The Romani People In The European Cultural Imagination: Alexander Pushkin, Prosper Mérimée And Virginia Woolf, Nadya Siyam

Theses and Dissertations

Scholarly literature on Roma is scarce compared to other racial groups as a lack of academic interest, financial limitations, and other social and political factors has constrained it. This resulted in a cross-cultural circulation of misinformation about Romani people and the reproduction of Romani myths and stereotypes in fiction. This project aims to analyze selected literary works on Gypsies from three Eastern and Western European countries and two periods to unpack the cultural and political roots of Romani literary misrepresentation. This research employs a range of theoretical frameworks chosen to put the Gypsy protagonists under maximum spotlight without unnecessary repetition, …

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

"With The Butterfly Sleeves Naka Filipiniana": Contemporary Study Of Filipinx American Women In Popular Music, Georgette Luluquisin Patricio

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines contemporary Filipinx-American women artists and the ways in which they use their music to construct their identity against Western portrayals of the Filipinx/a woman. Unlike other Asian Americans, Filipinx Americans try to attain the status of the "model minority" because they were at one point in history considered US nationals with American training, but they also do not adhere to it in the same way that Japanese and Indian Americans do. The model minority myth is the notion that Asian Americans have to overcome a certain struggle or challenge in order to achieve the American Dream. Of …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time

An Arbitrary Aesthetic: Cultural Reproduction And Hegemonic Canonical Formations In The Western Theatrical Academy, Sim C. Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre as an artistic practice has often been celebrated as an art of and for the people, being a modality that in theory the common person has access to learn, explore and experience. In recent years I have become preoccupied with the growing rarification and privileging of this art form, particularly in how it is cognized and taught in the academic world. As such, I set out to investigate the mechanisms at work at levels structural, artistic, and personal that determine how theatre is taught and understood within the western academy.

This thesis seeks to examine and unpack the perceived …

The Structures Of Intra-National Class Divisions In Neoliberalism: The Women Of “Light” And “Dark” In The White Tiger, Sneha Madimi

Theses and Dissertations

Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, represents gender hierarchies and the class struggle of India’s neoliberal present. Adiga uses elements of satire and allegory to teach us something about how women are differently positioned in the neoliberal system. David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2). I will consider the novel, alongside Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” …

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

Freestyle's Forsaken, Sage D. Rivera

Theses and Dissertations

Freestyle is a genre of music born in the mid-1980s from Latino and Black communities in the urban epicenters of the United States. This project spotlights a freestyle music artist “Corina," and how she suffered a patriarchal construct but finally got the moment of significance she deserved.

Storytelling, Identity Development, And Decolonial Pedagogies: Frameworks For Teaching Indigenous Literatures Of The Great Lakes To Young Adult Readers, Katie Cary

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines Dakota and Anishinaabe literatures of the Great Lakes region with an emphasis on themes of homeland, identity development, community, violence, transformation, and healing. Each chapter of the dissertation focuses on a specific genre, medium, or theory, such as nineteenth-century autobiography, young adult literature, comics, and Two-Spirit critiques, along with pedagogical practices that can be incorporated into English curriculums to help educators teach Indigenous literatures more effectively. This dissertation provides teaching frameworks and suggestions for activities and discussions that other educators can adapt and model in their own secondary school or university classes. I consider texts by Zitkala-Sa, …

Childhood Reliquary De Una Catracha/Mexi Entre Nopales, Juliana Bustillo

Theses and Dissertations

Childhood Reliquary De Una CatrachaMexi Entre Nopales is a multisensory based installation consisting of three large and six medium scale mixed media paintings with performance. It is informed by my upbringing in Boyle Heights in the projects during the 90s, followed by East LA in the mid 2000s. It is the reliquary for my discomfort in institutional spaces and why I have found comfort in dystopian-like installations. This is the landscape in which I exist, regardless of where I am now. It is where I place my work. It is the context in which I celebrate the powerful delicacy of …

Roots And Webs And Nets And Branches And Bulletin Boards And Banners And Newsletters And Mutual Aid Text Threads And Kin And Caretakers And Porches And Poems Of Today And Spaces Of Survival, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo

Theses and Dissertations

As I welcome Richmond, VA into my family, I find myself needing to make roots and webs and nets and branches that ground me, that place myself as a Black, queer, mixed race, artist, activist, educator, storyteller, and cultural worker in this city. I am called to the streets before I am called to my studio. I question what it means to be a part of an institution that is slowly eating this city up. I become a story collector. I need to know where I am and whose land I now call home.

