Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

El Mundo Anti-Negro Y Los Hip-Hop Blues: Los Rakas Y J-Cole, Josué R. López

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Tenemos que contender con el mundo anti-negro. Los Rakas, un dúo artístico panameño-estadounidense, y J-Cole, un artista afro-estadounidense, utilizan al hip-hop como una avenida para comunicar sus ansiedades, sufrimientos y fortalecerse en la lucha infinita al ser el Otro Oscuro. Los blues forman parte de como uno lidia con la permanencia del racismo y nuestra existencia en un mundo anti-negro. A través de Frantz Fanon, Derrick Bell y Lewis Gordon, argumento que el estilo musical de J-Cole y Los Rakas constituye una forma de los hip-hop blues. Examino las canciones “Sueño Americano” y “Neighbors” para analizar cómo los artistas entienden …

The Earliest Surviving Version Of Charles Chesnutt's "Rena Walden," The Short Story That Became "The House Behind The Cedars", Dominic Yarabe

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

My research project presents an edited version, with an introduction, of the earliest surviving version of “Rena Walden,” the short story that ultimately became the novel The House Behind the Cedars. The novel is a passing story in which a light-skinned, mixed race girl enters white society to live life as a white woman. Interestingly, however, the short story on which the novel was based began as a fiction with no white characters whatsoever. As the manuscript of this story is often difficult to read because of hard-to-decipher handwritten revisions, I had to create my own editorial policy to …

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …

The Communal "I": Exclusion And Belonging In American Autobiography, Melissa Coss Aquino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Communal “I” in American autobiography emerges as an aesthetic response to the pressure of using “the master’s tools” to write from a community on the margins to disclose identity in the conflicts of exclusion and belonging. In this case “the master’s tools” to refer to several distinct elements the communal “I” is tasked with navigating: the use of what we have come to identify as standard English, the form and function of European autobiography as a celebration of individual exceptionalism, and the contradictory pressures on these autobiographies to both elevate and protect the communities in question from further marginalization. …

Between Settlers And Sovereignty: Literary Solidarity And Anti-Colonial Discourse In Territorial Hawai‘I, 1887–1959, Trevor J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project reclaims a history of anti-colonial discourse and collaborations among Asian settlers and Native Hawaiians between 1887-1959 in Territorial Hawai‘i, drawing from archival works, including King David Kalākaua’s poetry, correspondence, and speeches regarding the Hawaiian monarch’s responsibilities toward Asian laborers, Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana‘ole’s speeches about Hawaiian land rights and Asian farmers, and texts written by local Asian authors of the early 20th century, including Fred Kinzaburō Makino, Takie Okumura, James T. Hamada, Wai Chee Chun, and Noboru Itamura. Through this recovery of texts, I show how the racialization of Native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants by the U.S. territorial …

“The Only Way Out Is In”: Negotiating Identity Through Narrative In The House On Mango Street And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Brianna E. Taylor

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

While aimed at vastly different audiences, Sandra Cisneros’s beloved coming-of-age story The House on Mango Street and Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao both uniquely capture the complexities of navigating the hyphenated territory between their respective Mexican-American and Dominican-American identities. Cisneros engages readers with the simple yet profound narrative voice of Esperanza in a series of vignettes that subtly reveal a growing consciousness of her role as a young Mexican-American woman and her creative consciousness as an artist. Through the multifaceted narrative perspective of Yunior, Díaz skillfully weaves together “ghetto nerd” Oscar de …

Engaging The Traumatic Past In An Apocalyptic Present, Timothy J. Jerome

The Criterion

This essay explores the necessity of confronting the underlying issues of one's history in order to heal historic wounds, despite the difficulty and immediacy of one's current struggles. I examine how Pentecostalism functions as a touchstone to the past for John Grimes and his family in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, and eventually allows protagonist John to transcend the traditional forms of self-identification in order to create a new informed model of identity within the religion.

