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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Evolving The Genre Of Empire: Gender And Place In Women's Natural Histories Of The Americas, 1688-1808, Diana Epelbaum
Evolving The Genre Of Empire: Gender And Place In Women's Natural Histories Of The Americas, 1688-1808, Diana Epelbaum
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In the eighteenth century, “natural history” was a capacious genre designation that alluded to conventions as diverse in their cultural and political resonances as they were in their applications within the New Science. My project is a genre study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural history text and art produced by women scientists, explorers, colonists, and early Americans writing the New World; it destabilizes rigid notions of genre that exclude women, suggesting that genre is by nature fluid, inclusionary as well as exclusionary. To this end, I return into conversation understudied naturalists Maria Sybilla Merian, Jane Colden, and Eliza Pinckney, who …
The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …
Assembly And Association: Mapping The Development Of The Public Sphere In 19th Century Columbia County, Ny, Christopher L. Meatto
Assembly And Association: Mapping The Development Of The Public Sphere In 19th Century Columbia County, Ny, Christopher L. Meatto
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project seeks to investigate the development of the Habermasian public sphere in Columbia County, NY, during the rapid expansion of railway transportation from the middle- to the late-19th century, by gathering and presenting information about the proliferation of railway stations and select public institutions between 1840 and 1900. In charting the spread of area libraries, newspapers, post offices, and churches during this period, this project utilizes and combines methodological approaches taken by a number of landmark recent studies in historical geography and digital history; in so doing, it prototypes the research and pedagogical value and promise of incorporating …
Engagement And Resistance: African Americans, Saudi Arabia And Islamic Transnationalisms, 1975 To 2000, Jeffrey Diamant
Engagement And Resistance: African Americans, Saudi Arabia And Islamic Transnationalisms, 1975 To 2000, Jeffrey Diamant
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Since the 1960s, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has financed missionary efforts to Muslims around the world, attempting to spread a Salafi form of Islam that professes strict adherence to Islamic sacred scripture. The effects of this transnational proselytization have depended on numerous factors in “host countries.” This project explores the various impacts of Saudi transnational religious influence in the United States among African-Americans. By relying on previously unused documentary sources and fresh oral histories, it shows how Saudi “soft power” attempted to effect change in religious practices of African-American Muslims from 1975 through 2000. It provides the most detailed …
On The Appearance Of The Comedy Lp, 1957–1973, David Michael Mccarthy
On The Appearance Of The Comedy Lp, 1957–1973, David Michael Mccarthy
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Many observers of contemporary comedy in the United States during the 1960s referred to musical aspects of extra-musical performances. Comedy LP records furnish important artifacts for the study of the musical appearances these observers produced for themselves. Where contemporaries described appearances characterized by printable words and polemics as “satirical,” the musical appearances discussed in this dissertation can instead be described as “comic”: instead of mocking persons or ideas, they show people and things becoming involved with one another in absurdly triumphant ways. These two different sorts of appearances correspond to two different uses for comedy in a class society, one …
Mad Men Of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, And The American Postmodern Novel, Jennifer Chancellor
Mad Men Of Letters: Advertising, Masculinity, And The American Postmodern Novel, Jennifer Chancellor
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation I account for the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the American postmodern novel that has long puzzled scholars by arguing that the genre must be understood as an expression of dominant masculinity threatened, not by women or people of color, but rather changes in postwar business and consumer culture. I support this claim by examining works by some of the founding American postmodern novelists—Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon—through the lens of historicism and biography. As advertising and publicity professionals in the postwar period, these men were positioned to offer a “complicitous critique” of …
Where Is The "Korean" In The Korean War Memorial: Kissena Park's Korean War Memorial, Alice Lam
Where Is The "Korean" In The Korean War Memorial: Kissena Park's Korean War Memorial, Alice Lam
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The Korean War is branded as the "Forgotten War," but forgetting is an unconscious act and the Korean War is not so much forgotten as it is ignored. This paper looks at how the Korean War memory has been resurrected through Korean War memorials at first on a national level and then on a local level. Through the Korean War Veterans Association website, I looked at all the Korean War memorials throughout the U.S. and demonstrate how they create a distinct war narrative of sorrow and sacrifice that does not necessarily focus on the war itself. Then I delve into …
Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan
Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …
Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh
Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …
Fashioning Desire At B. Altman & Co.: Ethics And Consumer Culture In Early Department Stores, Tessa Maffucci
Fashioning Desire At B. Altman & Co.: Ethics And Consumer Culture In Early Department Stores, Tessa Maffucci
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
We live in an age of fast fashion. Clothing is produced in greater volumes than ever before and the lifecycle of each garment keeps getting shorter and shorter. Many items are manufactured to be worn only one time and then thrown away—as disposable as a cup of coffee. There is much to be learned about our current fashion ecosystem by looking into the past. Beyond the garments themselves we must understand the larger historical and sociological context in which these articles of clothing were produced. How does the shopping environment shape the buying habits and fashion trends of an era? …
The Fictions Of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, And The Construction Of Race In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867), Philip E. Kadish
The Fictions Of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, And The Construction Of Race In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867), Philip E. Kadish
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Fictions of Whiteness argues that political beliefs preceded and determined the race science theories which nineteenth century American white novelists applied or invoked in their work, the inverse of the current critical consensus. For issues ranging from Indian removal to slavery and Reconstruction, and utilizing theories from of Condorcet, Buffon, Camper, Louis Agassiz, James Pritchard, Johannes Blumenbach, and George Borrow these authors shifted allegiances to divergent race theories between and within works, applied those theories selectively to white, black, and Indians characters, and applied the same scientific race theories to politically divergent rhetorical ends. By analyzing shifting application of different …
The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith
The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …
Yellow Dust Abode: The Hawley-Suski Letters, 1942-1945, Roxanne Shirazi
Yellow Dust Abode: The Hawley-Suski Letters, 1942-1945, Roxanne Shirazi
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
On May 6, 1942, Dr. Peter Marie Suski assigned my great-grandfather, Willis M. Hawley, power of attorney to manage his personal affairs when he and his family, along with 120,000 Japanese Americans, were forcibly removed from the Pacific Coast to one of ten U.S. government internment camps. The two men began a regular and frequent correspondence that would continue throughout the war and beyond, producing at least 566 pages of letters between 1942-1960. Dr. Suski and Mr. Hawley wrote as friends, book collectors, and scholars of the Japanese and Chinese languages, and their letters comprise a richly detailed source for …
From Tulsa To Ferguson: Redefining Race Riots And Racialized Violence, Hesley R. Keenan
From Tulsa To Ferguson: Redefining Race Riots And Racialized Violence, Hesley R. Keenan
Dissertations and Theses
No abstract provided.