American Studies Commons^™

A Slowly Starving Race: Land And The Language Of Hunger In Zitkala-Ša’S "Blue-Star Woman", Adam R, Brantley

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper proposes that the motif of starvation in Zitkala-Ša’s 1921 short story, “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” is in fact a metaphor for the dispossession of Native American lands and its disastrous effects on Native American livelihood and culture. Though much scholarship has been done on sentimental rhetoric in Zitkala-Ša’s fiction, critics have not yet explored its connection to this the most immediate Zitkala-Ša’s concerns. This essay first unpacks letters from Zitkala-Ša’s personal archives to demonstrate her individual interest in dispossession, and then examines “Blue-Star Woman’s” ever-present language of hunger through this lens of land loss. In doing …

Bloodland: A Holistic Approach To Contemporary Reclamation Of Native Female Power, Anna Kendall

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Examining The Strategies Of Formation And Action Among Social Movements: A Comparison Of The Civil Rights Movement And Black Lives Matter, Hailee Saxton

Political Science Theses and Capstones

In today’s tumultuous political landscape, the question of what makes an effective social movement? is often asked. This can be a complicated question to answer as social movements vary greatly across racial, ethnic, economic, and political boundaries. Therefore, I am conducting a case comparison of two widely-known socio-political organizations, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter. In this comparison I will examine whether or not they truly fit the definition of a social movement, look at the strategies of action that have or could prove successful in enacting long-standing socio-political change, and make recommendations on how movements could continue …

How Do Native American Women Win Elections In Non-Native Districts?, Opalina Peralta

Political Science Theses and Capstones

In light of the recent tensions between Native American tribes and non-tribal elected leaders over such issues as environmental protection and treaty violations, caused in part by the United States' disproportionately Caucasian electoral representation, I aim to bring light the obstacles that Native Americans face in electoral politics. I analyze state legislative elections in which Native American candidates win. Using the data from the 2016 National Census and from University of North Dakota, Professor Mark Trahant. I hypothesize that the reason many Native American candidates win is because they are tied to non-native elements of the community. The two candidates …

Lewis In The Rye: An Approach To Controversial Literature, Abigail Griffiths

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis aims to coalesce literary criticism with Christian theology to provide a guideline for how Christians, who uphold a certain moral logic, should interact with literature that sparks controversy among readers. An analysis of J.D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye (1951) will be considered through the lens of C.S. Lewis’ commentary on good reading, good critique, and good art. Catcher in the Rye, an American novel, contains elements of derogatory language, promiscuous scenes, and insinuations of nihilism. How would C.S. Lewis, a British novelist and a prominent figure in Christian thought, read Salinger’s work: would he find …

Rock Island Revisited: Black Hawk’S Life, Keokuk’S Oratory, And The Critique Of Us Indian Policy, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article examines the writings and oratory of the Sauk tribal leaders Keokuk and Black Hawk in the context of Indian diplomacy at Rock Island Indian agency. While Black Hawk's autobiography Life of Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk (1833) is widely read today, Keokuk's oratory has typically been dismissed as an accommodationist extension of US governmental discourses, as op-posed to Black Hawk's rhetoric of resistance and criticism of the Black Hawk War. Complicating these historical narratives, this article argues that both Black Hawk and Keokuk produced collaborative publications that in similar ways critiqued the management of Indian affairs within networks of Indian agents, traders, …

Stepping Out Of Photographs: Stopping The Myth Of The Vanishing Native Through Reclaiming Personhood In The Edward Curtis Project, Mari Murdock

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Forum Prompt: Approaching Indigeneity, Learning Modernity, Christine Bold

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

“Nourished By My Mother”: Zitkala-Ša And The Indian Sterilization Project, Lainey Wardlow

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Hip hop, as a cultural phenomenon, leverages rap as a narrative form in periods of acutely visible political unrest in the Black American community to combat pejorative narratives of Black America as revealed in the American criminal justice system’s treatment of Black Americans. Hip-hop themes were prevalent in golden-age rap of the 1980s in response Regan-era war-on-drugs policy, which severely disadvantaged the Black community and devalued the Black personhood. Hip hop used narrative to reclaim the Black personhood while it served to encourage political involvement in the Black community, urging Blacks to participate in rewriting the narrative of Black America. …

“Sprinkled, Cleansed, And Comforted”: The Early American Jail, Jacob Johnson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

The Ethos Of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric And The Democratic Function Of American Protest And Countercultural Literature, Jeffrey Lorino Jr

Dissertations (1934 -)

My dissertation, “The Ethos of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric and the Democratic Function of American Protest and Countercultural Literature, 1940-1962,” establishes a theoretical frame-work, the literary epideictic, for reading the African American social protest literature of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and the American countercultural literature of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. I argue that epideictic rhetoric affords insight into how these authors’ narratives embody a post-World War II “ethos of dissent,” a counterdiscourse that emerges out of a climate of dynamism deadlocked with controlling ideologies. Epideictic, the branch of rhetoric concerned with civic matters, commends or censures a particular individual, …

The Semi-Anti-Apocalypse Of Black Panther, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is one of a series of films reviews of Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler.

The Beholder, Allan Lake

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

A poem on the effect of landscape on the emotions.

Shifting Rurality American Gothic, Iowa Nice, Biotech And Political Expectations In Rural America, William D. Nichols 890252

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper traces the linkage between heritage landscape within the context of the election of Donal Trump. Trump's invocations of heritage riled certain regions of the US which had a distinct connection to Regionalism, both as a political idea and as an aesthetic practice. Focusing on Iowa, home to the quintessential American painting, American Gothic, the paper looks at modernity and agriculture, and how the two categories seem to rely on (but also negate) heritage. By examining what a genetically modified landscape might mean in relation to the historical image of the pastoral/provincial farmer, a network of frictions and …

Poetry Of Roe 8, Nandi Chinna

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Poetry of Roe 8

The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started …

Review Of Thinking Continental: Writing The Planet One Place At A Time, John Charles Ryan Dr

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Review of Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017) edited by Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall and O. Alan Weltzien

Saturn/Cronus-11, Joel Weishaus

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

“Saturn/Cronus-11” is from a Cosmography, an in-progress project of Literary Digital Art that invokes the gods of seven planets in our celestial neighborhood; plus The Sun, The Moon; and Incognita. It includes my trope of invagination: fragments exhumed from the authored corpus and transplanted into the body of a living text, which, along with superimposed images and animations, advances us toward a more magnanimous, transdisciplinary sphere. The project also includes notes.

The Multi-Vocal Trailscape Of The Natchitoches Trace: A Trail Of Tears, Trade And Transformation, Jade L. Robison

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper demonstrates how individuals have inscribed the Natchitoches Trace trailscape with meaningful narratives via oral traditions, historical accounts and material evidence, and considers how descendent populations curate their heritage in such a landscape. Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri River near St. Louis, the Natchitoches Trace stretches southwest through the Ozark region in Missouri and Arkansas, and onto Natchitoches, Louisiana. Created by pre-Columbian groups for trading purposes, the trail was later utilised by early European pioneer families for westward expansion. The 1830 Indian Removal Act forced the repurposing of the trail as a route of exile for displaced …

Imaginative Geographies: Visualising The Poetics Of History And Space, Clive Barstow

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.

Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends …