Digital Commons Network^™

From Farewell To Fáilte: The Voices Of Iowa’S Irish Daughters, Katie Hermanson

History Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity

Irish women’s immigration to Iowa brought rich culture and lasting impacts, despite their contributions being silenced by history. Women left Ireland for economic opportunity and education abroad to support their impoverished families. Millions emigrated between 1830 and 1915, spreading across the world. The Irish women who came to the United States encountered discrimination and cultural stereotyping as they worked in domestic service, developed religious orders, taught school, owned businesses and raised families. Women bore the burden of supporting their families in Ireland by sending remittances home and communicating between countries. Their cultural identity as exiles dwelled in guilt for leaving …

The Maroons: The First Black Nationalists Of The Americas, Marquise K. Camp

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Maroon communities are seldom discussed in academic discussions about Black nationalism. This suggests that the goals and achievements of the Maroons differed from those of Black nationalists, and that there are no significant historical links between the two. This project argues that Black nationalists and the Maroons are closely related, not only because of their shared roots in the African diaspora but also because they both sought independence and self-governance for Black people. The aims of Black nationalists like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X closely resemble those of the Maroons. By examining the Maroons alongside Black nationalism, one can gain …

Recognizing Speculative Literature: Conceiving Identity In The Archives Of Enslavement, Gabriella Greco

Theses and Dissertations

One of the key problems of the archive of enslavement, borne out of the violent erasure of enslaved identities, is the struggle to reconstruct and honor those lost identities. Recognizing Speculative Literature: Conceiving Identity in the Archives of Enslavement investigates postcolonial archival processes and the resulting documents to identify a spectrum of speculative literary genres that can be used to supplement traumatic archival erasures, often of female voices and identities, to further understand the power dynamics. To clarify, I use the term ‘speculative literature’ here to refer to a mode of literature that relies on the few fragments that may …

All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’S Translation Of Shui Hu Zhuan And Its Effects On Her Writing Career, Zhihui Sophia Geng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’s Translation of Shui Hu Zhuan and its Effects on Her Writing Career,” Zhihui Sophia Geng focuses on Pulitzer Prize winner and Noble Laureate Pearl Sydenstricker Buck’s All Men Are Brothers, her translation of the classical Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan. She examines the reception of her translation and analyzes the significance of All Men Are Brothers to Buck’s literary career. By providing the first complete translation of Shui Hu Zhuan to an English-speaking audience, Buck made a significant cultural contribution to the United States and English-speaking cultural spheres. The …

Re-Curation And Recognition: Addressing The Curation Crisis Through The Garnet Ghost Town, Jocelyn A. Palombo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As universities, federal curation facilities, public museums, and private collections struggle to create space on their shelves curators and archaeologists continuously evaluate what must continue to be stored and what needs to be deaccessioned. Utilizing a collection housed at the University of Montana I explore strategies for combating this issue. The collection originates from the Garnet Ghost Town and has been in the university’s care since its excavation. The objectives of this project are to obtain new information and incorporate innovative techniques to learn more about the collection itself and provide an updated analysis to one of Montana’s most complete …

An Imaginary* Interview With A Philippines Collections Museum Donor, Camille Ungco

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Ontological distance is the dehumanization that emerges from uninterrogated coloniality between colonized subjects and the oppressive systems. This distancing has occurred in the histories of U.S. teachers both domestic-based and abroad, especially in Southeast Asia. In Steinbock-Pratt’s (2019) historiography on the relationships between early 1900s U.S. teachers and their Filipinx students, ontological distance was “The crux of the colonial relationship was intimacy marked by closeness without understanding, suasion backed by violence, and affection bounded by white and American supremacy” (Steinbock-Pratt, 2019, p. 214). This dehumanizing psychological or ontological distance existed during U.S. colonial regimes abroad, specifically in Southeast Asia and …

The Foundation And Center Of American Studies; An Introduction To Native American Histories And Cultures - A Syllabus, Rhonda L. Baldonado

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

The contention of this Capstone is that Native America is the foundation and should be the center of American Studies. One way to facilitate such an effect on the discipline is to expose community college students to American Studies early, by offering an elective course about Native American communities within the US. The heart and soul of this Capstone applied project is a syllabus for an American Studies course in Native American Histories and Cultures. It is an elective, introductory, survey course that that covers four important aspects of Indigeneity: Indigenous Histories, Native American Politics and Activism, Indigenous Women and …

Review Of Fang Tang's Literary Fantasy In Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Women’S Literature: Imagining Home, Lilly Chen

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

2022 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2022 IGGAD Conference: Who Owns This? Communities, Heritage, and Preservation.

Afroam: A Virtual Film Production Group, Bill Taylor Jr.

