Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Countering Dominant Narratives In Community: The Many Voices In Spoken Word Poetry, Natalie Raquel Acuña

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In this project I research the counternarratives within spoken word poetry by authors of color (i.e., Rafeef Ziadah, José Olivarez, and Denise Frohman) and how they resist the dominant narratives that are broadcast towards a larger audience. I analyze categories of counterstory through the following paired themes: immigration/citizenship, and joy/trauma. I delve into the heavy importance of community within my project in the realm of spoken word poetry. A lot of poetry is going against dominant narratives, community within this discourse gives a sense of belonging and relatability to the experience of the spoken word performers.

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Disrupters:Three Women Of Color Tell Their Stories, Dulce María Gray, Denise A. Harrison, Yuko Kurahashi

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

This essay is an amplified version of the presentation we made at the 7th Biennial Seneca Falls Dialogues. Our aim is to story back into the world our first experiences and motivations for investing in suffrage and democratic activism. We are three American professors of disciplines in the humanities, who for decades have taught and lived across the United States and have traveled the world. Yuko Kurahashi’s essay tells the story of how Raichō Hiratsuka and Fusae Ichikawa, Japanese activists in their suffrage and peace movements, helped shape her personal and professional life. Denise Harrison talks about the first wave …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

Spiritual Activism And Political Solidarity In So Far From God And Mother Tongue: Two Views By Two Authors, Jean Paul Russo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM AND POLITICAL SOLIDARITY IN SO FAR FROM GOD AND MOTHER TONGUE: TWO VIEWS BY TWO AUTHORS

by

Jean Paul Russo

Florida International University, 2020

Miami, Florida

Professor Anne Castro, Major Professor

This thesis focuses on the intersection between spirituality and political action in the works of two Latinx authors, Demetria Martinez and Ana Castillo. Building on Gloria Anzaldua’s theories of trauma, narrative, and what she terms ‘conocimiento,’ I contend that the novels So Far From God, and Mother Tongue, present an alternative approach to political action that is derived from a common experience of suffering and trauma as …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Kiskeyanas Valientes En Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers And The Spaces Of Contemporary American Literature, Isabel R. Espinal

Doctoral Dissertations

We can learn and gain a lot by putting Dominican women writers at the center of our attention. Yet they rarely have that place. This dissertation looks at Dominican women authors who have lived and written in the United States —Josefina Báez, Marianela Medrano, Yrene Santos, Aurora Arias, Nelly Rosario, Annecy Báez, Ana Maurine Lara, Raquel Cepeda— and how they fit within the spaces of contemporary American society, and more broadly within world flows of peoples and cultural productions. I draw on the theories and methodologies of Gloria Anzaldúa and her generation of feminists of color, as well as subsequent …

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 …

Frederick Luis Aldama. Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey By Interview. San Diego: ¡Hyperbole Books!, 2017., Jessica Rutherford

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Frederick Aldama. Latino Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview. San Diego: ¡Hyperbole Books!, 2017.

Magical Politicism: History And Identity In Gabriel García Márquez’S Fiction, Isabel C. Henao

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Gabriel García Márquez establishes the importance of identity, names, and narrative in order to highlight the importance of recognizing the past for a country that has allowed history to be rewritten and, as a result, forgotten. Márquez writes about what happens to a character with no history, for whom it then becomes imperative that the other characters orchestrate a narrative, thereby allowing Márquez to critique the neocolonialism and imperialism that occurred in Colombia. This strategy can be seen in several of his most well-known works—the short stories “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in …

Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions In The Yage Letters, Melanie Keomany

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Burroughs's Postcolonial Visions in The Yage Letters" Melanie Keomany discusses the contents of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg's The Yage Letters which could be dismissed as openly bigoted and racist. Keomany posits that the text reveals valuable connections between the colonial expansion of the eighteenth century and 1950s USA and Latin America. By re-shaping Burroughs's lived experiences in the Amazon into a text where the narrator William Lee mimics sardonically and parodically the colonial scientific explorer, The Yage Letters provides valuable insight into the complex postcolonial context of the mid-twentieth century.