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Articles 1 - 30 of 43
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
On Vinyl: Revival & Survival, Thom Leavy
On Vinyl: Revival & Survival, Thom Leavy
Capstones
As a record collector and journalist, I take stock of what they mean to me while searching to better understand the “Vinyl Revival” of the past decade. I meet and pick at people who’ve worked with the medium at its height, its demise, and today. We talk about what digitization has done and will do to music, and what vinyl means to them.
https://readymag.com/u29439050/onvinyl/
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky
Theses and Dissertations
This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …
Musicalization: Early Childhood Music Access, Discourse, And Praxis In Nyc Charter Schools, 2014-2015, Andrew Aprile
Musicalization: Early Childhood Music Access, Discourse, And Praxis In Nyc Charter Schools, 2014-2015, Andrew Aprile
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Over the past two decades, charter schools have become a hallmark of education reform in the United States. Concurrent with this movement is the increasing prominence of high stakes testing. While much research has sought to compare the effectiveness of charter schools and traditional public schools in terms of standardized assessments, scant attention has been paid to the role of arts and music in charter schools, and little has been done to distinguish the distinct strands of the charter school movement. Given what we know about the importance of music education and the growth of charter schools, it was the …
Impressive Failures: Mavericks Of Film Authorship And The Impossibility Of Success In Hollywood, Tom S. Davies
Impressive Failures: Mavericks Of Film Authorship And The Impossibility Of Success In Hollywood, Tom S. Davies
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation directly challenges the critical and commercial primacy of success attached to Hollywood films and their filmmakers, especially when one argues for or against their quality and/or importance within cinematic history. Through a process of shifting and multiplying perspectives within a broader narrative that is critical of what separates success and failure, certain films and filmmakers that were judged as failures or disappointments under impossible prerequisites of creating a successful film––commercially, aesthetically, or both–– are, instead, reconsidered as constructive counterpoints to the expectations of the Hollywood economic field of production as well as to the inevitable disappointment of the …
Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy
Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My dissertation argues that white women played crucial roles in the economic, political, and cultural circuits that linked the United States and Cuba, and the hemisphere broadly, during the nineteenth century. It inserts white women into a historical account of U.S. imperialism by analyzing the literary works of a number of American women who traveled to or simply fantasized about Cuba during this period of intense and widespread interest in the island. It identifies white women not just as providing the symbolic rationale for Cuban annexation or intervention – the preservation of their chastity being a common justification for the …
Spectacular Politics And Everyday Performance: Tracing Music From Ceauşescu’S Romania To Multicultural America, Benjamin Dumbauld
Spectacular Politics And Everyday Performance: Tracing Music From Ceauşescu’S Romania To Multicultural America, Benjamin Dumbauld
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Drawing from fieldwork conducted throughout the United States and Canada, this dissertation examines the continued performance of socialist-era music within the Romanian-American community. It addresses why a community largely made up of people who sought to leave the country during the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu continue to perform music tied to that period by tracing the historical performance and reception of multiple genres, ranging from traditional peasant music to folk rock. The dissertation begins by examining the nationalization of Romania’s music industry under the early socialist regime (1944-1965), and locates the difficulties Communist Party members confronted in delineating a …
Affective Afterlives: An Ethnography Of Activism Between Movements, Manissa Maharawal
Affective Afterlives: An Ethnography Of Activism Between Movements, Manissa Maharawal
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This ethnographic project starts at the end of Occupy Wall Street in New York City and ends at the beginning of Black Lives Matter in Oakland, CA. In between these two movements it looks at a variety of political projects that focused on issues of housing and anti-gentrification in New York City and San Francisco. Throughout I favor a view of social movements that understands the messy trajectories of activism. This methodological privileging of what activists are doing, and the places and spaces in which they ground their work seeks to de-center bounded social movements in the study of politics …
Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.
Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …
The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno
The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.