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Because of the gatekeeping practices of the Hollywood film industry, and the high cost of both filmmaking and distribution in general, Afro-American filmmakers have struggled to produce films with “global reach.” This study visits the possibility of Afro-American filmmakers using alternative technologies and infrastructures to produce high-quality films, thereby bypassing the high cost and exclusionary practices of Hollywood studios. Using new 21st-century digital technology, this study involved the creation of a small geographically dispersed virtual film production team. The study’s foundational framework was a constructivist qualitative research paradigm, using Action Research, and supported by 24 months of triangulated data from …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

"The Fact Of The Black Poet": Four Phenomenological Interviews With Prominent American Writers On The Impact Of The Furious Flower Poetry Center, Karen E. Risch Mott

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The purpose of this study was to discern the impact, if any, of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the United States’ first academic center devoted to Black poetry. A qualitative approach centered on semi-structured phenomenological interviews was applied, and four nationally acclaimed poets were recruited for a purposive sample: Jericho Brown, PhD; Toi Derricotte, MA; Tyehimba Jess, MFA; and Evie Shockley, JD, PhD. Emergent themes were identified based on content analysis by hand-coding transcripts; these findings lead to a conclusion that Furious Flower’s impact on the poets has been significant and consistent in three ways: 1) creating a platform for …

Self · Ish: Examining And Reshaping Filipino & Filipinx Identities Within The Continental United States And Hawai’I Via Post-Colonial Literature, Kiana Anderson

Senior Theses

This thesis explores a conversation between the “self” and Filipino culture to examine the ways the Filipino diaspora exists in literature amongst colonization and trauma. Through literary texts spanning across time and geographical locations, like Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, I interrogate the cultural and psychic meanings associated with the concept of home within the context of these hybrid histories. By examining the neo-canonical literature of some of these authors, I interrogate their sense of self, voices and visions via the languages, symbols, cultural frameworks and emotions that are prevalent within the literary …

2020 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2020 IGGAD Conference: Without Borders: Tracing the Cultural, Archival, and Political African Diaspora.

The Anonymous Web In Adichie’S Americanah, Michelle Jude Gibeault

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Adichie’s Americanah is a novel that elevates anonymous blogging into black cultural performance. The novel follows a young Nigerian, Ifemelu, who arrives in the United States on a student visa and depicts her stressful confrontation with racism in post-slavery America. Through beginning a blog, Ifemelu voices her experiences as a black woman and immigrant in ways that renew the concerns of James Baldwin, an author whom she studies closely. Like Baldwin, her style blends humor and techniques of persuasion that trace to traditional oral folklore. Ifemelu’s success rests partly on Adichie’s construction of her as a character of good ethos, …

Okonkwo’S Reincarnation: A Comparison Of Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And No Longer At Ease, Mary J. N. Okolie, Ginikachi C. Uzoma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Abstract: The reincarnation myth is a global concept, founded basically in religion and tradition. It was especially vibrant in the ancient times in places like Egypt, Greece, and in continents like Asia and Africa, which possess varying understandings of the myth. In Igbo tradition, for example, it is believed that reincarnation occurs within a family. And that some of the marks of reincarnation are usually the possession of the birthmark or certain other physical features and the exhibition of character and behavioral traits of a deceased person by a living member of his/her immediate or extended family. Thus, reincarnation entails …

Living The Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, And Culture, Trisha Venisa-Alicia Martínez

American Studies ETDs

Living the Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, and Culture is an ethnographic interdisciplinary study that draws upon the voices of Manitos, or Hispanic New Mexicans, and experiences of migration from Northern New Mexico into Wyoming from late 19th century to the present. This project exemplifies how consciousness or a heightened sense of awareness derives from the value system of querencia or how one establishes a sense of self and community through place. I argue the cultural landscape of a person’s place of origin injects a set of values and distinct qualities that create a strong sense of identity, enable community, …

2019 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2019 IGGAD Conference: Tracing the African Diaspora: Places of Suffering, Resilience, and Reinvention.

Post Colonial Studies, Nashieli Marcano, Kyle Brooks

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging and Kinships in African American Men’s Literature, 1953-1971 builds on the work of women-of-color feminists since the late 1960s and queer-of-color critique in the works of José Esteban Muñoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Roderic Ferguson, and Nadia Ellis, in order to chronicle the emergence of a queer tradition in mid twentieth century African American men’s literature. Through literary analysis and archival research on marginal figures of African American culture during this period, this dissertation proposes that the black pulp novels of Chester Himes, Robert Deane Pharr, Clarence Cooper Jr., and Iceberg Slim perform a queer critique of and …

African Dreams Of America: Diaspora Experience In The Writing Of Aidoo, Adichie And Cole, Gbenga Frederick Olorunsiwa

