Digital Commons Network^™

Bibliography, Print Culture, And What To Do With Comics In A Rare Books Library, Michael C. Weisenburg

Faculty and Staff Publications

Comic books are among the rare books of the future. In fact, some comic books are scarcer and more valuable than many of the “old books” that fill special collections stacks. This essay proposes to answer the questions of “What do we do with comics in an academic library?” by analyzing comics as a popular phenomenon that is deeply rooted in book history and the developing print culture of the past 100 years. Using the traditional methods of bibliographic analysis, we might better situate comics within the mission of academic libraries as we work to foster learning, discovery, and inclusivity …

Epistemological Insecurity In The Anthropocene, Dustin Purvis

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation analyzes how increased mainstream awareness of climate change and other complex environmental phenomena transforms some of the basic tools we use to understand the world, including notions of agency, evidence, and causality. More specifically, this project highlights numerous contemporary literary and cultural narratives that formally and thematically depict impromptu systems of action and comprehension developed by humans confronting the unique forms of information overload that result from damaged and rapidly changing environments. Following critics like Ulrich Beck, Rob Nixon, and Stacy Alaimo, I suggest our current era of ecological instability and destructive environmental practices dictate what I refer …

Severe Constraints, Radical Possibilities: Reimagining Critical Pedagogy In The First-Year Writing Class, Elia Benjamin Newsom

Wayne State University Dissertations

Critical pedagogues often bring political questions into the classroom and seek to disassemble the very paternalistic, repressive nature of education itself. However, while these scholars and the texts they write are well-intentioned, the possibility of achieving political goals in a first-year writing class are severely constrained by forces within and outside an instructor's control: committees, composition directors, university administration, state & federal governments, economic & social conditions, etc. That said, looking at the material history of writing studies, there have been moments of radical possibility, opportunities to fundamentally change the status quo for the better. In this dissertation, I argue …

An Arbitrary Aesthetic: Cultural Reproduction And Hegemonic Canonical Formations In The Western Theatrical Academy, Sim C. Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre as an artistic practice has often been celebrated as an art of and for the people, being a modality that in theory the common person has access to learn, explore and experience. In recent years I have become preoccupied with the growing rarification and privileging of this art form, particularly in how it is cognized and taught in the academic world. As such, I set out to investigate the mechanisms at work at levels structural, artistic, and personal that determine how theatre is taught and understood within the western academy.

This thesis seeks to examine and unpack the perceived …

Bibliography, Kristi Branham

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Kristi Branham.

Samozvanets (The Pretender), Matthew Garrell, Alikzandr Malakov

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

he Russian word Samozvanets most directly translates to Imposter in English. However, for this thesis, I have selected the alternative interpretation of Pretender. Imposter implies the taking or assuming of another’s position. Pretender, more personally, carries the meaning of presenting self as something one is not. It is through the lens of the Pretender that I examine the idea of what it means to be a member of a particular ethnicity, and to engage with one’s cultural heritage. I do this through a collection of fictional stories, investigating various lives within the Russian diaspora following the dissolution of the Soviet …

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, …

A Black Prometheus Among The Gods: Illuminating African American Literary Tradition In Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Kenneth L. Rainey Iii

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In his hard-hitting novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door Sam Greenlee aims to help his target African American audience to succeed and thrive as their true selves with the novel functioning as a guide to resisting the ever-present physical and spiritual threat faced daily. On the one hand the novel functions as a manual for civil uprising, but underneath that surface, Greenlee argues that true African American resistance comes through nurturing self-determination, self-love, and self-esteem. This project also argues that Spook ought to be located closer to the center of the African American literary canon and provides comparisons …

