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Articles 1 - 30 of 512
Full-Text Articles in American Studies
Mapping The Contemporary American Public Sphere With Habermas, Deleuze, And Soderbergh, Hunter Main
Mapping The Contemporary American Public Sphere With Habermas, Deleuze, And Soderbergh, Hunter Main
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
However infirm “the public” may be as a political body in America today, its presence as idea in American life is still potent. This thesis seeks to take a first step in developing an idea of what a contemporary American public looks like and how it functions, using concepts developed by Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, and Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. The Habermasian “public sphere” is a major reference point for popular thinking about the public, and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is indeed an exemplary historical and critical account of the wide range of forces that cohered …
A Spectral Return: Non-Metaphorical Ghosts, Monsters, And Hauntology, Kit Bauserman
A Spectral Return: Non-Metaphorical Ghosts, Monsters, And Hauntology, Kit Bauserman
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Uses of hauntology within academic scholarship are peculiarly metaphorical and British. This project aims to combat the overabundance of such readings to create more breadth in academic discourse on the spectral. This project does not seek to replace metaphorical or British renderings of hauntology, but to exist alongside it as overreliance on a particular formulation creates detrimental limits and barriers to scholastic innovation. The first essay examines the ghosts of Theodore “Wes” Wesley and Samuel Isaac Bailey within Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery (2018-2023) and The Sheridan Tapes (2020-present). Examining these category-defying ghosts which exhibit mass, warmth, and breath through …
Healing Culturally Induced Trauma From Marvin’S Room To The Indian Boarding School, Angie Jocelin Leiva
Healing Culturally Induced Trauma From Marvin’S Room To The Indian Boarding School, Angie Jocelin Leiva
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This master’s thesis portfolio is analyzing the music of contemporary hip-hop artists and the autobiographical work of 20th-century Indigenous writer and political activist Zitkala-Ša. A close reading methodology is used to analyze all the writing included in this body of work. The purpose is to examine the importance of community building within Black and Indigenous communities in the wake of political and social injustice. This portfolio uses the theoretical work of Audrey Lorde, Sianne Nagi, and Robert Warrior to provide support for the central thesis. All the subjects in this portfolio are writing from a first-person point of view and …
Refraction: The Prism Of Cultural Identity And How It Is Impacted By Grief And Storytelling, S. Aanjali Allegakoen
Refraction: The Prism Of Cultural Identity And How It Is Impacted By Grief And Storytelling, S. Aanjali Allegakoen
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
These two essays explore the ways in which cultural identities are impacted by external forces within an environment, specifically grief and storytelling. In the first essay, the cultural identity of American Muslims is examined through the lens of the post-9/11 protests against the Córdoba House Muslim Community Center in New York City. The “grief-wrath” that was utilized against the Muslim Community by Islamophobic protesters is then explored in other instances within the United States, relating to the identity formation and expression that can happen in ways that refute discrimination and oppression. The second essay details the ways storytelling can express …
Colonial Apprehension: Hawaiian Indigeneity In U.S. American Popular Culture, 1945-1980, Leah Kuragano
Colonial Apprehension: Hawaiian Indigeneity In U.S. American Popular Culture, 1945-1980, Leah Kuragano
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation is an interdisciplinary historical study of American settler-colonial state formation that focuses on the contentious political relationship between the U.S. and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) after World War II. The central objects of study are three Hawaiʻi-inspired American popular-cultural formations — surfing, tiki culture, and police procedural television — that have very rarely been examined through the analytic lens of indigeneity. In three case studies, I demonstrate how popular-cultural production and consumption has mediated historically specific modes of colonial apprehension. This dissertation develops a methodological approach that merges archival research of undigitized source material with textual and cultural …
“I Fixed Up The Trees To Give Them Some New Life:” Queer Desire, Affect, And Ecology In The Work Of Two Lgbtq+ Appalachian Artists/The Wildcrafting Our Queerness Project/The Queer Appalachia Preservation Project, Maxwell Mason Cloe
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The following essay and digital projects each engage both with a unique aspect of contemporary queer Appalachian art and culture as well as the ways in which oral history and digital humanities methodologies can be used to generate collaborative research possibilities. The first essay is an exploration of two LGBTQ+ Appalachian artists, Dustin Hall and Charles Williams, and the ways in which their work uses Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures” and Jose Muñoz’ understanding of queer futurity to rethink human relationships with non-human nature. The first digital project is an online exhibition of queer Appalachian artists and their work, bolstered by oral …
