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The Carceral Death Machine: Savagery, Contamination And Sacrifice In The Contemporary Prison, Timothy Malone Jan 2022

The Carceral Death Machine: Savagery, Contamination And Sacrifice In The Contemporary Prison, Timothy Malone

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, I develop a convict epistemology that interweaves two elements: 1) a deep engagement with the works of particular philosophers and scholars investigating questions of punishment, violence, biopolitics and political philosophy 2) with some specific, publicly-reported incidents within California prisons in the late 20th and 21st centuries and my own detailed narration of events and the structural and quotidian dynamics of the prison yard as I experienced them as inmate #K73299 from 1997 to 2005. Diverging from Foucauldian theories of disciplinarity, I argue that under neoliberalism, the primary punishments that any inmate is subjected to within the carceral …

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Hail, Caesar!, Kel R. Karpinski Jan 2022

Hail, Caesar!, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

This piece looks at queer characters in the Coen Brothers’ film Hail, Caesar! (2016). The film takes place during the heyday of the Hollywood film studio set in 1951 and draws on many films during that time period of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

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The Personal Must Always Be Political: A History Of Survivors' Narratives In Anti-Sexual Violence Zines, Jeannine Colby Fortin Jan 2022

The Personal Must Always Be Political: A History Of Survivors' Narratives In Anti-Sexual Violence Zines, Jeannine Colby Fortin

Honors Papers

This thesis constructs a history of the changing role of survivors’ narratives in anti-sexual violence zines from the 1990s to the early 2020s. I argue that zines are a window to the changing politics of the American anti-sexual violence movement. Through this lens, I find that the role of survivors’ narratives in zines has complexly changed and ultimately diminished over time. I examine how and posit why this change occurred in zines and the anti-sexual violence movement. Among other reasons, I find that both have followed the traditional arc of social movements, which chronologically involves emergence, coalescence, institutionalization, and decline. …

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Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe Jan 2022

Breaking Free: Detectives Let The Guilty Walk, Cassandra Holcombe

All Master's Theses

In a genre like detective fiction, known for affirming social order, the refusal to enforce rule of law seems like an anomaly. The number of famous detectives who have let a perpetrator go suggests that release of suspects is not a break in genre conventions, but is a wider pattern that needs to be acknowledged. This study investigates that pattern by measuring the complexity of thirteen detectives: eleven of whom release perpetrators and two of whom do not, to serve as a control group. The higher the complexity of the character, the more human the character seems to be. The …

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Ghosts, Hauntings, Kinship, And Contamination: Key Tropes For Narrating Extinction In Jeff Vandermeer's Hummingbird Salamander And James Bradley's Ghost Species, Christopher Hardesty Nicholson Jan 2022

Ghosts, Hauntings, Kinship, And Contamination: Key Tropes For Narrating Extinction In Jeff Vandermeer's Hummingbird Salamander And James Bradley's Ghost Species, Christopher Hardesty Nicholson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis examines the narrative portrayals of issues pertaining to anthropogenic extinction in two contemporary speculative fiction novels: Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021) and James Bradley’s Ghost Species (2020). This focus leads to consideration of narrative genre, tropes, and affective resonance. The first half of this thesis centers the genres of tragedy and elegy, their tropes of ghosts and hauntings, and the affective processes of grief and horror. Within these narrative frameworks extinction is experienced as a claustrophobic site of horror in Hummingbird Salamander, and as a time-warping inspiration of grief in Ghost Species. However, in each novel …

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Colonial Markets, Consumers, And Trade: A Comparative Analysis Of Historic Ceramics From The Bluefields Bay Area, Westmoreland, Jamaica, Lacy Risner Jan 2022

Colonial Markets, Consumers, And Trade: A Comparative Analysis Of Historic Ceramics From The Bluefields Bay Area, Westmoreland, Jamaica, Lacy Risner

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The ceramic assemblages from a British colonial settlement in Bluefields Bay, Jamaica, provide a unique window into the market availability, exchange routes, and consumption patterns of the eighteenth century. This study compares the historic ceramics collected from two sites in Bluefields Bay to one another and to other intra-island (Jamaica), intraregional (Lesser Antilles), and international (North America) colonial and postcolonial sites to reveal patterns of individual and global ceramic consumption and distribution in the emergent capitalist networks and markets of the colonial era. Integrating small British colonial sites into the networks of other more extensive studies focusing primarily on plantations …

