Digital Commons Network^™

Star Wars: From Fantasy Film To Statement Showcase, Erica Pang

Pop Culture Intersections

This paper will examine the success of the Star Wars franchise by comparing two of its films: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015). During the nearly 40 year period in between each film’s release, there was significant socio-political change that had occurred. Therefore, in order to continue to appeal to its existing audience, as well as adopt new audiences, Star Wars had to deviate from the traditional characters and storylines of A New Hope and instead, focus on diversity and representation in The Force Awakens. Using socio-political and feminist approaches, I …

The Societal Influence Of The Nba, Kyle Kawashiri

Pop Culture Intersections

Based on recent events, there has been a lot of discussion about the racial issues in America. Many professional athletes have been vocal about these issues, but NBA players seem to be at the forefront of many of the conversations regarding social injustice in this country. This article will examine different factors that have influenced the popularity of the National Basketball Association, such as product distribution, online engagement, global outreach, and the choice to allow players to use their platforms. The article will then argue how these factors have allowed the NBA and its players to be leaders in the …

Why Playing Video Games Is In Your Best Interest, Adan Salazar

Pop Culture Intersections

This article explores the world of video games and their potential to benefit one's well being. For decades video games have persevered in pop culture and have provided entertainment for countless people. The overwhelming popularity of video games has also sparked debate on how they can affect an individual. From extended screen time hurting vision to violent content affecting actions many claims have been made against video games. The truth is there is far more evidence supporting video games as a benefit towards users. Enriching social practices, providing therapy and implementation into classrooms are just a few of the ways …

Defending K-Pop Idols Online: The Fanbase’S Underlying Issue Of Ignorance, Grace Gita Tantra

Pop Culture Intersections

This article covers how parasocial relationships and echo chambers promote ignorance within K-pop fandoms on social media platforms, specifically when it comes to cultural appropriation, racial stereotyping, and anti-Blackness. Despite the recent surge in education and accountability in other areas of pop culture, K-pop has created a unique space online when it comes to these dialogues. We will be exploring this through looking at the Korean wave, implications of parasocial relationships, and the divide in the common conversation online; these concepts will be applied to specific recent examples of K-pop controversies and the fans' responses.

A World Of Luxury, Tanvi Yeccaluri

Pop Culture Intersections

This article explores the history of luxury and the impacts of the growing consumerism in the United States. The change in consumption habits is touched on, with analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic stimulus check usage and trends. The debate of the importance of social status in the US and how our current society displays materialistic values in relation to the growing demand for luxury is a covered, and supported by numerous studies and research conducted over the past twenty years. There is an explanation of how society has become driven by the desire for luxury in order to increase social …

September 2020, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Erev Rosh Hashanah Sacred Music Concert and Service; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Community Notices

Amjambo Africa! (September 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue...

Indigo Arts Alliance.....................p.2

publisher’s editorial.....................p.4

registering to vote.......................p.4

French............................................p.5

Swahili...........................................p.6

Somali............................................p.7

School resource officers ..............p.8

U.S.-Canada border.....................p.8

News from Africa.........................p.9

Finance/buying a home.............p.10

Guest columns..............11/14/20/21

World market basket...........p.12/13

Héritier Nosso............................p.15

Community org. News........p.16/17

Kinyarwanda..............................p.18

portuguese .................................p.19

outdoor learning.......................p.23

bus Shelters................................p.23

Keepers Of Rhode Island's Heritage: Ann Olyphant, Thomas Hornsby, And Stephen Gould, Marian Desrosiers

Faculty and Staff - Articles & Papers

Mystery often surrounds artifacts from the 17th century later found in a family's attic. Historic preservation may be the result of caretakers holding onto the past without understanding the connections. The excitement is in finding the documents to put together the puzzle.

An Empire Among Empires: America's Relationship To "The Other" In The Historiography Of Empire, Lynne C. Goldhammer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper outlines two different threads in the historiography of empires regarding their treatment of “the other.” The first thread begins with the early Chinese empires, the Qin and Han, which used diplomacy and tributes as well as repression to incorporate “others” under their imperial umbrellas. This thread was then picked up and modified later by the Mongols and Mughals, both of which showed a fair amount of flexibility and openness towards cultural difference. The second thread begins with the Romans (the Republic and Empire), who were largely flexible and inclusive towards “others” until the late Empire, when Christianity took …

Knights Of The Round Table Mesa: A Brief Study In The Paintings And Books On The American West, Mitchell A. Gehman

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

This article investigates how printed material and visual arts helped create the image of the cowboy in American popular culture. This perception did much to influence the popular memory of the American West and had significant consequences for the development of American identity.

