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

Revisiting History: Anti-Racialist Afrofuturism In Octavia Butler's Kindred, Brad C. Kelly

MSU Graduate Theses

Popular understanding of history is dominated by racial binaries that suggest the Black past and the white past are wholly antithetical to one another. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uncovers interconnections between Black and white Americans that complicate this understanding by having her characters travel to the antebellum period. By uncovering these interconnections, Butler is able to envision a future in which Black and white Americans are reunited through the recognition of their shared, yet vastly differing, sufferings under white supremacy. I have termed this idea anti-racialist Afrofuturism because Butler seeks to dismantle the social construct of race through her illumination …

The Wh-Eye Of The Storm: How Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, And Arif Anwar Fictionalize Extreme Weather In Their Works, Elena Vedovello

Pomona Senior Theses

In this thesis, I used Robin Wall Kimmerer’s and James D. Rice’s ideas of “ecological imagination” to analyze three twentieth and twenty-first century works that feature historical extreme weather events. American Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston introduces her fictional characters to the historical force of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; British Modernist writer Virginia Woolf writes about the 1609 Great Frost in Orlando; and Bangladeshi author Arif Anwar sets his novel The Storm during and around the infamous Bhola Cyclone of 1970.

Although these authors and their novels stem …

Multilingual Experimental Literature And Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Erín Moure And Kathy Acker, Melissa Tanti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The impulse toward multilingual writing has arisen as a prominent trend in contemporary women’s writing. Criticism and notions of the literary have to respond to, among other things, the fact that "we live in a world where a significant portion of the population is at least partially bi or multilingual" (Camboni 34). To be responsive to the "increasing multilingualism of writers necessitates new strategies for reading the polyvocality of texts" (Eagleton and Friedman 3). This paper considers the ways multilingual writing creates, “small scale modes of listening” (Maguire xix) that tune the reader to languages, identities, and cultures under erasure. …

Constructing (Un)Situated Women: Situated Knowledges In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things (1997) And Balli K. Jaswal's Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows (2017), Necole T. Deloach

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” to postcolonial feminist novels such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Balli K. Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows in order to illustrate why there needs to be a new framework for analyzing literary postcolonial women. Despite the applicability of Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” to postcolonial feminist literary studies, there has been little research published that analyzes not just the intersection of “situated knowledges” and postcolonial feminist literature, but also the problems that occur when Western scholars approach postcolonial texts without completely acknowledging their own worldview. I argue …

Nothing About Us: Three Models Of Disability In Three Works Of Literary Fiction, Mary Lipiec

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores how the three umbrella models of disability (medical, functional, and social) are shown in several disabled characters from three novels published after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum. Through the utilization of literary analysis from a cultural studies perspective, this project shows that the models of disability, despite the various flaws in their respective designs, prove to be useful lenses to see disability through, both in these novels and in real life, …

Ruptures In Indentures In Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter Of Maladies And Unaccustomed Earth, Prabal D. Gupta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) is one of the prominent American writers of Bengali descent, contributing mainly to diaspora literature to depict the nuanced aspects of Bengalis in their immigrant lives. Lahiri’s stories in Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) illustrate the challenges of the Bengali diaspora due to their indentured identity, which I have used to refer to the Bengali people’s culturally-rooted identity. This study investigates how the diaspora’s native cultural identity fluctuates in connection with the host culture. The research renders a reconfigured image of “home” because the concept of home changes for these people after migration in …

Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, And The Government Of Species By Neel Ahuja, Amrita De

Critical Humanities

In lieu of an abstract:

There is no better way to preface this review of Neel Ahuja’s rich analysis of the “government of species” in his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species than to dive right into the heart of the ongoing interconnected infectious dis-ease crisis.

Introduction: Pandemic And The Global South, Puspa Damai

Critical Humanities

In lieu of abstract: Critical Humanities is a child of the coronavirus pandemic. As paradoxical as it may sound, the journal was born of our desire for community, conviviality, and survival in a world ravaged by disease, despair and death.

Biopower, Biopolitics And Pandemic Vulnerabilities: Reading The Covid Chronicles Comics, Pramod K. Nayar Ph.D.

Critical Humanities

This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collective trauma of the pandemic; on the other hand, these comics draw attention to the role the state plays in regulating bodies to be monitored, governed and, in some cases, deemed disposable.

