Digital Commons Network^™

Mechanical Trenching Cultural Resources Survey: Proposed Emergency Bridge Repair At Peek Road Bridge City Of Katy, Fort Bend County, Texas, Catherine L. Jalbert, Michael Hogan

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

Terracon Consultants, Inc. (Terracon) was retained by CivilTech Engineering, Inc. (Client) to conduct a mechanical trenching survey along the embankment slopes of Buffalo Bayou at Peek Road, the location of proposed emergency bridge repair in Katy, Fort Bend County, Texas. Since the proposed undertaking will occur on land owned or controlled by a political subdivision of the State of Texas, and because funding for this project will come, in part, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) this project required compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA; Title 44, Part 10 CFR) and was subject to the Antiquities Code …

Neoliberalism And Contemporary American Literature, Liam Kennedy, Stephen Shapiro

Dartmouth College Press

How has American literature responded to the dominance of neoliberalism? Does it make sense to speak of an "American" literature in neoliberal times? Can literature function as either a neutral category or a privileged narrative of national imagination in a time when paradigms of the nation-state and of liberal capitalism are undergoing a prolonged shift? In the United States, as elsewhere, the association between the nation-state, liberal capitalism, and literary form has a long history, reflecting determinate relations between writer and reader within imagined national community. As this community loses its symbolic efficiency in the age of neoliberal capital, the …

Amjambo Africa! (January 2019), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue...

Public Charge Rule Change ..Page 3

Breaking News from DRC ......Page 4

City-Wide Meeting ................Page 6

Multicultural NightSMCC......Page 7

Global Awareness & Repsonsibility Conference.....................Pages 8 & 9

Axels Samuntu, PAE .............Page 11

Heritage Restaurant.............Page 12

Poetry ..............................Page 13/14

Deqa Dhalac..........................Page 14

On Being a Somali-Mainer ..Page 15

Just Punishment?: The Epistemic And Affective Investments In Carceral Feminism, Tess Joseph

Honors Papers

This thesis draws upon recent works in feminist theory, epistemological theory, affect theory, and abolitionist theory to critically engage with contemporary U.S. forms of “carceral feminism,” Elizabeth Bernstein’s (2010) concept that describes the recasting of feminist politics in carceral terms. I expand upon Bernstein to contend that we must direct attention to our epistemic and affective conditions to understand our investments in carceral feminism.

I begin by mapping the origins of carceral feminism, first tracing its history through a discussion of the initial iterations of colonialism and enslavement. Turning to a more recent timeline of the mainstream feminist anti-violence movement—a …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Sean Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In December of 2001, Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry (Def Poetry Jam) turned HBO viewers into audience members of a televised poetry reading, featuring spoken word and performance poetry. Over six seasons, actors, rappers, comedians, and the host, Mos Def, joined poets in a unique representation of counter-public open mic poetry readings and poetry slams. This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the …

Intimate Stranger, Strange Intimacy: Towards The (Sinthôm)Ethics Of Transference Love In Lacan’S Analyst’S Discourse, Jung-Hsien Lin

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, as suggested by Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), which is transference. Broadly defined, transference refers to the relationship between the analyst and the analysand transpiring during the analytic process. Although Sigmund Freud and Lacan have presented contrasting views with regards to the term, both of them share one common ground, that is, taking transference to be the aim of the psychoanalytic practices. Due to its theoretical divergences and convergences, debates about transference have focused on whether or not such an analytic aim is truly ethical. What complicates the discussion of ethics …

Spiteful Houses, Sweet Homes: Analyzing Denver's Traumatic Space In Beloved, Tyler Dick

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis aims to explore and evaluate the traumatic space of Denver in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Currently, a lack of critical discourse exists to link together Denver, trauma, and theories of spatiality. This thesis evaluates three types of trauma that inform and develop Denver's traumatic space: direct, indirect, and insidious trauma. Paired with spatial theories, the origins of Denver's trauma are mapped throughout the various places of the novel. The result of this analysis reveals a complex and layered traumatic space, with lasting ramifications on Denver's sense of safety, identity, and stability in a post-slavery United States.

A Bargain At Any Cost: The Rise Of Dollar General, Frances Evelyn Barrett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dollar General Corporation has grown into a retail titan with more than 15 000 stores across the continental United States. The first chapter of this thesis traces the history of this multibillion-dollar firm since its founding as a family-run business in Scottsville Kentucky in the late 1930s. Situating Dollar General’s history within the evolving contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries illustrates that Dollar General Stores succeed when the economy staggers. Neoliberalism and global finance capitalism have only exacerbated the geographic expansion and profitability of the company as the second chapter begins to explore. Although Dollar General Stores open at …

"And Nothing She Needs": Victoria's Secret And The Gaze Of "Post-Feminism", Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