Deconstructing Native American Stereotypes Through The Reading Of Contemporary Multicultural Literature, Morgan Mcdougall

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

This project will look specifically at the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Some of the questions to be addressed throughout the project include: what does it mean to be the “Other,” how can minority multicultural literature be used to help students deconstruct racial stereotypes, and what are the systems in place that have formed the division between “us” and the “other?” I will begin with a historical account of interactions with Native Americans within the United States, beginning with initial encounters and moving up to modern times. Providing this historical information will help …

Straddling Two Words: Biracial Identity In "Flight", Rachel Ramlawi

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

If borderlands are the space between two territories that is the space bi-racial people occupy every day. Their entire life is lived in the space between creating a unique form of othering where they’re never fully part of either community their parents belonged to. In Sherman Alexie’s novel Flight, the Narrator Zits is a bi-racial Native American teenager who constantly grapples with his identity. Through the theme of past-lives Zits is able to embrace both parts of his ethnicity, establish his identity, and grow up. It is a coming of age tale that is remarkably unique. This paper draws …

Four Lines About Archives, Ismael Santos

The Crambo

This attempts to analyze and interpret the different moods, methods, and experiences of a new Grad student/Teaching Assistant in Miami, Florida.

Telling Room: Color In Action, Ryan Poag, Meaghan Gonsior

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

The Telling Room is a nonprofit writing center in Portland that helps young writers ages 6 to 18 build confidence, strengthen literacy skills, and provide real opportunities for students to display their creativity for audiences. Every year they approach creative writing through a unique theme to help keep young writers engaged. Their anthology’s theme this year is COLORS. Colors can symbolize and illustrate various aspects of life including human emotion, energy levels, and cultural phenomena. Using the connection between color and creativity, we have embarked on a project to produce a series of six short videos based on the colors …

How Has Post Colonialism Affected Our Perception In The Novels “No Longer At Ease” By Chinua Achebe And “Samskara” By U.R Ananthamurthy?, Aaryan Manoj Nair

Publications and Research

A study in post-colonialism is a highly enticing endeavor. In the modern society, postcolonial literature is largely underappreciated in contrast to the more opulent reception of the Victorian or Elizabethan era of literature. The truth is, even today, modern perceptions of many colonial nations are largely constructed by their colonial masters. There is certainly a bias due to the influence of Western Hegemony and its monopoly on global media. The Western world still possesses a tendency to discredit anything which does not conform to its democratic liberalist ideals without glancing at other local factors. In the modern world, while the …

Aas 267 African American Literature, Anne Rice

Open Educational Resources

A survey course that will take us from the early days of enslavement to the present. We will read, analyze, and discuss literary texts written by African Americans, paying particular attention to the political, historical and social context that informs these texts.

The full course site is available at https://aas267.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, And Environmental Narrative By Alexa Weik Von Mossner, David Tagnani

The Goose

Review of Alexa Weik von Mossner's Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative.

The Frederick Douglass Diary: A Transcription, Andrew Lang, Joshua Rio-Ross

College of Science and Engineering Faculty Research and Scholarship

This document contains the transcribed text of The Frederick Douglass Diary, a 72-page handwritten diary kept by Frederick Douglass during his 1886-87 tour of Europe and Africa, with additional notes added in later years. The diary is part of the Frederick Douglass Papers available from the library of congress as scanned images. We present here the results of our use of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to transcribe the diary.

Notes On Survival, Despite, Jason Harris

ETD Archive

In this collection of poems, the issue of damage-based thinking and desire-based thinking is being examined. It is being examined through the use of several different types of poetry techniques. Within the poems, the past, the present, and the future are examined and asks a larger question: How can we, as people take the daily violence that we encounter and find – and/or work our way to – joy.

Sharing Englishes & Social Media, Catalina F. Florescu, Chloe Richards

Student and Faculty Research Days

This year-long grant-funded project examined the intersection of culture and class with use of the English Language, and explored the concept of multiple Englishes rather than one, monolithic, "correct" version of the language.

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

'Behold The Dreamers' Raises Issues Of Class, Immigration, And Color, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows the path of a Cameroonian family whose members, like many newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly “post-racial” culture converge as major themes in this new generation of immigrants’ painful encounter with the American Dream. Yet Mbue’s novel is also a distinctly New York story, capturing the particular experiences of the city.

Tracing Writer/Reader Identity In, And In Response To, Queer Latinx Autohistoria-Teorìa, Corrina Wells

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project examines how diverse representation changes the discourse around queer latinx identities. This project extends theories of representation that show how a text changes the imaginary of the reader through a two-part methodology. First, through explicating Spit & Passion and A Cup of Water Under My Bed, this project examines how these texts construct a readers’ imaginary. Then, through a corresponding qualitative assessment on readers’ responses to the texts, this project identifies the extent to which the texts change the beliefs and understandings of a small group of students. Articulating an ecology of identity using the texts under examination, …