Fractured Selves, Gearoid Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

Fractured Selves is a self-portrait that examines the histories and points of conflation and diversion of my four public personas. In the style of a Zoom meeting, they chat with a host against animated backgrounds. Interactivity creates non-linear consuming of the content and user directed navigation through four timelines

Womanist Ways In A Man's World: Unpacking Anti-Blackness In Higher Education Enrollment Management Roles, Mesha C Garner

Theses and Dissertations

This study evaluated the phenomenon of anti-Black womanism in enrollment management at Historically White Institutions (HWIs) for Black women professionals. The qualitative study was conducted to understand dialectical functions of enrollment management and the dialectical responsibilities that Black women have while working in enrollment management. The theoretical framework of anti-Black womanism guided this study. Anti-Black womanism is a dual lens of BlackCrit (Dei, 2017; Dumas and Ross, 2016) and Womanism (Phillips, 2006). Furthermore, this study comprised the historical perspective and acknowledged the settler-colonial complex to best conceptualize the perceptions of Black people, particularly Black women. This study included 10 participants, …

In Order To Escort Her, Kimberly Baglieri

Theses and Dissertations

In Order To Escort Her is a thirty-five minute hybrid-documentary in which Lila, my great-aunt, converses with her niece, my mother, about various supernatural creature encounters and spirit visitations from relatives. This is interspersed with a “visitation” from another close relative, communicating from a different time and space dimension. By weaving together supernatural stories and matter-of-fact accounts of resilience and survival, a magical world is created where boundaries between the material and the invisible realms blur. The main thematic concerns of this film are love, care, presence in joy amidst terror, and the journey of the soul.

Black Feminist Thought, Interrupted: Dissecting The Voice Of Black Feminists In The Blogosphere And Their Engagement With Platform Affordances, Dawn G. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT, INTERRUPTED

DISSECTING THE VOICE OF BLACK FEMINISTS IN THE BLOGOSPHERE AND THEIR ENGAGEMENT WITH PLATFORM AFFORDANCES

By Dawn G. Johnson, Ph.D

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Media, Art, and Text Department in the College of Humanities and Sciences

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2021

Dissertation Chair: Dr. Archana Pathak, Associate Professor, Dept. of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University

Black women that have long searched for spaces to be creative and have voice due to their …

Chupa Chuparosas Y Chupacabras, Ruben U. Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

A Rascuache Nahual that uses therianthropy on the border between the US and Mexico border.

A Story About A Girl With Snakes For Hair, Kate M. Turner

Theses and Dissertations

My work is autobiographical. I use various art making processes to create a visual archive of my life. By abstracting these memories and experiences, I can examine how culture works surrounding issues of identity. This is my story.

Imaging Exploitation, Complexity, And Paradox In Subaltern Labor Photography, Mahnure Janis

Theses and Dissertations

Imaging Exploitation, Complexity, and Paradox in Subaltern Labor Photography is an expanded cinema performance examining 'cheap' labor in the fast fashion industry through a self-reflexive diasporic lens. The images and narration explores the garment factories in Bangladesh and contains ‘a photographer’s cognitive meta-data’, including ethical dilemmas while taking the images.