Black Elk Faces East: Beb Vuyk, Cultural Translation, And John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks, Frank Kelderman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This essay examines the work of the Dutch-Indonesian author Beb Vuyk in producing one of the first foreign-language translations of John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks: the 1964 Dutch edition Zwarte Eland spreekt. Published in the Netherlands, Vuyk’s translation connects the 1932 as-told-to autobiography of the Oglala Lakota heyoka Black Elk to the career of one of the most important Dutch-Indonesian authors after World War II, who had a prominent voice in debates on Indonesian decolonization. Linking the literary history of two different colonial contexts, Vuyk’s edition also connects Black Elk Speaks to a Cold War-era history of …

Amjambo Africa! (December 2022), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In this Issue

Amjambo Arts ..........................2

Holiday Greetings .................... 3

Education .................................. 4

Domestic Violence ...................5

Editorial .....................................6

Tips & Info ................................7

World Market Basket ...............8

Chance to Advance ..................9

Updates from Africa ..............10

Refugee Camp in Uganda .....11

All about the Workforce ........12

Legislative Update .............13-15

In 7 languages

Election Season..................16-17

Health & Wellness........18-23,25

In 7 languages

Financial Literacy/Cars .........24

Service Org. columns....... 26-27

Ukraine/New Voices ..............28

COCOMaine: New Leader ....29

Amjambo Africa! (November 2022), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In this Issue

Nigerian Community .............. 2

Amjambo Arts.......................... 3

Moonglade .............................4-5

Education ..................................6

Publisher’s editorial ..................7

Financial literacy ..........8-13, 19

In 7 languages

World Market Basket ......14-15

Election special .................16-17

All about the Workforce ........18

Community Happenings ...... 20

News from Africa. .............22-23

Health&Wellness. ..............24-31

Topic: Loneliness

In 7 languages

Community columns .......32-33

New Voices ........................34-35

Tips & Info ........................36-37

Afghan Adjustment Act ........ 38

Queering The Weeki Wachee Mermaid And Its Renewed Aesthetic Value, Jacqueline D. Merveille

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have asserted that the visual representation of womanhood responds to a cultural context, which often adheres to patriarchy and the satisfaction of the male gaze. The mediated depiction of the mermaid through time is polysemous and therefore deserves a thorough examination substantiated by robust theories. As a gendered feminine figure that complies with the patriarchal pressure of subjugation to gratify male desire, the mermaid can, however, elude the socially constructed dichotomy of genders, contributing to her agency and queerness. By investigating the Florida roadside attraction of Weeki Wachee Springs’ mermaid shows and other mediated visual depictions of the sea …

Amjambo Africa! (October 2022), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In this Issue

Election special .....................2-3

Moonglade .............................4-5

Amjambo Arts.......................... 6

Credential equivalencies ....8-10

In 7 languages

Ask the doctor ........................11

In 7 languages

Housing update ......................12

Editorial ...................................13

Market Basket ................... 14-15

Beautiful Blackbird .......... 16-17

All about the Workforce ........18

Community Happenings..20-21

News from Africa ..............22-23

Health & Wellness .............24-31

In 7 languages

Community columns .............32

Financial literacy ....................33

New Voices columns ........34-35

Tips & Info ........................36-37

Amjambo Africa! (September 2022), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In this Issue

Moonglade............................. 4-5

Education............................. 6-10

In 7 languages

General Assistance ...........11-13

In 7 languages

Market Basket ...................14-15

All about the Workforce ........18

Community Happenings ......20

Amjambo Arts ........................21

Ugandan athletes ....................22

Rwandan hero .........................23

Health & Wellness.............24-31

In 7 languages

International & Maine updates .................... 33

New Voices feature........... 34-35

Financial literacy ....................35

Nonprofit updates ............36-37

Tips & Info.............................. 38

Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the 2016 American Presidential election, celebrity endorsements proved to be a more narrow gauge of public opinion than ever. The symbolic alignment with popular musicians, which had long abetted the Democratic Party’s standing with youth and particular identity groups, seemed only to reaffirm the party’s establishment status, drawing disavowal in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment on both the left and right. ‘Retromania,’ a term first coined by Simon Reynolds in 2010, can be tracked conceptually from the nostalgic inclinations of twenty-first century popular culture to the ideological sphere, where nostalgic, essentialized constructions of community, identity, and progress have coalesced …

