counter Culture Youth: Immigrant Rights Activism And The Undocumented Youth Vanguard, Rafael A. Martinez
American Studies ETDs
This thesis offers a social, historical, and political analysis of the Undocumented Youth Movement from 1986 to 2012 for the purposes of understanding how the movement carved out spaces of social belonging that problematized punitive immigration legislation and traditional understandings of citizenship. In particular, I argue that undocumented youth challenge the social binary of deserving and underserving citizenry by positing a counter cultural critique of U.S. immigration policies and the organizations that support or challenge these policies. By counter culture I mean the ways in which undocumented youth combat normative cultural integrations into the broader society and therefore do not …
Touching Nether-Regionalisms: Paul Cadmus As Exemplary Foil To A Homegrown American Art, Maxine Marks
Touching Nether-Regionalisms: Paul Cadmus As Exemplary Foil To A Homegrown American Art, Maxine Marks
Art & Art History ETDs
The struggle over who writes our histories and who is included in those histories resonates within the broader scope of my project where I examine such productions and deliberations of American identity through U.S. visual language and artistic production. I challenge exclusive ideas of Americanness' and counter such exclusions within Regionalism via the artistic production of Paul Cadmus. I specifically explore issues of gender, race and class in the artworks of U.S. artist Paul Cadmus, his resulting impact on the Regionalist movement and the heteronormative masculine identity that emerges from within Regionalism. I illuminate Cadmus's contributions to Regionalism, rebuild connections …
Unsettling Accounts: Life, Debt, And Development In The Middle Rio Grande, Samuel Karrigan Robison Markwell
Unsettling Accounts: Life, Debt, And Development In The Middle Rio Grande, Samuel Karrigan Robison Markwell
American Studies ETDs
This thesis reexamines the history of the formation of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD) during the first half of the twentieth century. Previous histories have either uncritically celebrated the MRGCD, or have been critical of its formation because of the way it negatively affected Mexicano/Hispano farming communities. This thesis extends the critical literature by situating the MRGCD as a formation of settler colonialism and attending to the ways it affected Pueblo Indian Nations. I argue that the MRGCD, ostensibly designed to "protect life and property" in the valley, was actually concerned with securing forms of life and property …
Assembling The Poor People's Campaign (1968) Queer Activism And Economic Justice, Christina Juhasz-Wood
Assembling The Poor People's Campaign (1968) Queer Activism And Economic Justice, Christina Juhasz-Wood
American Studies ETDs
This thesis attempts to bring the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) of 1968 into contemporary discussions about queer scholarship and activism. The PPC assembled a diverse racial and ethnic constituency in an unprecedented way to produce a massive, national political campaign to end poverty. This complex assemblage was largely indecipherable to the press and many historians, which has contributed to the view that the campaign was a failure, particularly in relation to the civil rights movement . I describe how the mainstream gay rights movement appropriates the civil rights movement as normative to seek forms of national inclusion. I argue that …