In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …
Genre, Representation, And Memory In Spanish Civil War Texts By Women From Spain And The United States, Jennifer Prince
Genre, Representation, And Memory In Spanish Civil War Texts By Women From Spain And The United States, Jennifer Prince
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation seeks to addresses a lacuna in the androcentric Spanish Civil War literary canon by recovering women’s voices writing about the war from the 1930s to the present. It also examines the war stories women tell and how they represent themselves and others when writing about the Spanish Civil War. All of the seven authors examined here write through the lens of some distance—either as American citizens observing the war or as the descendants of the war’s survivors—but each with an intimate connection rooted in biology or ideology. The foundation of this dissertation is close reading and textual analysis …
Aesthetic Geographies: Art, Crises, Urban Imaginaries, Erin Siodmak
Aesthetic Geographies: Art, Crises, Urban Imaginaries, Erin Siodmak
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Performance art, with its origins in Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, has long been a political, politicized, and transgressive form of art, posing challenges to art world institutions, political and social norms, and the nature of art itself through practitioners’ unconventional uses of the body, space, and audience/viewer participation. Much of the power of performed art comes from its performative and transitory nature: it does not simply express, represent, or communicate information. Rather, performative art forms such as installation or performance are productive of political aesthetics. Art may not necessarily intervene directly with political, legal, and legislative decisions or acts, but …
A Lesson On Hatred From The Annals Of Logan County History, Aaron Barlow
A Lesson On Hatred From The Annals Of Logan County History, Aaron Barlow
Publications and Research
Stories of lynchings, events of the American past, remain alive in all of us whose ancestors were involved, be it as victims, perpetrators, or even law officers who, for one reason or another, stood aside. We can’t push aside or ignore that history any more than we can bury the other terrible legacies of slavery.
Harriet Jacobs And Toni Morrison: A Tradition Of Narrative Resistance, Allyson L. Molloy
Harriet Jacobs And Toni Morrison: A Tradition Of Narrative Resistance, Allyson L. Molloy
Theses and Dissertations
This article considers historical constructions of power and the narrative as a mode of resistance. Working in different centuries, under extremely disparate circumstances, Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Toni Morrison in her novel The Bluest Eye, utilize specific narrative strategies to challenge and question institutionalized power which is evidenced through their deliberate employment of narrative strategies not only to challenge the institution of slavery or the hegemonic ideal, but also to question the racial and gender oppression systemic to those institutions of power.
The Papers Of Norman Rosten, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It
The Papers Of Norman Rosten, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It
Finding Aids
This collection contains items such as original drafts of published works, photographs, playbills, interviews, reviews, correspondences, and scripts. There is also some publicity material for his screenplay A View From the Bridge, an original radio script for Death of a King, as well as final revisions. In addition, there are newspaper clippings, magazine articles and some interviews Mr. Rosten gave during his term as Brooklyn’s Poet Laureate.
The Paule Marshall Collection, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It
The Paule Marshall Collection, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It
Finding Aids
In this collection you will find an incomplete typescript from one of Paule Marshall’s published works, her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstone.
The Papers Of Nina Schneider, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It
The Papers Of Nina Schneider, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It
Finding Aids
This collection contains materials primarily about Nina Schneider, although there are some items related to her husband Herman as well. There are articles, biographical information, book reviews (in different languages), press releases, fan mail, photographs, and program data. There are also Ms. Schneider’s diaries/letters, her lectures and speeches (with notes), poetry that she wrote, items regarding her only published book The Woman Who Lived in a Prologue as well as bound copies of the final manuscript. In addition, there are drafts, notes, and several chapters of her unpublished book Coming to Terms: A Fact Finding Memoir. Finally, there are assorted …
The Papers Of Laura Benet, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It
The Papers Of Laura Benet, Brooklyn College Library And Academic It
Finding Aids
The Papers of Laura Benet consists of Ms. Benet’s personal diaries, several folders of correspondence, and the proof of her book Famous American Humorists (1959). There is also a copy of Ms. Benet’s memoir titled When William Rose, Stephen Vincent and I were Young (1976).
Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz
Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz
Publications and Research
Sinister Wisdom Issue 3, published the year 1977 holds an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, titled, “It is the lesbian in us...”; The cover of the same issue has art by photographer Tee Corinne. Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. This non-fiction creative essay written by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz reflects on the first year of Sinister Wisdom's publication as a celebration of 40 years through this special edition anniversary print for which only 1000 have been printed. The essay remarks on the shift in lesbian identity and community and the potential impact of the Sinister Wisdom journal …
A Heads Up On Kathy Griffin's Trump Head Depiction, Marleen S. Barr
A Heads Up On Kathy Griffin's Trump Head Depiction, Marleen S. Barr
Publications and Research
This essay is a feminist analysis of the controversy involving Kathy Griffin's depiction of Trump's head.
Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo
Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In January 1907, New York City had its first major encounter with the figure of Salome. Appearing on three large stages in the city simultaneously, the archetype of the dancing girl quickly became an object of controversy. Her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in its staging of Strauss’s Salome resulted in public debate and the ultimate closure of the performance by the Met’s Board of Directors. The event brought attention to the Salome archetype’s already contested character. Salome arrived in the United States from Europe where she had been the subject of a quarter century of debates about how …
"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen
"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My thesis explores and analyzes the Federal Theater Project’s cultural and political impact during the Depression, as well as the contested legacy of this unique experiment in government-sponsored, broadly accessible cultural expression. Part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration, the FTP aimed to provide jobs for playwrights, actors, designers, stagehands, and other theater professionals on relief in the stark period from 1935 to 1939. But the project became a nationwide political and artistic flashpoint, spurring fierce debate over the leadership, politics and impact of this “people’s theater.” The FTP gave professional theater an unprecedented reach into working-class and black …
Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green
Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …
Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton
Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed …
Thine Is The Kingdom: The Political Thought Of 21st Century Evangelicalism, Joanna Tice Jen
Thine Is The Kingdom: The Political Thought Of 21st Century Evangelicalism, Joanna Tice Jen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Despite renewed attention to religion and ethics in political theory, there is a notable absence of inquiry into evangelicalism. Social scientists have studied Christian right policy in the late 20th century, but how has the movement shifted in the new millennium and what are the theoretical beliefs that undergird those shifts? By reading popular devotional writings as political texts, this dissertation distills a three-part evangelical political thought: 1) a theory of time in which teleological eternity complements retroactive re-birth; 2) a theory of being wherein evangelicals learn to strive after their godly potential through a process of emotional self-regulation; and …
A Girlhood Among Ghosts, An Experimental Project, Maple Wu
A Girlhood Among Ghosts, An Experimental Project, Maple Wu
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation” – Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace.
I do not believe I know devastation. I think to be devastated means one has to experience extreme pain, and live in the aftermath of trauma. I think of this in terms of war, famine, and immigration. A little self-reflection shows that in the twenty-something years of my life, I have not encountered any of the three things listed.
What I do recall, however, is the first time I picked up Maxine …
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …
Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones
Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …
Beyond The Vale: Visualizing Slavery In Craven County, North Carolina, Marissa N. Kinsey
Beyond The Vale: Visualizing Slavery In Craven County, North Carolina, Marissa N. Kinsey
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Beyond the Vale is a data visualization project dedicated to the study of slavery in antebellum North Carolina. Focusing on Gooding’s Township, a rural farming community in the eastern county of Craven, it is designed to address basic questions about the experiences of the county’s antebellum enslaved population. These questions represent points of contention between local heritage narratives and the direct testimonies of former slaves. Where former slaves describe a complex, yet undeniably exploitative system in which they had only minimal control over their own lives, county literature echoes larger themes in North Carolina state scholarship by either overlooking slavery, …
Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman
Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …
I. M. Pei, William Zeckendorf, And The Architecture Of Urban Renewal, Marci M. Clark
I. M. Pei, William Zeckendorf, And The Architecture Of Urban Renewal, Marci M. Clark
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation reevaluates the practice of design and real estate in the United States through an insufficiently understood case study of the architect-developer team of I. M. Pei and William Zeckendorf and their twelve-year partnership in urban renewal. William Zeckendorf (1905-1976) was the most ambitious real estate developer in the United States in the 1950s, with an outsize personality and larger-than-life plans. Unlike most developers of the era, Zeckendorf believed that quality design and visionary planning were critical to remaking city cores through urban renewal. To accomplish this, he hired I. M. Pei (b. 1917), a talented, young designer out …