Novel Epidemics: Contagion And Metaphor In Us Literature, Maxwell Clement Cassity

Dissertations - ALL

Metaphors of epidemic and contagion have played a powerful role in shaping American identity by using disease to symbolically mark out certain raced and classed populations as outsiders to the social body. In the twentieth century, epidemics and epidemiological reading came to dominate not only the fields of science, but also literary and cultural production and its critical lenses. “Novel Epidemics” examines how American novelists William Faulkner, Ishmael Reed, and Helena María Viramontes used epidemic as a fictional framework for examining and critiquing the ways that the US social body was imagined, constructed, and reinforced through an epidemiological lens. Using …

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe In The Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay, Sourit Bhattacharya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern …

Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers And Africa’S Digital Futures, Treasa De Loughry

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers and Africa’s Digital Futures,” Treasa De Loughry focuses on different visual responses to e-waste in West Africa, from eco-documentary film and photography responses to the infamous Agbogbloshie e-waste yard in Ghana; to techno-utopian visions of e-waste bricoleurs, and e-waste as a signifier and artefact of the neocolonial nature of the capitalist world-ecology. The first half of this article focuses on Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes’ documentary film, Welcome to Sodom (2018), grounding it in critiques of the transmedial influence of the documentary form, while attending to the film’s pyrotechnical “optical regime” (Schoonover). …

Signs Of The Inhuman: Hauntings And Lost Futures In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’S La Compañía, Marcela Romero Rivera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as …

Returning To The Past To Rethink Socio-Political Antagonisms: Mapping Today’S Situation In Regards To Popular Insurrections, Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Slavoj Žižek, Hernán Scholten, David Pavón-Cuellar, Gonzalo Salas, Oscar Ariel Cabeza, Jesús William Huanca Arohuanca, Sergio J. Aguilar Alcalá

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article seeks to elaborate a map or cartogram based on a number of protests and social mobilizations that took place in different parts of the world -mainly in Latin America, but also in Europe and Asia. Beyond the data and figures available from various sources, which never speak for themselves, an interpretation is proposed here to reveal the meaning of these events. In other words, by displaying a map of these social movements, the authors propose not only the visualization of a collection of data, but also an illumination of these events in the light of history. From there, …

Necropolitics And Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ In Hong Kong After Rancière And Mbembe, Anthony Siu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “Necropolitics and Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ in Hong Kong after Rancière and Mbembe,” Anthony Siu examines images from Defiance.Voices, a two-volume collection that gathers photography and art illustrations about the Hong Kong Protests. He studies how paintings from the second volume register politics and events, arguing that visual art can be viewed as a new form of “speculative fictions,” a material ontology that historicizes modes of sovereign violence in postcolony. The introduction situates the debate of aesthetics in Hong Kong, conjoining Rancière’s thinking on “the people” and Achille Mbembe’s philosophy on “necropolitics.” The first cluster of …

Fredric Jameson And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’S Periodizing The Black Internal Colony, Jeremy Matthew Glick

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Periodizing the Black Internal Colony,” Jeremy Matthew Glick reads these authors’ coupling of Black radical struggle with wars of decolonization as engaging against a twenty-first century war on revolutionary memory. This essay examines Jameson’s brief “Maoist Digression” in “Periodizing the Sixties” and discussion of Cuban Revolutionary Foco-theory as “neither in […] nor of it” and Spivak’s planetary turn’s link to Black internal colonialism analysis as a way to talk about the intersections of revolutionary politics and literary form. It concludes with a brief meditation on Amiri Baraka on the centrality of space for …

Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ And ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth In Urban China, Diego Gullotta, Lili Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China”, Diego Gullotta and Lili Lin examine how Chinese youth are positioned within the dominant culture, how young people appropriate space in their emergent cultural practices, and how they negotiate meaning-making. The article first analyses the rising tides (houlang) video, sponsored jointly by the state and the private sector, and argues that it reduces youth to a homogenous subject inscribed into the discourse of “China’s rise” (zhongguo jueqi) via emotional mobilization. The “lying flat” phenomenon represents young people’s negative response to …

Breadtube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats To Spread Countercultural Ideology, Jj Sylvia Iv, Kyle Moody

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of …

Periodizing The Residuality Of A Composite Protest Art Form: The Case Of Telangana Dhoom Dham, Vamshi Vemireddy, Sasi Kiran R. Mallam

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article will document the emergence of the composite art form of “Dhoom Dham” in the state of Telangana, a southern state from India. A mixture of folk song-and-dance routines interspersed with political speeches, Dhoom Dham emerged as a potent form of political protest during the Telangana statehood movement and dominated the cultural imaginary of the movement. It has the characteristics of a residual cultural form as conceptualized by Raymond Williams. Dhoom Dham masterfully combined the elements of folk and repurposed the left protest music traditions to help the cause of the formation of separate state of Telangana. …

Sounding The State Of The World: Interview With Karim Rafi, Summer 2021, Matthew Brauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Matthew Brauer interviews Moroccan contemporary artist Karim Rafi about postcolonial creation in the 2020s in "Sounding the State of the World.” Beginning with Rafi’s shift to remote performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussion approaches confinement as just the latest in a series of crises in North Africa and the world. The repeated experience of crisis opens a conversation about the contemporary experience of time, broached in relation to modern Moroccan art history, which emerged from and against the conservative institutions of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). The interview touches on a range of distinctive concerns in Rafi’s art practice, from …

A Case Of Pandemic Narrative And The End Of Post-Cold War, Yongbing Jin, Penghan Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The topical book Wuhan Diary, authored by the Chinese writer Fang Fang during the COVID-19 lockdown of Wuhan, is not so much a diary as a “becoming-diary,” given its performative practices. Wuhan Diary’s emphasis on the individual or private nature of its writing activity is attributable to its characteristic realistic conception of authenticity, which resulted historically from the humanist trend within Chinese literature in the 1980s as a significant element of post-socialist realism. Insofar as Wuhan Diary claims an overarching authorship that does not cohere with—or is, indeed, utterly subverted by—its textual complexities, it can be interpreted as …

Biopolitics In The Twenty-First Century: India And The Pandemic, _ Swatie, Rashee Mehra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Swatie and Rashee Mehra discuss in their "Biopolitics in the Twenty-first Century: India and the Pandemic”, the rise of the biopolitical state in India in the 2020s. The article emphasizes the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics for the pandemic in India. The biopolitical governmentality of the Indian state operates at several levels to politicize ‘life itself’: racism (the notion that sections of the population are disposable), economics (the notion of privatization of care), and the logic of contagion (based on ideas of threat perception and risk). The article engages with biopolitics in the 21st century and looks at …

Confinement, Care, And Commodification In Mati Diop’S In My Room, Brittany Murray

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Confinement, Care, and the Commodification in Mati Diop’s In My Room,” Brittany Murray discusses a short film released in 2020 by the French and Senegalese director, Mati Diop. Shot in the artist’s studio in a Parisian banlieue during mandatory Covid-19 confinement, the film tackles the issues of grief, isolation, and care. The article shows how the film represents these issues, particularly urgent during the pandemic and yet belonging to longstanding concerns about care work and reproductive labor. To mediate between present crisis and a larger historical framework, the article demonstrates how the film’s formal attributes make a …

Reading The Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping And The “Urban Sensorium” In Tom Mccarthy’S Satin Island And Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Marty Gilroy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

“What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban everyday life […] and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account of the “urban sensorium” describes the mediatory, ideological role played by space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics of urban experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers the mediation of these insights as critical aesthetic strategies in two global city …