“The Friendly And Flowing Savage, Who Is He?”: Manifest Destiny, Native American Stereotypes, And How American Print Culture Closed The Western Frontier, 1865-1890, Emily Parrow

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

This article examines how 19th Century American print culture shaped white American perceptions of Amerindians. Between the close of the Civil War and the Wounded Knee Massacre, the American press, Indian captivity narratives, and fictional accounts reflect diverse white perspectives on and attitudes towards Native Americans’ past and future in a continental United States.

Death As A Gift In J.R.R Tolkien's Work And Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Gaelle Abalea

Journal of Tolkien Research

In the episode “Intervention” (S5 ep.18), when going on a spiritual quest about her nature as a slayer, Buffy is told, by the guide under the form of the first Slayer, that ‘Death is her Gift’. Buffy, a 20^th century young woman is confused by the declaration, as are the viewers unless they have read the Silmarilliion, in which the Elves refer to human mortality as the Gift of Illuvatar, a gift they greatly envy.

Writing decades apart, Tolkien and Whedon may not have the same use of the word “gift” as their background and inspirations are quite different …

Posting About Blm Made It A Movement Pushing For Real Change, Nolan Michaels

Pop Culture Intersections

Although social media includes opposing views that have unified against BLM, it has been responsible for massive growth of the movement. In this paper, I will show how social media plays a pivotal role in BLM by scaling up the movement and encouraging more nuanced and diverse perspectives on BLM to develop. Although all social media platforms are used to promote BLM, my examination will focus mainly on Twitter because it is the primary platform analyzed by scholars that investigates the growth of BLM. What MLK was able to accomplish by tapping into the new medium of television is now …

“Nobody” Speaks In A Bog: Emily Dickinson’S “I’M Nobody Who Are You?”, Mei Fujie

International Programs

No abstract provided.

10 Theses On Feminist Economics (Or The Antagonism Between The Strike And Finance), Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance),” Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago are interested in a feminist economics that is able to redefine, based on the bodies and territories in conflict, labor and exploitation, communal and feminized modes of doing and resisting, and popular innovation in moments of crisis. They write from the position of having formed part of the organizing for the feminist strike that, since 2016, has driven what they characterize as a massive, radical, and transnational movement. They root the theses that they synthesize here in that dynamic …

Readymade Or Made [To Be] Ready, Replicant Or Surplus: Social Reproduction And The Biopolitics Of Abstraction Prefigured In Contemporary Art, Jaleh Mansoor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The artist may be one of the last subject-positions within capitalism to determine their own labour under the sign of “creativity,” and to be held at an oblique angle to value productive labour; they are dialectically “free” to be creative (Adorno, Vishmidt, Stakemeir, Beech). But since 1973 if not 1915, artists mark this creative capacity as a process whereby reification has migrated from that of the object to that of the subject, to the artist-subject, now heightened in a post-industrial era of “feminized” and immaterial labour where service eclipses production. Artists in the “post medium condition” elaborate practices that track …

Detroit’S Water Wars: Race, Failing Social Reproduction, And Infrastructure, Brian Whitener

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this essay, I theorize an emergent urban power dynamic of infrastructural resource grabs or the use of state power to transfer infrastructural resources away from marginalized, racialized, and/or precariously documented populations. As a transfer, rather than a set of cuts or privatizations, I argue this dynamic is distinct from those of neoliberal or “shrinking” states and is a direct attack on the social reproduction capacity of communities and individuals. Focusing on the case of Detroit, where predominantly white suburban elites succeeded under the cover of Detroit’s 2013-14 bankruptcy proceedings to pry the possession of the water and sewage infrastructure …

Toward An Ecology Of Life-Making: The Re-Membering Of Meridel Le Sueur, Rosemary Hennessy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay advances Marxist feminism’s attention to social reproduction in order to account more fully for the relations that support life-making. The ecology of life-making is, I argue, an under-developed facet of social reproduction theory and an extension of its reach. I begin by clarifying social reproduction theory’s explanations of the value of reproductive labor time to life-making. I then turn to feminist political ecology’s attention to capital’s deregulation of life and to Native feminist onto-epistemologies as they expand the material history of capital’s theft of time and imposition of embodied debt. In the essay’s final section, I consider the …

