Social Justice Commons^™

Inclusivity In The Archives: Expanding Undergraduate Pedagogies For Diversity And Inclusion, Amy J. Lueck, Beverlyn Law, Isabella Zhang

English

This chapter uses the experience of two undergraduate students conducting research in their university archives to consider the “hidden curriculum” entailed in archival research at some institutions. When diverse identities and experiences are not represented in our archives, we run the risk of communicating a lack of value for those identities, producing a feeling of marginalization and exclusion for some students and foreclosing an opportunity to build solidarity across difference for others. In light of the limited holdings at many university archives and the increased prevalence of archival research in the undergraduate classroom, the authors draw on research from writing …

Jean Raspail, Michel Houellebecq, And Jenny Erpenbeck: Acknowledging The Barbarian Within, John C. Hawley

English

This paper seeks to discuss recent sites of contestation of the implications one assigns to migration from Africa and the Middle East to Central and Western Europe. It will be predominantly Eurocentric in its data and analysis, dealing less with the motivations of the migrants and the second generation, and more with the various responses to that migration among Europeans (e.g., what are “they” doing to “us”). The major literary texts involved in the paper will be Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015), and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (2015), with initial consideration of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973). …

Community And Conscience Formation, Phyllis R. Brown

English

The three Cs, competence, conscience, and compassion, are fundamental to Santa Clara University's distinctive identity as a Jesuit and Catholic university. However, a fourth C, community-and communities within communities-provides a context for conscience formation through dialogue and critical engagement not only with the academic subject matter of course work but also outside the classroom with the wicked problems facing humanity. This chapter will explore ways individuals and programs at Santa Clara University (SCU) invite students to experience communities in classroom and co-curricular settings that encourage dialogue, critical engagement, and social consciousness aimed at fostering the greater good. This engagement is …

Gay And Lesbian Culture And Politics, John C. Hawley

English

As laws change and we move several generations away from the times of greatest struggle, the atmosphere that created the contemporary scene for gay and lesbian citizens, their culture and politics, becomes increasingly remote and potentially forgotten. As recent historians have recalled, though, “This was a population too shy and fearful to even raise its hand, a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation’s culture,” –an “invisible people” (Clendinen, 11). The movement for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, considered by many to have originated with the …

Postcolonial Theory, John C. Hawley

English

Rather than agreeing to any one meaning or referent, most critics these days speak of ‘post-colonialisms’ to refer principally to ‘historical, social and economic material conditions’ and at other times to ‘historically-situated imaginative products’ and ‘aesthetic practices: representations, discourses and values’ (McLeod 2000: 254). Arising from subaltern studies, its theorists embrace hybridity, indict alterity, analyze colonial discourse, and employ strategic essentialism to promote identity politics. Under its influence, a strain of self-interrogation has for decades run as an undercurrent through much of anthropology and archaeology. Topics including looting, repatriation, stewardship, and the transformation of disciplinary identity are now persistent tropes …

Chattering Classes/Twittering Revolutionaries: Journalism, Social Media, And The Arab Spring, John C. Hawley

English

In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said discusses internationality and cosmopolitanism against the backdrop of the Gulf War, and Ree's view that the "nation-form is a kind of false consciousness", as if it were "an expression of popular subjective will" (Said, 1993: 10). But the monopolization of power by central national authorities results in a kind of façade, whereby "processes which are actually the effect of internationality are experienced as an expression of the natures of different nations and their individual members" (Said, 1993: 10, emphasis added). Yet nationalism sits uncomfortably in countries that, some might say, were in some cases …

Distancing The Past: New Forms Of Discomfort With Aids In The U.S, John C. Hawley

English

In his Introduction to this collection, Gustavo Subero makes reference to the AIDS Quilt, a reference made especially significant since the year 2012 marked its 25th anniversary. The whole quilt had been last displayed in 1996; in the summer of 2012, 8.000 panels were rotated each day in the National Mall in Washington, DC. The quilt, composed of thousands of 3’ x 6’ panels (intentionally the size of a human grave), currently consists of over 48.000 panels honoring more than 94.000 individuals who have died of AIDS. In the early days of the quilt, in the 1980s and 1990s, the …

"I Enter Into Its Burning": Yvonne Vera's Beautiful Cauldron Of Violence, John C. Hawley

English

Commentators inevitably remark upon Yvonne Vera's prose and upon its startling application to the violent episodes she recounts. Some find it inappropriate, self-conscious, more suited to poetry than to prose. Others (and sometimes the same folks) describe it as by far her strongest suit, wherein descriptive powers overtake narration and plot becomes inevitably amorphous - but lovely. In this essay I wish to analyze why this conflicted response would not have concerned the author and why, in fact, she would have sought to discomfort the reader while bringing pleasure. Many writers before Vera have struggled over the applicability of art …

Ignatian Values In The Core Curriculum, Phyllis Brown, Diane Jonte-Pace

English

In this essay we examine three major resources for revising the core curriculum in Jesuit universities, commenting on how each can contribute to an integrated Ignatian core, guiding us toward answers to our questions about content and pedagogy. Our rich Jesuit tradition is one of these resources. Two other important resources are contemporary publications about promoting citizenship in higher education and about supporting student learning through assessment.

Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley

English

l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and …

Biafra As Heritage And Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, Iweala, John C. Hawley

English

Eddie Iroh made the observation that writers of his generation, who had lived through the Biafran conflict, were too close to the suffering to write the definitive accounts of the war, and that the task would fall to later generations. This essay looks at three later accounts Dulue Mbachu’s War Games (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Uzodinma Iweala’s Beast of No Nation (2005) to assess the war’s impact on Nigerian cultural expression in the twenty-first century. As the eldest of the three writers, Mbachu lingers more on the war itself than do the other …

Introduction: Unrecorded Lives, John C. Hawley

English

When anthropology student (and later, novelist) Amitav Ghosh set out from Oxford to Egypt in 1980 to find a suitable subject for his research, he may not have suspected the impact the trip would have on his life. He succeeded in completing the required tome for his degree and then went on to write In an Antique Land (1992), an unusually constructed book that deals with themes of historical and cultural displacement, with alienation and something we might these days, under the influence of postcolonial theory, call "subaltern cosmopolitanism." Others might recognize the genre in which Ghosh is writing as …

Edward Said, John Berger, Jean Mohr: In Search Of An Other Optic, John C. Hawley

English

We have no known Einsteins, no Chagall, no Freud or Rubenstein to protect us with a legacy of glorious achievements.
-Said, After the Last Sky ( 17)

This humble epigraph spoken on behalf of the Palestinian people by one of its most visible apologists now serves ironically as his own epitaph, for Edward Said surely has achieved as impressive a position in academia as anyone in the twentieth century, and he now enters the lists of memorable contributors to the human project. One notes that such a sentence, relatively brief as it may be, nonetheless & bristles with the combative …

The War Of The Worlds, Wells, And The Fallacy Of Empire, John C. Hawley

English

In his summary of the contemporary reviews of The War of the Worlds (1898), William J. Scheick notes that their extensive number suggests that readers now recognized that Wells was an emerging writer whom they could not ignore. "There were, again," Scheick notes, "reservations about slipshod style, hasty plotting, vulgar content and cheap effects; but these doubts were overrun by the general verdict that this romance was one of the most ingenious stories of the year and the best work to date of an author who was one of the most original of the younger English novelists" (Scheick 5). Earlier …

Postcolonial Theory, John C. Hawley

English

Colonialism and its aftermath prompt a form of cultural studies that seeks to address questions of identity politics and justice that are the ongoing legacy of empires. Postcolonial theory has its origins in resistance movements, principally at the local, and frequently at nonmetropolitan, levels. Among its early thinkers, three seem of special importance: Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and Frantz Fanon. Antonio Gram sci ( 1891- 193 7) was a founder of the Communist Party in Italy. In his Prison Notebooks (1971 ), he wrote insightfully about the proletariat, designated by him as subalterns; his thoughts regarding the responsibilities of public …

Making Disciples Of All Nations, John C. Hawley

English

The whole problem is this: how to utter God in a practice of faith where I must decide what I wish to do with the woman or man I find in my path-make of him or her a human being with a right to life or a slave for life.-Jean-Marc Ela (139) Perhaps there is such a thing as seduction. Conversion. Perhaps cultures absorb one another. If it is true that the Franciscan padre forced the Eucharist down the Indian's throat, maybe she forgot to close her mouth. Maybe she swallowed the Franciscan priest. After all, the churches of Latin …

We Wretched Of The Earth: The Search For A Language Of Justice, John C. Hawley

English

"In the beginning was the Word," writes John-God's revealing utterance that "was made flesh and lived among us." This incarnational character of the Word, this "living among us," has demanded of Christians in each age a reinterpretation of its original and ongoing meaning. If the protean nature of God's self-expression has seen a continuing "translation" in each age, though, it is becoming increasingly evident among church members that a similar task is also required in each ethnic milieu. The "us" among whom the Word lives is made up of many communities of discourse, and a logocentric theology like Christianity must …

Mongo Beti And Jean Marc Éla: Literary And Christian Liberation In Cameroon, John C. Hawley

English

In his fascinating study of contemporary African intellectuals and their struggle to set themselves apart from their European educations, K wame Anthony Appiah describes the intellectual ferment throughout the continent as producing "new, unpredictable fusions" because Africans "have the great advantage of having before [them] the European and American--and the Asian and Latin American--experiments with modernity to ponder as [they] make [their] choices" (134). Appiah uses the example of his own sister's wedding in Ghana to exemplify the hybridized role that religion continues to play in that self-definition. The ceremony followed the Methodist ritual; a Roman Catholic bishop offered the …

Responses To Charles Kingsley’S Attack On Political Economy., John C. Hawley

English

In 1850, Charles Kingsley lightheartedly told a friend that "The 'Christian Socialist' sells about 1500, and is spreading; but not having been yet cursed by any periodical, I fear it is doing no good."(l) Writing under the pseudonym 'Parson Lot," this young enthusiast did not have much longer to wait for that token of "success." Just two years later, in his defensive Who Are the Friends of Order? Kingsley acknowledged that the Christian Socialists were now besieged on all sides, and had "to hear Edinburgh Reviewers complaining of them for wishing to return to feudalism and medieval bigotry while Quarterly …