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Twenty-First Century Adaptations Of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature, Kathryn J. Mcclain Jan 2022

Twenty-First Century Adaptations Of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature, Kathryn J. Mcclain

Theses and Dissertations--English

Twenty-First Century Adaptations of Early Twentieth Century American Protest Literature examines the resurgence of didactic political literature in the United States during the 21st century, specifically adaptations of early 20th century American leftist protest works by authors such as Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Richard Wright. While the most political aspects of these writers’ fiction are often either criticized as too politically overt – such as Sinclair’s The Jungle and Wright’s Native Son – or forgotten in favor of an author’s perceived literary merit – London’s The Iron Heel in comparison to his other works like Call of the Wild …

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Exploring Chinese Audience’S Responses Toward American Film Representations Of Chinese Culture And People, Yue Yu Jan 2022

Exploring Chinese Audience’S Responses Toward American Film Representations Of Chinese Culture And People, Yue Yu

Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative study focuses on the Chinese audience responses to Chinese media representations in American films. The goal of this project is to create a white paper that can be present to American film producers or potential movie investors who want to earn a bigger market share in China. Semi-structured focus groups were conducted among college students, addressing four research questions. Findings revealed that the participants in the focus group were able to identify and acknowledge the Chinese media representation and stereotypes in American feature films. Furthermore, most of the participants were positive towards Chinese elements incorporations and were capable …

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National Identity And Civil War Memory In The American South: How History, Ideology, And Media Inform The Culture Wars Of The Late Twentieth Century, John Lancaster Jan 2022

National Identity And Civil War Memory In The American South: How History, Ideology, And Media Inform The Culture Wars Of The Late Twentieth Century, John Lancaster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

On Veterans Day weekend, 1994, the remains of a Confederate soldier named Lewis Powell were reinterred in a cemetery in Geneva, Florida and given military honors. This thesis begins by historicizing Powell's burial ceremony to the final decades of the twentieth century to argue for new ways of viewing and understanding how Americans engaged with Civil War memory and legacy at a time of particularly felt social and cultural change. The 'culture wars' of the 1980s and 1990s describe the many battles and debates fought over issues as wide-ranging as race, politics, gender, sexuality, religion, and education, and were often …

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Cherokee Abstract Artist Leon Polk Smith: A Convergence Of Traditions, Danielle Montanino Jan 2022

Cherokee Abstract Artist Leon Polk Smith: A Convergence Of Traditions, Danielle Montanino

Dissertations and Theses

This paper analyzes how Leon Polk Smith's Indigenous roots and upbringing in Indian Country had a significant impact on his artistic practice in a time of discrimination and segregation in the United States. Through examination contextualizing his work within the history and political events of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations it is revealed how Polk Smith developed a formal language that could navigate both worlds and be viewed through a pure abstraction lens or a lens embodying his Indigenous traditions. In addition to his Indigenous philosophies, Mesoamerican Inca Nation’s cultural motifs further ground Polk Smith’s Indigenous aesthetic, and avant-garde …

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Colonial Prehistories Of Indigenous North America, Mark A. Mattes Jan 2022

Colonial Prehistories Of Indigenous North America, Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

One of the most common inquiries received by Filson Historical Society librarians concerns the myth of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Of the myth’s many versions, the one most familiar to Ohio Valley History readers goes like this: Madoc, a Welsh prince escaping an internecine conflict over political rule at home, supposedly sailed to North America in the twelfth century. His force either landed at the Falls of the Ohio or made it there after landing further south and being driven north by hostile locals, possibly Cherokee people. Madoc and his contingent intermixed with Indigenous populations, whose fair-haired, blue-eyed, …

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Reconstructing Queer Outsiders: Intersecting Identities Of Contemporary Gay Ethnic American Poets, Anthony Salazar Jan 2022

Reconstructing Queer Outsiders: Intersecting Identities Of Contemporary Gay Ethnic American Poets, Anthony Salazar

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores poetry and memoirs written by recent poets who identify as gay, ethnic, and American. As a result of the complex process of both integrating their intersecting identities and confronting various forms of oppression, the work of gay ethnic American poets has become necessarily more layered than that of their white heteronormative counterparts. They have also transformed a genre traditionally defined by the limited and limiting category “gay” into a multivalent “queer” medium that embraces a futurity of vast and unapologetically ambiguous possibilities. Their very act of emphasizing ethnicity and sexuality in relation to other intersecting identities ultimately …

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Nature, Magic, And Healing: How Leslie Silko Builds Her Native World, Ashton Q. Record Jan 2022

Nature, Magic, And Healing: How Leslie Silko Builds Her Native World, Ashton Q. Record

Student Publications

An essay examining how Leslie M. Silko utilizes the relationship between Nature and Native American Mystic Arts to create a full and vibrant world in her novel Ceremony.