Adaptive Acts: Queer Voices And Radical Adaptation In Multi-Ethnic American Literary And Visual Culture, Michael M. Means

Theses and Dissertations

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant …

Responding To Change: Girl Scouts, Race, And The Feminist Movement, Phyllis E. Reske

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA) is to teach girls to be giving, self-sufficient, and independent in their homes and communities through volunteer work and earning merit badges. Open to all girls since its inception, the GSUSA offers Girl Scouts training in both gender-conforming and nontraditional vocations. However, during the first half of the twentieth century, segregation and domesticity was emphasized in American society. The organization began to focus less on careers, independence, and racial inclusion to preparing predominately white girls to be good wives and mothers. As Black Power and women’s liberation …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Long Vacation In Bk, Doll Chao

Theses and Dissertations

The diary of a transcontinental search for self and place, a journey through obtuse politics, cultural oppression, and loneliness - this film is the document of a lost generation of Taiwanese youth and its conflict with China, swirling in a transpacific gyre of sound, image, and text.

Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations

The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …

Tipping Point, Pang Z. Vang

Theses and Dissertations

What happens to a woman at the tipping point under oppression in a patriarchal society? How does she behave? Pulling from the vagina dentata mythologies, and personal and collective experiences of rape culture, I formed a body of work which problematize the stereotypical narrative of victim/perpetrator. As a visual and conceptual exploration, my work explores the themes of desire, agency/non-agency, and violence [as it manifests within and outside of the body]. Utilizing visual and conceptual quotations from film, pornography and sex toys, these works subvert the exoticized stereotype of the Asian woman as sexual plaything.

The Feminization Of Violence, Caitlin Logan

Theses and Dissertations

Grounded in the necessity of upending the economic base as it is defined by Louis Althusser, this paper seeks to express a possibility for the creation of a feminine voice, that when expressed as itself, independent of the pervasive nature of patriarchal power and significance, could be the very event that engenders the first real “violent” attack on the base. Using Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God, as an example of a uniquely feminine voice, this paper also seeks to empower the experience of the Black female aesthetic as a perspective capable of tapping the multiplicity of human …

A Model Of Women Entrepreneurs' Well-Being, Dianne Deborah Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

There has been a recent surge in the growth of women entrepreneurs and particularly minority women entrepreneurs in the United States. Women owned businesses play a key role in the United States economy – they are almost 10 million in number and represent over 35% of the total number of firms (U.S. Census, 2012). As the role of women entrepreneurs, and particularly, minority women entrepreneurs, in the U.S. grows, the need to understand this group becomes ever more important. Traditionally, the entrepreneurship literature has assumed the masculine perspective, with much of the foundational theories built upon research based on male …

Her-Story: Black, Middle-School Girls Exploring Their Intersectional Identities, Crystal Latanya Edwards

Theses and Dissertations

While intra-racial-group comparisons have lead scholars to argue that Black girls are succeeding academically and therefore require less explicit focus in educational research, there is little literature that focuses on the ways that Black girls’ experiences in formal educational spaces shape their emotional wellbeing and sense of intersectional identity—specifically, from their own perspectives (Paul, 2003; Townsend, Thomas, Neilands, and Jackson, 2010). In recognizing this relative invisibility, my research redirects focus to obstacles that typically go relatively unnoticed and unaddressed. Utilizing focus groups and diary/follow-up interviews as methods, I explore the subjective experience of Black girls within the educational context. Placing …

Exploring The Leadership Experiences Of Minority Women In A Black Greek Letter Sorority, Ashley Nichole Jennings

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative phenomenological research study was designed to explore and reveal the lived experiences of minority women in Black Greek Letter Sororities and their understanding of sorority membership and leadership development following graduation. Data collection was completed using two qualitative streams: online questionnaire and one-on-one interviews. This study will contribute to the discussion of leadership development for Black Greek Letter Sorority members. More specifically, this study focused on the role that a Black sorority has in developing minority female leaders as they matriculate and develop within higher education and simultaneously in the sisterhood. This research study provided suggestions on opportunities …

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, And The Creation Of "Authentic Voices" In The Black Women's Literary Tradition, Anna Storm

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on African American women’s literature from the 1890s through 1948, covering the New Negro movement and sentimental domestic novel, the folk writings of the early twentieth century, and white-life fiction. The study investigates writers and texts that at various points in the creation of a black women’s literary tradition have been labeled “inauthentic” or have otherwise received comparably little attention by scholars of the tradition. In particular, I examine the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Zora Neale Hurston, placing them in conversation with one another and within the broader context of black women’s writing at the turn …