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Full-Text Articles in Cultural History

Bearing The Benefit: An Evolution Of Passing To Trespassing & How We Got Here, Kennedi J. Williams Apr 2024

Bearing The Benefit: An Evolution Of Passing To Trespassing & How We Got Here, Kennedi J. Williams

Honors College Theses

In recent years, we have seen a shift in the social treatment of white people in America. The desire to be politically correct at all times, in hopes of avoiding becoming the next viral “Karen” or racist has become imperative. The following thesis will explore the latest trend of white women buying racial capital by producing mixed-race children. At first glance, this idea can be a bit problematic. How can we assume the reasoning behind a woman choosing to bear a child? With this in mind, I would like to emphasize that individuals do not have to consciously be racist …


International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera Jun 2023

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …


Ancestral Pursuits: A Multicultural Celebration Of Identity & Race, Charlotte Cates Castro May 2021

Ancestral Pursuits: A Multicultural Celebration Of Identity & Race, Charlotte Cates Castro

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Using critical historical rhetorical methods along with critical race and decolonial theory, this project situates ancestral pursuits as a communication-centered discursive formation by investigating the rhetorical strategies modern biotech and genealogy companies utilize to influence contemporary discourse around identity and belonging and narrate ethnicity and genealogy as acts of consumption. Through direct-to-consumer DNA testing and complimentary services, modern day biotech and genealogy companies like Ancestry and 23andMe market personalized insights into ancestry, genealogy, inherited traits, and health data that promise to connect users to their past, as well as to situate them in present-day society, through a deeper understanding of …


“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar Jun 2020

“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how audiences engage with U.S. Latinx media representations through the practice of critical media literacy. I interrogate how media consumers construct critical media literacy through interacting with U.S. Latinx figures on digital media platforms, particularly on the social-media app, Twitter, and the user-generated video content platform, YouTube. Throughout this thesis, I argue that users on these platforms who engage with U.S. Latinx pop culture figures, like Jennifer Lopez and Belcalis Almanzar (Cardi B), read, digest, and comprehend a variety of multimedia images, texts, or videos, and that this engagement becomes an accessible form of critical media literacy, …


I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo, Luis A. Vasquez La Roche Jan 2020

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo, Luis A. Vasquez La Roche

Theses and Dissertations

I Hope My Black Skin Don't Dirt This White Tuxedo is a series of works--sculpture, installations, and performances--that explore themes of shame, failure, commodity, ephemerality, ritual, resilience, erasure, race, and death. The research and interest in these themes stem from a page of the Trinidad and Tobago Slave Registry. I use the research that surrounds this document to highlight different moments in history, in my personal life, and to imagine near futures.


Undying (And Undead) Modern National Myths: Cannibalism And Racial Mixture In Contemporary Brazilian Vampire Fiction, Jacob C. Brown Jun 2019

Undying (And Undead) Modern National Myths: Cannibalism And Racial Mixture In Contemporary Brazilian Vampire Fiction, Jacob C. Brown

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Contemporary cultural media illustrates the vampire as an important symbolic figure in the Brazilian imaginary. For example, in twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian fiction, television, and political discourse, vampires have risen from their supposedly European origins as expressions of urban decay, comic excess, and government corruption in Brazil. Beyond these representations, I focus on three contemporary novels in which the vampire also plays a starring role. O vampiro que descobriu o Brasil (1999) by Ivan Jaf, Aventuras do vampiro de Palmares (2014) by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Dom Pedro I Vampiro (2015) by Nazarethe Fonseca stand out from other creative reimaginings …


Entwined Threads Of Red And Black: The Hidden History Of Indigenous Enslavement In Louisiana, 1699-1824, Leila K. Blackbird Dec 2018

Entwined Threads Of Red And Black: The Hidden History Of Indigenous Enslavement In Louisiana, 1699-1824, Leila K. Blackbird

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Contrary to nationalist teleologies, the enslavement of Native Americans was not a small and isolated practice in the territories that now comprise the United States. This thesis is a case study of its history in Louisiana from European contact through the Early American Period, utilizing French Superior Council and Spanish judicial records, Louisiana Supreme Court case files, statistical analysis of slave records, and the synthesis and reinterpretation of existing scholarship. This paper primarily argues that it was through anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity and with the utilization of socially constructed racial designations that “Indianness” was controlled and exploited, and that Native Americans …


In The Land Of The Mountain Gods: Ethnotrauma And Exile Among The Apaches Of The American Southwest, M. Grace Hunt Watkinson Jun 2016

In The Land Of The Mountain Gods: Ethnotrauma And Exile Among The Apaches Of The American Southwest, M. Grace Hunt Watkinson

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In the mid to late nineteenth century, two Indigenous groups of New Mexico territory, the Mescalero and the Chiricahua Apaches, faced violence, imprisonment, and exile. During a century of settler influx, territorial changeovers, vigilante violence, and Indian removal, these two cousin tribes withstood an experience beyond individual pain best described as ethnotrauma. Rooted in racial persecution and mass violence, this ethnotrauma possessed layers of traumatic reaction that not only revolved around their ethnicity, but around their relationship with their home lands as well. Disconnected from the ritual resources and sacred geographies that made up every day Apache living, both groups …


Musical Influence On Apartheid And The Civil Rights Movement, Katherine D. Power Apr 2014

Musical Influence On Apartheid And The Civil Rights Movement, Katherine D. Power

Student Publications

Black South Africans and African Americans not only share similar identities, but also share similar historical struggles. Apartheid and the Civil Rights Movement were two movements on two separate continents in which black South Africans and African Americans resisted against deep injustice and defied oppression. This paper sets out to demonstrate the key role that music played, through factors of globalization, in influencing mass resistance and raising global awareness. As an elemental form of creative expression, music enables many of the vital tools needed to overcome hatred and violence. Jazz and Freedom songs were two of the most influential genres, …