A study of the Victoria’s Secret catalogues, which frames the period 1996-2006, reveals that the models’ poses and postures manipulate the formulaic gaze of objectification with seemingly empowering themes. Instead of the indeterminate, averted looks that Berger (1972) and Mulvey (1989) considered in their analyses, the more recent versions of Victoria’s Secret photographs confront viewers with pouts, glares, and stares of defiance. In this essay, I contribute to current conversations regarding mixed messages that concern post-feminism and third-wave feminism (Duffy, Hancock, & Tyler, 2017; Glapka, 2017; McAllister & DeCarvalho, 2014; McRobbie, 2009). In this regard, the Victoria’s Secret catalogues constitute …

Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney

Theses and Dissertations--English

Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …

Gender, Politics, Market Segmentation, And Taste: Adult Contemporary Radio At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Saesha Senger

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the …

Where We Belong: Spatial Imagining In American Women’S Life Narratives, 1859-1912, Gokce Tekeli

Theses and Dissertations--English

Where We Belong: Spatial Imagining in American Women’s Life Narratives, 1859-1912, studies three marginalized and disadvantaged American women’s self-life narratives during a transitional period in American history. In this dissertation, I am taking an interdisciplinary approach. Where We Belong borrows from social geography, new materialism, and autobiography studies in order to complicate critical discussions of women’s space and place in nineteenth-century women’s self-life narratives. Each chapter of Where We Belong presents a case study with the goal to provide a broader understanding of women’s strategies of belonging due to and despite their spatial exclusions. The overarching emphasis in each …

Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature, Josh-Wade Ferguson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Rambling Blues: Mapping Contemporary North American Blues Literature” revises the methodological assumptions that have underwritten our understanding of blues literature and the politics of race and region that surround it. Where previous commentators have defined blues literature primarily through its formal and thematic connections with blues music and with the sociohistorical contours of black southern life more generally this dissertation expands the boundaries of how we conceive blues literature by examining Langston Hughes’ poems “The Weary Blues” (1925) and “Po Boy Blues” (1926) August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods …

Contesting Slavery In The Global Market: John Brown’S Slave Life In Georgia, Michael Drexler, Stephanie Scherer

Faculty Journal Articles

John Brown, author of Slave Life in Georgia, published in London in 1854, proffered a radical approach to ending slavery in the USA in step with Marxian economics. In this paper, we will explain how Brown’s representation of subjectivity may have caused critics to neglect it. Brown treats freedom as something foreign and external. He has to learn what freedom means, first through exposure to a model of liberal citizenship and then through the experience of several modulations of fugitive liberty. Brown’s social world is wholly determined by external forces. Whether slave or freeman, he faces ambiguous situations. Is …

"Bachelor Buttons": Feminist And Womanist Essays And Poems, Billy E. Clem Jr.

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this critical and creative dissertation, I sketch a brief study of selected multicultural hybrid texts in contemporary US Anglophone literary studies; discuss their implications for reading, writing, and teaching; and present my own hybrid text.

Second-wave feminist and womanist theories and practices opened literary and cultural studies to new and exciting ideas and methods for reading, teaching, and writing both canonical and non-canonical Anglophone texts. One genre emerging anew by these theories, practices, and practitioners is the literary hybrid text, a multi-genre form composed of a variety of prose genres, poetry, drama, and/or visual imagery. Hybrid texts ask readers …

Finding The Singing Spruce: Craft Labor, Global Forests, And Musical Instrument Makers In Appalachia, Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

Musical instrument makers in the state of West Virginia in the United States pursue “singing,” lively instruments that capture ideals of musical tone and “re-enchant” their work and lives through relationships with craft materials and the forest landscape. Suitable tonewoods that grow in the region, such as red spruce (Picea rubens), intersect with makers’ desires to craft instruments in the style of famed makers such as the C.F. Martin Company and the Gibson Company as well as provide instruments imbued with a sense of place. While the demand for and symbolic import of instruments made with local wood …

United I Stand: An Investigation Of Power Distance Value And Endorsement Of The Great Man Theory Through American Social Identities, Jeffrey M. Girton

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Four decades of research on power distance have been applied to cross-cultural leadership studies on an inter-national level. A quantitative investigation was conducted to analyze a uniquely American narrative of power distance, which was developed through a post-structural epistemology. Using ANTi-History theory, endorsement of the Great Man Theory was argued to be a leadership ethos that is related to American power distance value. The GLOBE project’s Power Distance Subscale, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s Achievement Versus Ascription Scale, and an author-developed scale for self-reported endorsement of the Great Man Theory was deployed to investigate culturally contingent leadership ethos on an intra-national level …

The Evolution Of Sunset Magazine's Cooking Department: The Accommodation Of Men's And Women's Cooking In The 1930s, Jennifer Hoolhorst Pagano

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The Western regional magazine Sunset has been published under a series of owners and publishers since 1898. In 1928, Sunset was purchased by Lawrence Lane, a Midwestern magazine executive who transformed it from a failing turn-of-the-century, general interest publication about the West, into a successful magazine about living in the West for the Western middle-class. Sunset had always been a magazine for men and women, and one that appealed to both male and female intellectuals at the time Lane purchased it. Lane and his editors attempted to interject more rigid middle-class ideals into a magazine that had espoused ideas that …

