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American Studies Commons

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University of Massachusetts Amherst

2016

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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin Nov 2016

Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that scholarly inquiry into American poetry of the Great Depression is incomplete without a critical understanding of poems produced within the labor movement. Through archival research and methodologies drawn from American studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and labor history, this dissertation demonstrates that autoworkers from 1935-1941 developed a rich poetic discourse that championed their cause. Autoworker poets—including autoworker song lyricists—used humor and borrowed extensively from popular, religious, and “folk” cultures to craft their own poetic styles and trope sets. They wrote about a diverse range of topics from their hopes for the unionization movement, to scab conversions, …


From What Remains: The Politics Of Aesthetic Mourning And The Poetics Of Loss In Contemporary African American Culture, Kajsa K. Henry Nov 2016

From What Remains: The Politics Of Aesthetic Mourning And The Poetics Of Loss In Contemporary African American Culture, Kajsa K. Henry

Doctoral Dissertations

While critical analyses of loss and mourning in African American studies have tended to focus on narratives that primarily concentrate on the Atlantic slave trade/slavery and music, particularly blues and gospel spirituals, this project advocates reimagining the boundaries of our discussions of loss to include other art forms, including assemblage art and performative dance. From What Remains: The Politics of Aesthetic Mourning and the Poetics of Loss in Contemporary African American Culture includes the assemblage art of the 1966 exhibition Signs of Neon and Tyree Guyton’s ongoing Heidelberg Project that respond to the violence of urban rebellions and decay and …


"Daring Propaganda For The Beauty Of The Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising In The Poetry And Drama Of The Black Power Era, 1965-1976, Markeysha D. Davis Nov 2016

"Daring Propaganda For The Beauty Of The Human Mind:" Critical Consciousness-Raising In The Poetry And Drama Of The Black Power Era, 1965-1976, Markeysha D. Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a literary and intellectual history of the contributions of black American theorists, poets, and dramatists in the 1960s and 1970s towards the establishment of black critical consciousness in order to lay grounds for black people to experience a fuller existence as human beings through black-centered creations and presentations. Through the following chapters, I establish the framework and evolution of black psyche-liberation theories—spanning Du Bois’s theory of double-conscious through the contributions of black artist-theorists like Baraka, Neal, and Woodie King, Jr., followed by examinations at length of the theories of black liberation in praxis by the poets and …


Nixon's War On Terrorism: The Fbi, Leftist Guerrillas, And The Origins Of Watergate, Daniel S. Chard Nov 2016

Nixon's War On Terrorism: The Fbi, Leftist Guerrillas, And The Origins Of Watergate, Daniel S. Chard

Doctoral Dissertations

In 1969, militant factions within both Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) began to form the United States’ first clandestine revolutionary urban guerrilla organizations: the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). These groups carried out bombings, police ambushes, and other attacks throughout the country, prompting responses from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the administration of President Richard M. Nixon. Several historians have analyzed U.S. leftist guerrillas’ motives, and much has been written on FBI operations against the Black Power movement and New Left, including the Bureau’s covert counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) …


Minor Subjects In America: Everyday Childhoods Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Gina M. Ocasion Jul 2016

Minor Subjects In America: Everyday Childhoods Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Gina M. Ocasion

Doctoral Dissertations

In my American studies dissertation, I argue that contrary to dominant discourses of separation between spaces of childhood and adulthood, representations of indigeneity, both explicit and implied, affirm the quotidian presence of social and political structures naturalized through children’s culture. Children’s literature, Native American autobiographies, and advice literatures historicize gendered inequalities reliant on particular racial representations. In other words, the intersections of gendered and racialized inequalities surface forcefully in these genres as spaces produced to reify the subjugation of minor and marginal identities through historical narratives. I understand children and the spaces they inhabit to constantly negotiate power, agency, and …


Of Wolves, Hunters, And Words: A Comparative Study Of Cultural Discourses In The Western Great Lakes Region, Tovar Cerulli Mar 2016

Of Wolves, Hunters, And Words: A Comparative Study Of Cultural Discourses In The Western Great Lakes Region, Tovar Cerulli

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is a description, interpretation, and comparison of talk about wolves. The study is based on diverse data—including in-depth interviews, instances of public talk, government documents, and letters to the editor—gathered over three years. An overarching research question guides the study: How do hunting communities create and use discourses concerning wolves? The study is situated within the ethnography of communication and, more specifically, the framework of cultural discourse analysis. The study employs cultural discourse analysis methods and concepts to describe and develop interpretations of how participants render wolves symbolically meaningful, and of beliefs and values underpinning such meanings. One …


Transnationalizing Social Justice Education: Interamerican Frameworks For Teaching And Learning In The 21st Century, Mirangela G. Buggs Mar 2016

Transnationalizing Social Justice Education: Interamerican Frameworks For Teaching And Learning In The 21st Century, Mirangela G. Buggs

Doctoral Dissertations

Social Justice Education currently uses mostly U.S.-based theories and concepts, and it often relies upon nation-specific historical legacies and nation-centric contemporary understandings of patterns of inequality. This study offers interdisciplinary conceptual-historical frameworks garnered from historical studies, African Diaspora Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, along with studies of frameworks and pedagogies in critical and multicultural education to enlarge Social Justice Education. This conceptual study utilizes a world-historical analysis and focuses on the interconnectedness of the Americas—Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America— establishing a hemispheric and regional framework to inspire more transnational work in educational projects. Arguing that there are shared …


A List Of Racialized Black Dolls: 1850-1940, Anthony F. Martin Jan 2016

A List Of Racialized Black Dolls: 1850-1940, Anthony F. Martin

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

Between 1850 and 1940 Black racialized dolls made in Europe and the northern United States saturated the marketplace with the peak years in the 1920s. These dolls were advertised with pejorative names and descriptions that typed cast African Americans as domestics and labors on mythical antebellum landscapes assisted White children in shaping Black people as inferior to Whites. Data mining doll encyclopedias, websites, and catalogs, I have compiled a list of Black racialized dolls. Additionally, I have provided advertisements of positive imagine Black dolls from The Crisis and The Negro World that provided a counterweight to the stereotyped dolls.


Terracotta Pipes With Triangular Engravings, Flavia Zorzi, Daniel G. Schávelzon Jan 2016

Terracotta Pipes With Triangular Engravings, Flavia Zorzi, Daniel G. Schávelzon

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

The discovery of two smoking pipes from seventeenth-century contexts in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is used to suggest the presence in colonial times of a new set of stylistic norms derived from African traditions that are expressed at a regional scale not only in smoking pipes, but in a variety of items of material culture. These terracotta pipes, recovered at Bolívar 373 and the Liniers House sites, are characterized by their particular geometric decorative pattern, achieved by engravings and incisions. Similar specimens were found elsewhere in Buenos Aires, as well as in Cayastá (province of Santa Fe, Argentina) and Brazil.