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Afroam: A Virtual Film Production Group, Bill Taylor Jr. Jan 2022

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 …

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American Performance: Artistic Experience And The American Dream, Savannah M. Barrow Jan 2022

American Performance: Artistic Experience And The American Dream, Savannah M. Barrow

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The American Dream was first epitomized by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography (1791), in which he instructs his fellow citizens on how to procure the American promises of social mobility and economic prosperity. However, the moral and social performances reinforced by Franklin’s recipe-for-success promote an ideological system that prevents marginalized communities such as women, immigrants, and people of color, from procuring the Dream’s most foundational features. Inequitable access to the Dream is a theme revisited throughout American literature, wherein disenfranchised characters consume the aspirational narrative of American social mobility through art, media, and propaganda. This essay tracks the representation of …

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Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson Jan 2022

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

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Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv Jan 2022

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

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Navigating The Labyrinth Of House Of Leaves Through A Postmodern Archetypal Literary Theory, Samuel K. Hval Jan 2022

Navigating The Labyrinth Of House Of Leaves Through A Postmodern Archetypal Literary Theory, Samuel K. Hval

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.

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Getting Back: The Chiffons’ Sonic Reclamation, Hilarie Ashton Jan 2022

Getting Back: The Chiffons’ Sonic Reclamation, Hilarie Ashton

Publications and Research

Sixties girl group the Chiffons are famous for their soaring 1964 hit “He’s So Fine,” a song in turn remembered almost as often for its plagiarism by George Harrison than in its own right. Much of the rest of their catalogue, including the tremendous “I Have a Boyfriend,” gets shunted into historical and critical gaps that paint rock music history as controlled by men. In this article, I examine the Chiffons in their own right, reframing a story of well-worn sonic theft to center on the group it obscured, through and alongside interpretative contradictions, assumptions, and historical lacunae. I show …

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See You In The Funny Pages: Forms And Aesthetics Of Newspaper Comic Strips In Bill Watterson's Calvin And Hobbes, Jack Mallard Dec 2021

See You In The Funny Pages: Forms And Aesthetics Of Newspaper Comic Strips In Bill Watterson's Calvin And Hobbes, Jack Mallard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project looks at how Bill Watterson’s aesthetics and his employment of the comics apparatus, as well as his advocacy for learning the history of the formal development (and decline) of the newspaper comic strip, influence Calvin and Hobbes’ approach to art, family, education, and other cultural topics. By adapting Thierry Groensteen’s theory of spatio-topia, a term describing comics’ ability to provoke meaning from how graphic, verbal, and structural elements inhabit space and relate to one another within space, I demonstrate how Bill Watterson’s quality as a comics artist comes as much from his ability to activate spatio-topic potentials …

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Performing Amish Agrarianism: Negotiating Tradition In The Maintenance Of Pennsylvania Dairy Farms, Nicole Welk-Joerger Dec 2021

Performing Amish Agrarianism: Negotiating Tradition In The Maintenance Of Pennsylvania Dairy Farms, Nicole Welk-Joerger

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies

Amish people have a reputation for being ecologically and environmentally conscientious. As numerous scholars in Amish and Plain Anabaptist studies have demonstrated, Amish views of the environment are diverse and ultimately anchored in the understanding that God made nature for human use. In these cases, Amish views of the environment could be described as much more anchored in traditional philosophical notions of “agrarianism” than “environmentalism.” In this article, I explore how some Amish approach agrarianism with a turn from more traditional farm life toward necessary economic engagement with multi-faceted operations and diversification. Based on intensive ethnographic research and participant observation, …

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Marion Post And The Farm Security Administration In Florida, Robert E. Snyder Dec 2021

Marion Post And The Farm Security Administration In Florida, Robert E. Snyder

Florida Historical Quarterly

Between 1933 and 1940, and continuing through World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spent billions of dollars through a number of agencies on a variety of relief and recovery measures. Persuading Congress and the American public that mammoth appropriations were necessary to ameliorate the privations suffered by the bottom third of the nation required a constant lobbying and educational effort. To show the needs of the ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill-clothed during the Great Depression, and to record the progress made by the New Deal, a documentary photography project was established in 1935 in the Resettlement Administration (RA), and became …