Have Your Cake: Constructing A Confectionery Vernacular In The Great Depression, Sarah Elisabeth Adams
Have Your Cake: Constructing A Confectionery Vernacular In The Great Depression, Sarah Elisabeth Adams
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Sweets—cake, candy, cookies, ice cream, and any other sugary treat—are a favored component of the American diet. They are also a familiar motif in the American cultural landscape. From the Good Ship Lollipop to Candy Crush Saga, imagined and imagined confections suffuse media and amusements, where they serve as both site and subject for negotiating economic and social tensions in the collective imagination. The visual and material depiction of sweets in the cultural landscape composes what I call the “confectionery vernacular,” a hybrid graphic language that provides an interdisciplinary framework within which to consider the American experience. Whether illustrated, photographed, …
Are You Black First Or Deaf First: Binary Thinking, Boundary-Policing, And Discursive Racism Within The American Deaf Community, Micayla Ann Whitmer
Are You Black First Or Deaf First: Binary Thinking, Boundary-Policing, And Discursive Racism Within The American Deaf Community, Micayla Ann Whitmer
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The question “Are you Black first, or Deaf first?” is worth exploring for a variety of reasons; the most basic of which is that it is often asked of Black Deaf people. Black Deaf overwhelmingly report that the questioners in these situations are white Deaf. The question “Are you Black first or Deaf first?” asks Black Deaf individuals to justify their Deafness because of their Blackness--implying that both categories demand exclusive cultural loyalty and that they cannot overlap. This categorization is interesting because Black Deaf, and only Black Deaf, are grouped in this manner. This thesis sets out to contextualize …
(Dis)Embodied Professionalisms: Doctors & Scientists In U.S. Literature, 1895-1935, Shaun F. Richards
(Dis)Embodied Professionalisms: Doctors & Scientists In U.S. Literature, 1895-1935, Shaun F. Richards
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The United States of America was founded upon patriarchal, white supremacist, and capitalist ideologies that have been concealed from the eyes of the world. (Dis)Embodied Professionalisms offers a viewpoint from which to see and understand how these traditions were mythologized during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in the modern professions and its representative identity: the doctor-scientist. His professionalization consolidated the power-knowledge of the gaze into an ideal figure of disembodied masculine rational and scientific authority premised on a visual epistemology. Through close readings of four novels written by Harold Frederic, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald during …
From Ship To Sarcophagus: The Uss Arizona As A Navy War Memorial And Active Burial Ground / “A Date Which Will Live In Infamy”: Community Engagement At Pearl Harbor National Memorial And Museum, Shannon L. Bremer
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
From Ship to Sarcophagus: The USS Arizona as a Navy War Memorial and Active Burial Ground On December 7, 1941, the Japanese government launched an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The attack destroyed several ships, including the USS Arizona. Today, a memorial straddles the wreck of the Arizona, paying homage to the 1,177 men that perished aboard the ship. In this paper, I will discuss the history of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the creation of the present memorial, and the interment ceremony that takes place there at the request of a USS Arizona …
For Children Of The Sun Who Deserved Better When Pickaninnies Were Not Enough: The Celebration Of Childhood Within The Brownies' Book, Felicia Bowins
For Children Of The Sun Who Deserved Better When Pickaninnies Were Not Enough: The Celebration Of Childhood Within The Brownies' Book, Felicia Bowins
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
In this thesis, I analyze how The Brownies' Book projected the ideals of the New Negro Movement by positioning Black children as crucial to the period's creation of a new Negro identity. My analysis begins by exploring various examples of racist imagery of the period and how the periodical subverted those negative representations of Black children and Black life. In my examination of The Brownies' Book's representation of Blackness, I discuss the minstrel tradition and the racist popular cultural imagery of the 1920s. By analyzing the positive representations of Blackness within The Brownies' Book, my study shows how the editors …
Beyond The Podium: A Critical Analysis Of Three Online Learning Tools, Julia Kott
Beyond The Podium: A Critical Analysis Of Three Online Learning Tools, Julia Kott
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Paying attention to the ways digital tools mediate the pedagogic encounter is to attend to the inherently emotional process of teaching and learning. This thesis investigates the implications of bringing eLearning tools into the online classroom with reference to bell hooks’ and Paulo Freire’s work on radical pedagogy and Aimi Hamraie’s notion of the “normate template” to investigate three eLearning tools called “Proctorio,” “FlipGrid,” and “Panopto”.
