Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Off The Rez: Witnessing Indigenous Knowledges Through Social Media, Deborah Hales

Ed.D. Dissertations in Practice

The term “Off the Rez” is used, in the title, to mean research that is not done on a reservation or in urban areas. This study aims to discover if social media can be used as an innovative option for non-Indigenous allies to conduct respectful research. The study research questions were, (1) can social media be used as a research tool, to witness Indigenous Knowledges? (2) Can social media be used as research, by non-Indigenous research allies, to have the least impact on Indigenous communities?

This research was conducted using social media, with selected Indigenous participants who were 18, identified …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Without A Trace: Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women And Exclusion In The Media, Nellasa Mackenzie Stewart

Honors College Theses

The research in this paper is designed to explore the lack of media coverage of missing and murdered indigenous women through primarily qualitative methods and techniques as well as interpret the significance of the lack of coverage through the lens of a critical analysis. The research will address how the coverage of missing indigenous women qualitatively differs with the coverage received by missing white women in the United States and Canada. The research approaches include the analysis of news sources detailing cases of missing indigenous women and missing white women and how their coverage qualitatively differs, as well as a …

Digital Indigeneity: Digital Media's Uses For Identity Formation, Education, And Activism By Indigenous People In The Northeastern United States, Virginia A. Mclaurin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to examine the types of digital media being produced in the Northeastern United States, its content, the goals and motivations of its creators, the processes underlying Indigenous digital media creation, and the desired and projected audiences of Indigenous digital artists and content creators. Resulting findings from this study illuminate long histories of Indigenous use of digital media tied to digital media's development in Indigenous lands. I argue that Native people have been producers and influencers in film and later, digital media, and have underwritten digital production due to its development on Indigenous lands. Through interviews and media …

Representing The Ali'i And Monarchy: Dress, Diplomacy, And Featherwork In Hawai'i, Tess Anderson

Scripps Senior Theses

When Native Hawaiians and haole (foreigners) first met, both participants belonged to fashion systems unknown to the other, composed of different materials, styles, tastes, standards, and construction techniques. As the outside world was introduced to the cultural heritage of Hawaiian hulu manu (featherwork), kūkaulani (chiefly fashion), and European skewed conceptions of Hawaiian indigeneity; the ali‘i (chiefs) and kama‘āina (commoners) received and adapted to incoming materials, technologies, and information. When these encounters transitioned into “prolonged contact” and settlement, dress and adornment proliferated in new ways. Analyzing the case studies of historic pā‘ū, holokū, ‘ahu'ula, and military uniforms shows the significance of …

Aloha Media: Negotiating Kānaka Maoli Representation And Identity In Television, Film, And Music, Colby Y. Miyose

Doctoral Dissertations

In her work on research and Indigenous communities, Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) points out that academic research is a site of contestation, struggle, and negotiation between the West and Indigenous people, and lays the groundwork for Indigenous researchers to write from a cultural perspective that serves their home community. Hawaiian cultural protocols serve as guidelines for my research. This dissertation, then, is simultaneously a critique of settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi and on screen, and as Foucault (1980) puts it, “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” (p.81)—an act of decolonial, Indigenous, and anticolonial thought. In this dissertation I argue that …

El Mar Y La Gente: Hacia Una Contextualización De Lo Indígena En El Botón De Nácar, Jonathan Braden Taylor

Honors Theses

El presente trabajo analiza las ramificaciones ontológicas, epistemológicas, y políticas del botón de nácar, un documental hecho en 2015 por el cineasta Patricio Guzmán. El siguiente análisis busca poner esta obra cinemática en el contexto de la formulación y el desarrollo del estado-nación chileno, lo cual ha ocurrido a expensas de las personas indígenas de la zona. Se observa que se emplea significación verdaderamente descolonizada en representaciones y discusiones de espacios acuáticos, lo cual engendra avances teóricos que utilizo para contextualizar el filme. Se sostiene que los efectos políticos de dicha significación descolonizada se ponen en marcha productivamente cuando son …

Time Machine Research And Approach, Tarek Bouraque

Theses and Dissertations

Time Machine is a hybrid documentary that explores the logics of enslavement, colonialism, eurocentrism and their interconnectedness in our globalized world. Mustapha Azemmouri, born in 1502, undertakes a journey to the 21st century to recount his own story of enslavement and exploration, and reflects on a collective puzzle of 500 years of hidden history.