Batman's Animated Brain(S), Lisa Kort-Butler

Department of Sociology: Presentations

Much of the analysis of Batman’s brain – whether by scholars, writers, or other comic characters – focuses on his psychological make‐up. That is, what makes Bruce Wayne psychologically motivated to be The Batman? His childhood trauma is often poised as the answer, the tireless pursuit of “justice” in an attempt to regain control from the trauma of his parents’ murders (Sanna 2015). The same could be said for his nemeses. Madness, psychopathy, and insanity are centered in the corrupted minds of Gotham’s ghastliest, some of whom have also had psychological or physical traumas (Langley 2012; Lytle 2008). A psychological …

Healing Familial And Historical Trauma Through The Lens Of Generational Femininity And Motherhood: Beyoncé'S Lemonade, Amanda R. Garcia

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

The Intermedial Politics Of Handwritten Newspapers In The 19th-Century U.S., Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Handwritten newspapers appeared in a variety of social contexts in the 19th-century U.S.1 The largest extant portion of 19th-century handwritten newspapers emerged from home and school settings. More far-flung examples include those written aboard ships during exploratory and military voyages. Others were produced within institutions such as hospitals and asylums. Such works were written during times of privation, including life in an army regiment or a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. At other times, handwritten newspapers accompanied efforts at westward settlement and transcontinental railway journeys. Impromptu papers could follow in the wake of natural disasters that knocked out print-based …

The Mockery Of Things: Material Culture And Domestic Ideology In The Detective Fiction Of Anna Katharine Green, Claire Meldrum

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The Mockery of Things: Material Culture and Domestic Ideology in the Detective Fiction of Anna Katharine Green examines how a popular genre author like Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935) uses objects to articulate middle-class identity and social constructions in late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America. During that era, the home as both a physical space and an ideological signifier was a central tenet in American middle-class identity. Focusing on domestically situated objects – clothing, household furnishings and domestic architecture – this dissertation considers how such items, which have tended to be read in support of domestic identity, instead function within the context …

Nothing Is Revealed: An Intimate Look Back At 1968, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

This started as a blog project, 99 entries on days in 1968 posted on the corresponding days of 2018. It is a cultural study of sixties America and a personal memoir.

On Jamming: ‘Study’ And The Unstudied, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Restaging World Literature In The Age Of Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism, Shaobo Xie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Restaging World Literature in the Age of Neoliberal­ism/Neocolonia­­lism" Shaobo Xie argues that Goethe's notion of world literature spells a genuine universalism that contributes to resistance to neoliberal imperialism. In the age of neocolonial­ism/ne­oliberalism all conduct, and all spheres of human life are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics and neoliberalism both as a govern­ing rationality and as an economic policy is penetrating into every part of the world. The politics that is really heter­ogeneous or external to the rule of neoliberal capitalism in the neocolonial global present consists in thinking towards new possibilities of organizing …

Resistance To Neocolonialism In Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory, Zeng Jun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Resistance to Neocolonialism in Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory" Jun ZENG claims that the introduction of Western Literary Theory in the past forty years of China's reform and opening up was carried out under the background of neo-colonialism. "Western imagination" in the discourse of contemporary Chinese literary theory was an important aspect of the strategy of cultural resistance under the overwhelming influence of Western neocolonialism. Contemporary Chinese literary theory no longer simply regards Western literary theory in the twentieth century as a bourgeois literary ideology; instead, it adopts a "de-ideological" attitude to return to the issues of literature, …

Introduction To A Critical Response To Neocolonialism, Guoqiang Qiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Neocolonialism In Translating China, Guoqiang Qiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Neocolonialism in Translating China" Guoqiang Qiao analyzes the neocolonial phenomenon that occurs in the process of Chinese literature's "walking-out." Taking examples from Howard Goldblatt's translation and neocolonial ideas that Goldblatt advanced in his essays, interviews and speeches and those Chinese writers, critics and professors who practice self-colonization, he analyzes their neocolonialism with the challenging concepts of neocolonialism and self-colonization and thus aims to cope with the phenomenon of colonization and self-colonization in the area of Chinese literature's "walking-out."

The End Of The Nobel Era And The Reconstruction Of The World Republic Of Letters, Guohua Zhu, Yonghua Tang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The End of the Nobel Era and the Reconstruction of the World Republic of Letters" Guohua Zhu and Yonghua Tang critically examine mechanisms of cultural hegemony associated with the Nobel Prize in Literature from a neocolonial lens. Borrowing from Casanova's idea of the "World Republic of Letters" and its attentiveness to geopolitics, the essay proceeds to reconstruct the dialectical relations between the nation and the world. It does so, in the first place, by documenting and analyzing the process of negotiation and bargaining entailed in the construction of global cultural hegemony and thereby examine the functions and …