Fourier, Marx, And Social Reproduction, Blanca Missé

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article establishes a conversation between the work of materialist socialist Charles Fourier and Marxist social reproduction theory (SRT). SRT has laid the ground to explore who produces the producer, in order to analyze and integrate the role of reproductive labor into a comprehensive Marxist view of the capitalist economy. In the context of the critical re-appraisal of the labor of social reproduction, Fourier offers a key materialist perspective which is also present in Marx: the identity between labor and desire in the socialist project. Fourier's materialism, I show, greatly influenced both Marx and Engels, for whom labor was also …

“Racist, Sexist, Profane, And Violent”: Reinterpreting Wwe’S Portrayals Of Samoans Across Generations, John Honey

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This paper examines the shifting portrayals of Pacific Islanders in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) across three generations. As both a popular and historically racially problematic venue, WWE’s politically incorrect programming has played an underappreciated and under examined role in representing the USA. Although many different groups have been portrayed by gross stereotypes in WWE, this paper uses the family of Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson—the Samoan Dynasty—as a case study. The WWE originally presented Pacific Islanders using the most offensive stereotypes, and the first two generations of the Samoan Dynasty had to “play Indian” or cosign onto gross representations of their …

Loughery Covid -19 Digital Archive, Kelly Loughery

Kutztown University Archives

Kelly Loughery, a Professional Writing major in the English Department at Kutztown University kept a journal in summer 2020 as part of an internship at the Rohrbach Library-Archives Office.

Straight Men Come Out: Queer Eye And The Path To A More Mindful Masculinity, Eli M. Roush

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

My thesis explores the culture surrounding the 2018 reboot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in relation to contemporary arguments in masculinity studies about the costs of hegemonic masculinity, performance, and identity. This paper examines how Queer Eye carefully creates space where heteronormative men can safely express emotional vulnerability and embody a more functional masculinity that expands beyond the bounds of hegemonic performance. The bulk of the analysis involves close readings of specific episodes and scenes from Queer Eye that introduce and examine the strategies the Fab Five use to redefine their subject's engagement with masculinity, explore the effectiveness …

The Sacred Circle: Ostension In Native American Hoop Dancing, Emma George

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis examines the role of the semiotic concept ostension in folk dance, specifically in Native American hoop dance. Although the discipline of folklore is well-versed in ostension, folk dance has not been examined through this lens. I argue that dance is a form of ostension, of demonstrating a narrative, and this is especially apparent within Native American hoop dancing. I begin with a brief history of Native Americans in North America before discussing the origins of powwows, intertribal culture, and hoop dance. I then look at both the sacred nature and material culture of the modern hoop dance before …

Jewish Identity On American Television And Viewer Attitudes In An Era Of Rising Anti-Semitism, Jacqueline Winters-Allen

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Research in media and cultural studies have shown that viewers form opinions regarding Jewish identity based on how Jewish characters are presented on screen. American entertainment has struggled with accurate portrayals of Jewish culture and characters; negative Jewish stereotypes frequently appear and perpetuate these perceptions. Due to the current rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, it is important to consider how writers are defining Jewish identity by examining depictions of contemporary Jewish characters and assessing viewer attitudes toward those characters. Two long-running, popular American broadcast television shows that contain Jewish characters as part of the main cast – The …

I Didn't Know Aiiieeeee, But It Knew Me, Adrienne Su

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

"I Didn't Know Aiiieeeee, But It Knew Me" is a poem that reflects on the influence of both the anthology and the word Aiiieeeee on the writer's development. It uses an adaptation of the ghazal to explore both the continuities and discontinuities of becoming a writer when Asian-American literature was mostly inaccessible.

Movement Upstream, Downstream: A Lyric Essay, Mong- Lan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Early on, without knowing I was part of a movement, I was part of the movement of the Asian American cultural and literary phenomenon.

Because it was necessary to bear witness, to tell my story, my stories, our stories, the collective story, my observations, which keeps on unravelling, I began to write.

Some Thoughts On Aiiieeeee! In 2019, Shawna Ryan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A creative writer reflects on the legacy of Aiiieeeee!

Aiiieeeee!’S No! In Thunder, Leslie Bow

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This accessible, brief, first person essay evaluates the legacy and rhetoric of the 1974 Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. It examines the ways in which the anthology’s front matter fosters both inclusions and exclusions as it establishes foundational rubrics for Asian American literature and assesses the volume’s continuing value for scholars.

Mantos, Unmasked 曼托, Russell C. Leong

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Zuihitsu: Teaching Aiiieeeee! As Intersectional Ecological Archive, Kenji C. Liu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A response to the Aiiieeeee! anthology on its 45th anniversary, using the Japanese zuihitsu form to reflect on its intersectional and ecological complexities and relevance for today.