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"Yonder Come Day": Religious Dimensions Of The Transition From Slavery To Freedom In Florida, Robert L. Hall Dec 2021

"Yonder Come Day": Religious Dimensions Of The Transition From Slavery To Freedom In Florida, Robert L. Hall

Florida Historical Quarterly

The Confederate firing on Fort Sumter in 1861 was a watershed not only in the political and military history of the United States, but also a turning point in its social history. The heady wine of secessionism and the rupturing of lines of communication and calm moral discourse were experienced in some religious polities for more than a decade before the fateful military event. Southern Methodists and Baptists had parted company with their non-southern counterparts by 1845, when, as John Hope Franklin has written, “slavery had become as much a part of the religious orthodoxy of the South as the …

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Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society Dec 2021

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

MAY MANN JENNINGS: FLORIDA’S GENTEEL ACTIVIST, by Linda D. Vance, reviewed by Joan S. Carver; A HISTORY OF THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE IN MANATEE COUNTY, FLORIDA, by Robert E. King, reviewed by Mark V. Barrow; LA REPÚBLICA DE LAS FLORIDAS: TEXTS AND DOCUMENTS, compiled by David Bushnell, reviewed by Bruce S. Chappell; LETTERS OF DELEGATES TO CONGRESS, 1774 - 1789, VOLUME 11: OCTOBER 1, 1778 - JANUARY 31, 1779, edited by Paul H. Smith, Gerald W. Gawalt, Ronald M. Gephart, and Eugene R. Sheridan, LETTERS OF DELEGATES TO CONGRESS, 1774-1789, VOLUME 12: FEBRUARY 1, 1779 - MARCH 31, 1779, edited …

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History News, Florida Historical Society Dec 2021

History News, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Charlton Tebeau Chair, D. B. McKay Award, Announcements and Awards, Obituary

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Major General James Patton Anderson: An Autobiography, Margaret Uhler Dec 2021

Major General James Patton Anderson: An Autobiography, Margaret Uhler

Florida Historical Quarterly

Although James Patton Anderson has received relatively little historical recognition, the contributions he made to Florida’s Civil War effort are worthy of historical study.

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Open-Range Cattle-Herding In Southern Florida, John S. Otto Dec 2021

Open-Range Cattle-Herding In Southern Florida, John S. Otto

Florida Historical Quarterly

The herders of the Old South held little land and few slaves but owned considerable numbers of livestock. They grazed their livestock on the unclaimed public lands, or “open-range,” at no charge, a practice which was safeguarded by state laws until after the Civil War. Living throughout the Old South, the herders were especially numerous in the mountains and the coastal plain, where the soil possessed little fertility, and where most of the land was unclaimed public domain. In the southern mountains, herders raised hogs in the unfenced hardwood forests, exporting porkers to southern plantations and to midwestern slaughter houses. …

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History News, Florida Historical Society Dec 2021

History News, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Conferences, Exhibitions, Announcements and Activities

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Florida Seminoles In The Depression And New Deal, 1933-1942: An Indian Perspective, Harry A. Kersey, Jr. Dec 2021

Florida Seminoles In The Depression And New Deal, 1933-1942: An Indian Perspective, Harry A. Kersey, Jr.

Florida Historical Quarterly

The Great Depression of the 1930s, following as it did the exuberant prosperity and financial excesses of the “Roaring Twenties,” caught millions of Americans both economically and psychologically unprepared to deal with the collapse which was to follow. One of the few groups which was not adversely affected immediately, if only because they were already living perilously close to the poverty level, was the Seminole Indians of Florida. As late as the turn of the century they had participated in a profitable trading relationship with white merchants in the south Florida region. These merchants had purchased a great volume of …

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Florida History In Periodicals, 1985, Florida Historical Society Dec 2021

Florida History In Periodicals, 1985, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

This selected bibliography includes scholarly articles in the field of Florida history, archeology, geography, and anthropology published in state, regional, and national periodicals in 1985. Articles, notes, and documents which have appeared in the Florida Historical Quarterly are not included in this listing since they appear in the annual index of each volume. The present listing also includes articles appearing in journals not published on schedule and which were not included in the list published in the July 1985 issue of the Quarterly.

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