"I Feel Your Pain": Service-Learning Programs And The Liberal Narrative Of Empathy, Molly Shilo
"I Feel Your Pain": Service-Learning Programs And The Liberal Narrative Of Empathy, Molly Shilo
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Over the past several decades, service-learning programs have proliferated at colleges and universities, gaining broad support for their incorporation of critical reflection, academic learning, and volunteer work. The stated objective of these programs is transformation, both for students personally and for the communities with which they engage in terms of resources and justice. Through a case study of Fordham University's Global Outreach program, though, I demonstrate that, by positing the emotion empathy as the most productive mechanism through which to radically transform oneself and set off a ripple of social change, university administrators and educators avoid actual structural transformation and …
Mother Of Dragons: White Feminist Imperialism In Hbo's Game Of Thrones, Abigail Kahler
Mother Of Dragons: White Feminist Imperialism In Hbo's Game Of Thrones, Abigail Kahler
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
In 2019, Game of Thrones aired its final episode, The Iron Throne. This episode enjoyed enormous viewership, and culminated in the death of Daenerys Targaryen, a fan favorite, whose storyline saw her conquer diverse cultures and declare rulership over the continents of Essos and Westeros. Her character is unique for being one of the most famous female protagonists in the fantasy genre, as well as a builder of empires. As evidenced by the hundreds of children named both ‘Khaleesi’ and ‘Daenerys’ after her, she was a hero to many. However, much of her storyline was occupied with the subjugation of …
The Association For The Preservation Of Virginia Antiquities And The Weaponization Of Nostalgia In The Service Of White Identity, Sachi Carlson
The Association For The Preservation Of Virginia Antiquities And The Weaponization Of Nostalgia In The Service Of White Identity, Sachi Carlson
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis addresses the practice of historic preservation, situating preservation and tourism as substantial arms of the Lost Cause movement in the late nineteenth-century. Through this case study of the Association of the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), I illustrate how, in the aftermath of the Civil War, southern historic preservation efforts were primarily acts of self-preservation. The APVA exemplifies how identity can be created and maintained through the very performance of it – by securing of a stage on which to do so. Heralding a specific brand of tradition, the APVA reached for the more distant grandeur of colonial …
Taking It To The Streets: Race, Space, And Early D.C. Punk, Ashleigh Mae Williams
Taking It To The Streets: Race, Space, And Early D.C. Punk, Ashleigh Mae Williams
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This work examines race and class in early Washington, D.C. punk from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It is my contention that written punk memoirs rarely give a contextual look at each movement. From rose-colored memoirs, many inside or outside the punk community view the movements as genuine rebellions against mainstream American music and values. It is my view that subversive movements do not emerge completely free from institutional oppression. The same is true with punk. to examine punk's beginnings, I analyze punk movements in the United Kingdom and Los Angeles before turning to a detailed account of …
Of Mammies, Minstrels, And Machines: Movement-Image Automaticity And The Impossible Conditions Of Black Humanity, Joseph Frank Lawless
Of Mammies, Minstrels, And Machines: Movement-Image Automaticity And The Impossible Conditions Of Black Humanity, Joseph Frank Lawless
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis argues that the GIF, as an underexplored analytical vertex within the broader matrix of media ecologies, should be understood as a generative nodal point in the American system of racialized violence. Thought in relation to its medium specificity, the GIF's materiality, particularly its capacity for infinite looping, is critically interrogated for its potential to amplify the circuitry of dominating racialization that felicitously condition the GIF's circulation. I open my argument with focus on a subset of the GIF genre known as the reaction GIF, which, in its frequently racialized form, is situated within the interconnected genealogies of the …
The Lonely Ones: Selfhood And Society In Harry Stack Sullivan's Psychiatric Thought, Taylor S. Stephens
The Lonely Ones: Selfhood And Society In Harry Stack Sullivan's Psychiatric Thought, Taylor S. Stephens
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis examines the contributions of psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) to an ongoing conversation on the self and society in the United States, from classical liberal political theory to the mid-twentieth century social sciences. Existing literature overlooks the 1940s as a divided period in American intellectual history. This project argues that an accurate presentation of the era demands the inclusion of thinkers who were excluded from mainstream institutions as a consequence of their training in 'professional' academic disciplines or social marginalization along the lines of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexuality. Careful examination of Sullivan's lectures, scholarly articles, unpublished …
“Terrible In Its Beauty, Terrible In Its Indifference”: Postcolonial Ecocriticism And Sally Mann’S Southern Landscapes, Laura Keller