Remixing The Archives: Indigenous Interpretations Of History And The Future, Marcella Ernest

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital …

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

Intimate Indigeneities: Aspirational Affective Solidarity In 21St Century Indigenous Mexican Representation, Jacob S. Neely

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation analyzes six contemporary texts (2008–18) that represent indigenous Mexicans to transnational audiences. Despite being disparate in authorship, genre, and mode of presentation, all address the failings of the Mexican state discourse of mestizaje that exalts indigenous antiquities while obfuscating the racialized socioeconomic hierarchies that marginalize contemporary indigenous peoples. Casting this conflict synecdochally as the national imposing itself on quotidian life, the texts help the reader/viewer come to understand it in personal, affective terms. The audience is encouraged to identify with how it feels to exist in a space where, paradoxically, the interruption of everyday life has become the …

The Examination Of News Media Representation Of Indigenous Murder Victims In Canada: A Case Study Of Colten Boushie’S Death, Latasha Vanevery

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The power of media outlets such as newspaper and televised news coverage could shape public perception and influence our policies on issues addressed in the news. More specifically, the media representations of Indigenous people in Canada often include racism, stereotypical assumptions, power struggles, and inaccurate accounts of the event being captured (Johnson, 2011). As a result, the western dominant perspective of Indigenous people would not be challenged resulting in the public perceiving Indigenous people as a group to be overlooked upon. To date, existing research on the media representations of Indigenous murder victims in Canada has focused solely on missing …

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Representation Of Settler Colonial Violence In Palestine, A Thesis In Support Of The Multi-Media Exhibition Choreographies Of Resistance, Rehab Nazzal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project-based dissertation emerges from my engagement with theories of representation, settler colonialism, and genocide, as well as involvement with direct engagement through embodied experience of the Palestinian reality in the colonized West Bank during 2015–2017. The artworks and written components of this project seek to represent shards of the multilayered Western-Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine through a focus on the struggle and resilience of the Palestinian people and the endurance of their land. Land seizing as the aim of settler colonialism and the colonised bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance are central to the various …

The Postmodern Indian: Representation And The Films Of Sherman Alexie, Tara P. Mccrink Burcham

Dissertations

For hundreds of years, Native Americans have been characters in American media. For most of those years, whites determined the way in which Native Americans were represented. First in print, radio, silent movies and later talkies and television, representations of Native Americans have included being uneducated sidekicks, savages, noble savages seeking to steal white women, drunken idiots, or hilarious jesters all for the entertainment of viewers. This troublesome history of negative depictions of Native Americans is the reason this research is directed at the films by Native American writer and filmmaker Sherman Alexie. This research is a qualitative analysis of …

Spectral Bodies: Women's Resistance Across Time In North America, Whitney C. Evanson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contrasts the lived experiences of feminists within the EZLN in Mexico with the historical persecution of community outsiders during the Salem witch trials. I want to explore the differences between a radical political and social movement (the EZLN), and the radical shift in history in which women were accused of witchcraft based on hysteria and rumors. There are parallels between the witch trials and the causes of the Zapatista movement in the ways that women's bodies were treated--their political usefulness to create fear and obedience from citizens by murdering them for their defiance, burying them in shallow graves. …

Settler Colonial Ways Of Seeing: Documentary Governance Of Indigenous Life In Canada And Its Disruption, Danielle Taschereau Mamers

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Settler colonialism in Canada has and continues to dispossess Indigenous nations of their lands and authority. Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing argues that a politics of visibility has been central to these structures of invasion and dispossession. In an effort to transform sovereign Indigenous nations into “Indians”, the state has used techniques of bureaucratic documentation to naturalize the classification of Indigenous bodies as racially inferior and thus subject to a range of violent interventions. This politics of visibility fails to see Indigenous people as people who matter.