American Studies ETDs

This study explores four African diasporic texts against a backdrop of the African dream of America, diasporic experience, post-colonialism and racism in the U.S. as portrayed in the writings of Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1971), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2014), and Teju Cole’s Open City (2012) and Every Day Is for the Thief (2014). I argue that the African dream of America is different but also exemplary of the American experience and therefore a privileged lens for understanding “America.” During the course of this research project, I found that while the writings of Adichie and Aidoo are …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article Of Literature For Our Times & Reading Transcultural Cities, Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Bioarchaeological Investigations Of Nineteenth-Century African American Burials At The Pioneer Cemetery (41bo202) In Brazoria, Texas, Aaron R. Norment, Jeremy W. Pye, Cory J. Broehm, Douglas K. Boyd

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

A search for unmarked graves in the state-owned right of way and underneath the pavement of State Highway 332 resulted in the discovery and archeological excavation of 11 unmarked graves associated with Pioneer Cemetery, an African American burial ground in Brazoria, Texas. Prewitt and Associates, Inc., conducted the fieldwork for the Texas Department of Transportation’s Archeological Studies Program. Between 2008 and 2012, the 11 unmarked graves were discovered, exhumed, analyzed, and then reinterred in Pioneer Cemetery in September 2012. This report describes the bioarcheological investigations of those burials along with 3 other unmarked burials that were previously exhumed and reburied …

Creating Knowledge, Volume 9, 2016

Creating Knowledge

Dear Students, Colleagues, Alumni and Friends,

Throughout my career as faculty and administrator in higher education I have been honored with the opportunity to introduce and celebrate the publication of scholarly work by colleagues and graduate students in many disciplines and institutions around the world. After more than three decades of doing so, this is the first time that I have the pleasure of introducing a formal publication of work created by a talented group of undergraduate scholars. This honor is further magnified by the fact that beyond its formal format, this is a reviewed publication of extraordinary rigor and …

Indigeneity, Diaspora, And Ethical Turn In Anzaldúa’S Borderlands/La Frontera, Hsinya Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ethical Turn in Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera" Hsinya Huang discusses indigeneity vis-à-vis diaspora, two concepts often used as if they were necessarily antagonistic and antithetical to one another. While in diaspora studies Native people are marginalized, Huang resituates the figure of the Native to the core of diasporic discussion by tracing the movement, migration, or scattering of Native people from their established or ancestral homeland. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's life narrative in Borderlands/La Frontera, Huang advances the concept of the ethical turn in diaspora studies by questioning the master narrative regarding …

Introduction To Fiction And Ethics In The Twenty-First Century, Zhenzhao Nie, Biwu Shang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Experiences Of African-Born Women Faculty And Administrators At Colleges And Universities In The United States, Oyibo H. Afoaku

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to document the experiences of African-born women faculty and administrators at colleges and universities in the United States. The study explored the factors that motivated African-born women to immigrate to and extend their stay in the United States beyond completion of their education; factors they perceive as constraint on their quest for self-empowerment and identity as foreign students, college instructors, and/or administrators, and parents; and factors that have enabled them to adapt to their host culture and achieve their educational and professional goals even though they had to contend with multiple challenges associated with …

“My Brain Database Doesn’T See Skin Color” Color-Blind Racism In The Technology Industry And In Theorizing The Web, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

In this article, I examine three interconnected notions about color-blind racism and the Internet. The first is the fantasy that the Internet as a technology is color-blind with regard to race; the second is the reality that color-blind racism operates in the tech industry. The third notion is the way color-blind racism shapes Internet studies of race and racism, in which race is contained as a “variable” or as an “identity” that inhere exclusively in people of color, but that leaves the way race is embedded in structures, industry, and the very idea of the Internet unexamined. To explore these …

The Ransom And Sarah Williams Farmstead: Post-Emancipation Transitions Of An African American Family In Central Texas, Douglas K. Boyd, Aaron R. Norment, Terri Myers, Maria Franklin, Nedra Lee, Leslie L. Bush, Brian S. Shaffer

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

In conjunction with the proposed construction of the southwest segment of State Highway 45 in southern Travis County, the Texas Department of Transportation sponsored archeological testing and data recovery efforts at the Ransom Williams farmstead. Prewitt and Associates, Inc., conducted an interdisciplinary community-based historic archeological study of the farmstead from 2005 through 2011. Extensive archival research reveals that the 45-acre farm was owned and occupied by Ransom Williams and his wife Sarah, both former slaves, from about 1871 to ca. 1905. The Williams family lived in the predominantly white rural community of Bear Creek, but they had connections to the …

Public Relations: Diaspora, Media, And The State(S) Of American Literature, Nathan Allen Jung

Dissertations

Like any good public relations campaign, this dissertation aims to offer a persuasive interpretation of certain key facts. The facts, as I see them, are as follows: first, a great number of contemporary novels and poems explore the personal and social consequences of diasporic migration. Second, these texts, along with their print and electronic paratexts, share a pervasive interest in media. And third, these works are rarely read in conversation with one another, despite their mutual concern for migration and media. Owing to this last point in particular, scholarship has failed to fully address the broader media theories developed in …