“Terrible In Its Beauty, Terrible In Its Indifference”: Postcolonial Ecocriticism And Sally Mann’S Southern Landscapes, Laura Keller
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Sally Mann (1951- ) has spent forty years photographing scenes in the American South, including domestic scenes, landscapes, and portraits. Although scholars generally interpret her work as a reflection of the region’s history of violence and oppression, my research will consider her work through the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism. In her art and writing, Mann portrays the land as an indifferent witness to history, a force intertwined with humanity, lending matter for human lives and reclaiming it after death. However, she also describes the way the environment interferes with her the antiquated technology she uses, creating dramatic flaws that imbue …
Reading Bodies: Disability And American Literary History, 1789-1889, Amanda Stuckey
Reading Bodies: Disability And American Literary History, 1789-1889, Amanda Stuckey
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation brings the field of critical disability studies to bear on organizational paradigms of nineteenth-century American literature. “Reading Bodies” intervenes in these fields with the claim that the book in a variety of formats, publications, and circulations acts as a disciplinary tool that seeks to arrange physical and mental characteristics and capacities into the category of disability. This project moves beyond examining representations of disability to demonstrate that the same social, cultural, and political forces that generated literary movements and outpourings – such as nationalism, displacement of Native peoples, slavery, and state-sanctioned violence – also generated material conditions of …
Race And Culture In The Early-Twentieth-Century United States And Colonial Hawaii, Leah Kuragano
Race And Culture In The Early-Twentieth-Century United States And Colonial Hawaii, Leah Kuragano
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
The following essays are two explorations of the role of culture in colonial Hawai‘i and in the American metropole in racializing and dominating Native Hawaiians in terms of a larger history of race-based oppression and romanticization in the US. The first essay draws from Werner Sollors’ Ethnic Modernism, in which he argues that the aesthetic movement of modernism, which has been historically white-washed by scholars, had strong ties to the influx of immigrants and the growing popularity of jazz music and other forms of African American cultural expression in the early twentieth century. The second essay, written for “Politics of …
The Sacred Ginmill Closes: Heavy Drinking, White Masculinity And The Hard-Boiled Detective In American Culture, David Camak Pratt
The Sacred Ginmill Closes: Heavy Drinking, White Masculinity And The Hard-Boiled Detective In American Culture, David Camak Pratt
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Through close readings of fiction, film, and television, “The Sacred Ginmill Closes” provides a cultural history of the heavy-drinking hard-boiled detective in his twentieth-century cultural prime. Emergent in the Prohibition era, hard-boiled fiction comprised a cultural response to both the real and imagined effects of national prohibition. In portraying the Prohibition era’s corrupt and violent public sphere, early hard-boiled fiction by authors like Dashiell Hammett contrasted heavy drinking masculine authority figures, often private detectives, with transgressively greedy and excessively thirsty women whose participation in the public sphere and in masculine behaviors like heavy drinking represented both the cause and ongoing …
Black Capes, White Spies: An Exploration Of Visual Black Identity, Evolving Heroism And 'Passing' In Marvel's Black Panther Comics And Mat Johnson's Graphic Novel, Incogengro, Ravynn K. Stringfield
Black Capes, White Spies: An Exploration Of Visual Black Identity, Evolving Heroism And 'Passing' In Marvel's Black Panther Comics And Mat Johnson's Graphic Novel, Incogengro, Ravynn K. Stringfield
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This thesis is a portfolio which contains two essays. The first essay, “Reclaiming Wakanda,” is a character biography of the Black Panther comic character from his inception in 1966 until 2016. The work historicizes and politicizes a character written as apolotical by his creators while also placing him firmly within a legacy of Black Power, Civil Rights and other Black freedom movements of the second half of the 20th century. The second essay, “Incogengro: The Creation and Destruction of Black Identity in the ‘Safety’ of Harlem” considers how images and representations race and racial violence are constructed in graphic novel …
Escaping Through The Past, Haunted By The Future: Confronting America Through Child Of God And The Underground Railroad, Zarah Victoria Quinn
Escaping Through The Past, Haunted By The Future: Confronting America Through Child Of God And The Underground Railroad, Zarah Victoria Quinn
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
My Master’s Thesis is comprised of two essays that review two contemporary American texts. Through genres of the gothic and historical fiction, these texts confront America’s violence of the past and present. The first essay, “Desiring and Dispossessing: Whiteness in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God,” investigates the novel’s reliance on a gothic genre as an affective strategy to confront whiteness’ specter of self-destruction. The second essay, “Escaping Through The Underground Railroad,” reconsiders the movement of escape and theorizes the action as a miraculous but forever-incomplete movement toward alternative ways of being--a theorization that could be useful for the present day. …