Using Indigenous feminist critique, discourse analysis, and aesthetics to analyze federal legislation, …

Different Names For Bullying, Marco Poggio

Capstones

“There's all different forms of bullying,” says Steven Gray, a Lakota rancher and former law enforcement officer living in South Dakota. In this look into Gray’s life, we learn about two instances of bullying: the psychological and physical harassment that pushed his son, Tanner Thomas Gray, to commit suicide at age 12; And the controversial construction of an oil pipeline in an ancient tribal land that belongs to the Lakota people by rights of a treaty signed in 1851, which Gray sees as an institutional abuse infringing on the sovereignty of his people. Gray is involved in the movement that …

Impassioned Objects And Seething Absences: The Olympics In Canada, National Identity And Consumer Culture, Estee Fresco

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation critically analyzes the commercial practices and products of the 1976 Montreal, 1988 Calgary and 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The central questions I ask are: how did the Olympics in Canada become a platform for the intersection of patriotism and consumption? What were the key ideas about Canadian identity, history, and citizenship that Olympic organizers and corporate sponsors promoted? How did commodities symbolize these ideas? Finally, how do these ideas relate to political policies and practices?

This work contributes to an understanding of how branded commodities shape Canadian identity and citizenship norms by arguing that the objects sold during the …

The Adversity Pop Culture Has Posed, Darel Joseph

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

I am a collage artist working with multiple mediums such as paint, photography, video, audio, and performance. As a New Orleans’ native, I have a unique history that is unflattering, for my history echoes that of America’s historical misdeeds. I make sociopolitical art because I am of a historically oppressed people. I make art that celebrates my diverse culture that is a collage of Native American, African, and New Orleans’ French Creole.

Native Newspapers: The Emergence Of The American Indian Press 1960-Present, Russell M. Page

CMC Senior Theses

During the 1960s and 1970s, tribes across Indian Country struggled for tribal sovereignty against “termination” policies that aimed to disintegrate the federal government’s trust responsibilities and treaty obligations to tribes and assimilate all Indians into mainstream society. Individual tribes, pan-Indian organizations, and militant Red Power activists rose up in resistance to these policies and fought for self-determination: a preservation of Indian distinctiveness and social and political autonomy. This thesis examines a crucial, but often overlooked, element of the self-determination movement. Hundreds of tribal and national-scope activist newspapers emerged during this era and became the authentic voices of American Indians and …

From Where I Am Standing: Indigenous Narrative And Photo Documentary, Nestor R. Veloz Passalacqua

Ethnic Studies

Latin American Indigenous Peoples (LAIP) are a marginalized segment in Latin America. They inhabit a sub-America and are forced to migrate due to socio-political struggle and cultural coercion. LAIP experience a transnational and transborder migration that reflects the quality of cultural hybridity and of regional, ethnic, and cultural crossings. The purpose of this study is to research LAIP ways of reclaiming and reproducing cultural practices that elicit Indigenous awareness, knowledge, and ethnic identification in a transnational setting. The study examines through interviews and photographs transborder experiences and the lives of the participants. As a result, the project reveals that LAIP …

Filmmaker, Lawyer, Indian Chief: The Negotiation Of Identity In An Indigenous Film Festival, William Lempert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since colonial contact, indigenous peoples have been predominantly represented by community outsiders. As a result, native peoples have rarely had a primary, or even collaborative role, in the production of these representations. However, in the last two decades, there has been an unprecedented proliferation of indigenous created films and the festivals that feature them. The Denver Indigenous Arts and Film Festival is an annual festival that exclusively showcases films made by and with indigenous peoples. The festival’s 2009 theme of “Telling Our Stories” emphasized cultural control of representation and the transmission of traditional knowledge.

In this thesis, I show that …