Queen Academy, Hantian Zhnag

Master's Theses

As an upmarket novel exploring immigration and racial dynamics, Queen Academy lies at the intersection of Kathryn Ma’s The Chinese Groove, Timothy Wang’s Slant, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in style and subject. The protagonist Kang comes to the US from China to study statistics, but finds himself becoming a “potato queen”—an Asian gay man interested in dating white men only—and locked in self-loathing. It will take a heartbreak and treading the line of illegality to see himself again. Overall, by engaging with themes of immigration, belonging, and racialized desire, the novel takes the stance that the …

Trilingualism In The United States: A Case Study Of An Arabic And Greek Household, Seongyo Gwon, David E. Posada, Milly Romo

Symposium of Student Scholars

Recent studies suggest that trilingual families in the United States are experiencing limited resources due to failing efforts to promote heritage language (HL) maintenance, diversity, and language rights both nationally and locally. Using a case study methodology, this paper will address obstacles identified in an interview with an Arabic speaking mother raising a trilingual child along with a Greek speaking partner while living in a monolingual society (U.S.). There is a need to uncover complex language practices and issues that different trilingual groups in the United States experience in order to preserve their heritage languages (HL) and cultures. Qualitative data …

Apocalypse Eternal: "The Road" And "Parable" Series As Pilgrimage, Caleb Gurule

Senior Honors Theses

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road represent two different views on how humans create meaning in a postapocalyptic world. The authors’ writings utilize the critical dystopia genre, in which the protagonists’ surroundings are bleak but the possibility of redemption remains. As Butler’s Lauren Olamina travels from her burned-down home to a place where she can begin a new community with her religion, Earthseed, as the foundational structure, she brings together a group of diverse and useful people who aid her in her pilgrimage to a better place. The protagonist’s identity as a mentally impaired black …

A Material Stratum: Black Bodies And Environmental Exploitation In Edward P. Jones' The Known World, Julia Woodward

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper seeks to reckon with the entwined realities of black lives, environmental degradation, and the Anthropocene through engagement with Edward P. Jones’ 2003 novel The Known World and Kathryn Yusoff’s recent critical work on the Black Anthropocenes. Yusoff contends that, “Literally stretching black and brown bodies across the seismic fault lines of the earth, Black Anthropocenes subtend White Geology as a material stratum,” (xii). This paper will examine the ways in which Yusoff and Jones are in conversation, and try to elucidate the ways in which the Anthropocene is both built upon and a harbinger of mass death. How …

Witness, Justice, And The Silent Confessional, Kortney Sebben

Graduate Review

Stories depicting injustice are inherently complicated by the limitations of language. Jacques Derrida’s “Circonfession” uses deconstructionist theory to describe the flawed nature of the confession in that proximity becomes problematic: those who experience are unable to authentically deliver the truth of that experience. Language also becomes an imperfect channel through which to deliver the truth; the truth lies in both a person’s ability to bring meaning to individual experience, but also, in an audience’s ability to interpret that experience; however, both sides of the conversation are challenged through an imperfect channel of communication. Therefore, silence of human behavior may very …

Bibliography For "Fiction Novels And Poetry By Hispanic Authors" Display, Isabella Piechota, Kalea Brown, Ruby Blakesleay

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about literature by Hispanic authors for Hispanic Heritage Month in September 2022 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University.

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines …

The Second-Person Point Of View In Three Contemporary Latino Short Stories, Rocio L. Uchofen

Student Theses

ABSTRACT

The Second-Person Point of View in Three Contemporary Latino Short Stories

By

Rocio L. Uchofen

Advisor: Professor Alyson Bardsley

The “you” discourse is dynamic, it generates an interaction, it implies a dialogue between narrator and reader. The investigations about the use of the second person in the narrative discourse generally go beyond English language frontiers, the discussion has not finished and narratological investigations have more texts to analyze as fiction in second-person narration is not an unusual occurrence in contemporary literature. The analysis of three short stories written by Latino writers Daniel Alarcon, Junot Diaz and Sandra Cisneros intends …

Octavia E. Butler’S Earthseed And The God Of Change, Mercedes Alayna Reid-X

Honors Program Theses and Projects

It is my intention in this paper to define Butler’s Change God and illustrate how she created it to end oppression in all forms. It is important to start with a bit of background on Butler herself, sharing how her upbringing and experiences in life influenced her feelings about religion. These feelings are what encouraged writings such as the Parables, helping the reader to understand why Butler felt the need to create a new type of religion instead of making use of one that already existed. Next, I include an introduction to Butler’s journey as a Black science fiction writer. …

Blood Quantum? Native Dna? Indigenous Lineage? The Complexities Of Native Authenticity And Identity, Grace Thayer

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Unlike any other ethnic minority in the US, Native Americans are required to authenticate their Indianness, or their relation to Native peoples, in order to qualify for tribal citizenship and justify their identity as Indigenous peoples. In order to become citizens of a Native nation, or to even be considered Indigenous in the eyes of the United States government, Native peoples are often required to prove their Indigeneity, or Nativeness, through blood, DNA, and other seemingly quantifiable measurements. No other minority group is forced to prove their legitimacy to be a citizen of their community in the United States, yet …

Indigenous Women’S Resistance And Healing From Colonial Violence: A Study Of Literature And Art, Demi Riendeau

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The purpose of this research is to flip the story of colonization form the perspective of the colonizers, and instead, make room to discuss the power and strength that Indigenous women hold to resist and exist despite the genocidal nature of settler-colonization. This is specifically done through the information given by literature written by Indigenous authors and artwork created by Indigenous peoples. Through these depictions of women, both fictionally and non-fictionally, we see the numerous ways that Indigenous women heal, build community, and resist colonial powers. Throughout the reading and analysis of about fifteen unique texts, there were some particular …