"I Figured You Were Probably Watching Us": Ex Machina And The Performativity Of Lateral Surveillance, Kayla Danielle Meyers
"I Figured You Were Probably Watching Us": Ex Machina And The Performativity Of Lateral Surveillance, Kayla Danielle Meyers
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Surveillance plays a central role in the film Ex Machina (2015). Though surveillance is usually conceived as a unilateral force exerted by one agent onto another, the film imagines a more fluid system where characters perform roles of surveillant and subject of surveillance simultaneously. to provide commentary on surveillance culture, the film connects the A.I. film genre to the office film and fraternity film, which privilege male kinship. In bringing these three genres together, the film highlights gender hierarchies and constructions of masculinity where surveillance is a tool for exacting hetero-patriarchal power. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I …
Material Literacy: Alphabets, Bodies, And Consumer Culture, Wendy Korwin-Pawlowski
Material Literacy: Alphabets, Bodies, And Consumer Culture, Wendy Korwin-Pawlowski
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation posits that a new form of material literacy emerged in the United States between 1890 and 1925, in tandem with the modern advertising profession. A nation recalibrating the way it valued economic and cultural mass consumption demanded, among other things, new signage – new ways to announce, and through those announcements, to produce its commitment to consumer society. What I call material literacy emerged as a set of interpretive skills wielded by both the creators and audiences of advertising material, whose paths crossed via representations of goods. These historically situated ways of reading and writing not only invited …
Folk Into Art: John Fahey, Modernism And The American Folk Revival, Lisa Carpenter
Folk Into Art: John Fahey, Modernism And The American Folk Revival, Lisa Carpenter
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
John Fahey’s music holds a distinct place in the mid-century folk revival--distinct because he is difficult to fit in with traditional narratives of the revival. John Fahey created a unique musical style through incorporation of traditional American music with classical music forms. His musical “quotations” and renditions of American blues, folk, ragtime, Protestant hymns, and parlor songs did not merely revive traditional music, but gave it new form and newfound respect in order to further artistic exploration. Fahey was a musical modernist, infusing tradition with the new. Fahey’s work can be situated in the context of modernist/folk connections that began …
Creolized Histories: Hybrid Literatures Of The Americas, Apostolos Rofaelas
Creolized Histories: Hybrid Literatures Of The Americas, Apostolos Rofaelas
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
This dissertation is about a hemispheric understanding of the Americas by foregrounding hybrid literatures written both by Caribbean and U.S. American authors as the space where a transnational slave past of diversity, relation, and cross-cultural influence can be revealed and discussed. I use the term hybrid because these imaginary writings engage with actual events and real-life people that have shaped the history of the Americas, the interpretation of which is re-negotiated here though both history and literature. and literatures because it is not only novels but also epic poetry and oral stories that writers resort to in order to restore …
New South(Ern) Landscapes: Reenvisioning Tourism, Industry, And The Environment In The American South, John Barrington Matthews
New South(Ern) Landscapes: Reenvisioning Tourism, Industry, And The Environment In The American South, John Barrington Matthews
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Commenting on two distinct bodies of visual culture, this thesis examines how the American South has been depicted in photography, advertisement, and popular media. Exploring images of the South ranging from Depression-era Virginia to present day lower Louisiana, these papers seek to better incorporate views of a region traditionally underrepresented in visual depictions of the American landscape. Underlying both projects is an interest in utilizing visual culture as a means to understand humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world. Taking a closer look at promotional materials from the early years of Shenandoah National Park, as well as the (post)industrial/posthumanist landscapes of …
Uncanny Objects: The Art Of Moving And Looking Human, Khanh Van Ngoc Vo
Uncanny Objects: The Art Of Moving And Looking Human, Khanh Van Ngoc Vo
Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Automata ("self-moving" machines) and reborn dolls (hyperrealistic baby dolls) individually conjure up questions of dynamic and aesthetic realism--external components of the human form as realistically represented or reproduced. as simulacra of humans in movement and appearance, they serve as sites of the uncanny exemplifying the idea in which as varying forms of the cyborg imbue them with troubling yet fantastical qualities that raises questions about our own humanness. My first essay, “Automaton: Movement and Artificial/Mechanical Life” directly addresses the characteristics that define humanness, principally the Rene Descartes mind-body dichotomy, by tracing the evolution of mechanical life, predicated as much on …