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Naccs 34th Annual Conference, National Association For Chicana And Chicano Studies

NACCS Conference Programs

Sociological and Ideological Shifts: Chicana/o Migratory Movements and Immigration Passages
April 4-7, 2007
Fairmont Hotel

Noticias De Naccs, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2007, National Association For Chicana And Chicano Studies

Noticias de NACCS Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Tumuge' Påpa' (Writing It Down): Chamorro Midwives And The Delivery Of Native History, Christine Taitano Delisle

Pacific Studies

This essay explores the evolving significance of the Chamorro phrase tuge' påpa'—"write it down"—as both a command and a cultural imperative in the life of a Chamorro woman and scholar. Anchored in personal history and critical scholarship, the essay examines how writing becomes a medium for engaging with, preserving, and reshaping Chamorro identity, history, and resistance in the face of colonial narratives. Drawing from research on i pattera siha—prewar Chamorro nurse-midwives trained under U.S. Naval Administration—this work blends ethnography, historiography, and family memory to challenge dominant American colonial discourse. Using the motif of “working hands,” it underscores the …

"Why Don't They Leave?" Saving Faith And Other Issues Of Catholic Missionization, Kathleen J. Martin

Ethnic Studies

No abstract provided.

Ua1f Wku Archives Vertical File - College Heights Herald, 1961-2007, Wku Archives

WKU Administration Documents

Digitized vertical file materials regarding the College Heights Herald.

Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, And Survival By Meredith M. Gadsby (Book Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

The folk will tell you that salt can either save you or destroy you. Toni Cade Bambara's Velma of The Salteaters realized that her survival depended on learning "the difference between eating salt as an antidote to snakebite and turning into salt, succumbing to the serpent." The lesson of similar folk wisdom is the subject of Meredith M. Gasby's Sucking Salt, where she propses as a new framework for the examination of Caribbean women's writing the survival techiniques implied in "sucking salt," techiniques suggested in her aunt's reflections on people she knew. Tantie expounded: "Little salt won't kill …

Indigenous Scientific Literacies In Nalo Hopkinson’S Ceremonial Worlds, Grace L. Dillon

Indigenous Nations Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Increasingly our critical tradition is recognizing the prevalence of issues of indigeneity in sf. Whether this emerging emphasis reflects keener powers of observation on the part of readers or shifting preferences on the part of writers, it is clear that, as the idealism of a Golden Age melts into the dross of colonial aftermath, sf is beginning to reflect the West's rising awareness that manifest destinies, whatever fashion they wear, wield a violent science in pursuing control and care little for the cultures they displace and erase. Nor is it surprising that a genre noted for its pioneering exploration of …

Using The Novel To Teach Multiculturalism, Michelle Loris

English Faculty Publications

Description of a fourteen week course taught by Michelle Loris, professor of English at Sacred Heart University. The course, titled Recent Ethnic American Fictions, introduced students to several concepts from contemporary literary theory. The theories included New Criticism, Deconstruction, Cultural Studies, New Historicism, and Feminist Theory. The assumption was that these concepts would give students the tools to become critical readers, which would then provide them with a deeper understanding of these multicultural novels and their particular cultural contexts.

For a semester, reading and thinking about these multicultural novels engaged and challenged the students' assumptions about themselves and the …

Representation In Kenya, Its Diaspora, And Academia: Colonial Legacies In Constructions Of Knowledge About Kenya's Coast, Jesse Benjamin

Faculty Articles

This paper explores the construction of knowledge in Kenya in the context and aftermath of colonialism and underdevelopment. Those communities that were politically and economically marginalized in Coast Province over the past century were also displaced in terms of academic opportunities, resulting in fewer social science scholars from Mijikenda and other non-Swahili communities in both Kenyan and diaspora universities. Underdevelopment studies in Africa and Kenya are briefly reviewed, and the colonial history of asymmetric social relations at coastal Kenya is traced. Finally, key debates over identity and history are examined within this context and shown to be exacerbated by diasporic …

Interrupting Ethnographic Spectacles In Eric Valli's Himalaya, Puspa Damai

English Faculty Research

How can we talk about "postcoloniality" in relation to Nepal, which, even though it has never been foreign to Western fantasies about the exotic, was never formally colonized? One of the ways could be to create narratives and deploy images - as has been done by Eric Valli in his popular film Himalaya- that foreground geographically remote and ethnically and politically marginalized people of the nation. And yet, this article argues, such an attempt as Himalaya could easily fall into the same trap as grips orientalist ethnography that seeks to generate spectacles of the other for its own pleasure. …

Remade In Hong Kong : How Hong Kong People Use Hong Kong Disneyland, Wing Yee, Kimburley Choi

Lingnan Theses

Recent studies of globalization provide contrasting views of the cultural and sociopolitical effects of such major corporations as Disney as they invest transnationally and circulate their offerings around the world. While some scholars emphasize the ubiquity of Disney’s products and its promotion of consumerism on a global scale, accompanied by cultural homogenization, faltering democracy, and diminishing state sovereignty, others highlight signs of contestation and resistance, questioning the various state-capitalist alliances presumed to hold in the encounter between a global company, a local state, and the people.

The settlement process and the cultural import of Hong Kong Disneyland in Hong Kong …

"Khmer Pride": Being And Becoming Khmer-American In An Urban Migrant Education Program, Theresa Ann Mcginnis

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This article focuses on the ways an urban migrant education program becomes a space where middle school Khmer students can explore who they are as Khmer youth living in an urban American context. I discuss how the youth are able to take a transformative, interactional stance to the literacy and sign-making practices within the program. I argue that the Khmer youth's identities are reflected within these literacy and expressive practices. Further, I suggest the experiences of these Khmer middle school children of agricultural workers provide rich examples of how immigrant youth draw on a variety of cultural resources (from urban …

Book Review - Reyes, A. (2006) Language, Identity, And Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian, Keo Chea

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

No abstract provided.

Four Poems: Snakehead Fish; Departures; Capitol; And Preparations For Southeast Asia, Bryan Thao Worra

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

No abstract provided.

Reform And Empire: The British And American Transnational Search For The Rights Of Black People In The Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Thomas E. Smith

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Late nineteenth century modernity forced reformers in Great Britain and the United States to embrace a new sense of immediacy in their strategies. These new strategies, however, rarely extended to black people who were often subject to violence and discrimination in the period of high imperialism. Instead, when most reformers discussed the problems black people faced all they could offer were traditional promises of religious-based protections or “uplift.” The violence of lynching in the 1890s forced reformers to address the problems of white supremacy in a direct fashion, while promoting an understanding of the connection between the plight of African …

Mining The Meaning Of Collective Memory And Imagination: The Construction Of Identity In The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Courtney Hooper

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project illuminates the relationship between cultural resistance, cultural production, and cultural identity in the poetry of Puerto Ricans in New York (“Nuyoricans”). Through textual analysis, informal interviews, and participant observation conducted in the South Bronx, this project is interested in how the descriptions of the island as “home” are used to mediate a cultural or ethnic identity, particularly amongst a people who do not live there, or perhaps never have. While the construction of an ethnic identity and a conceptual homeland in a diasporic community has been studied in past research, the intention here is to elaborate upon the …

"Don't Believe The Hype": The Construction And Export Of African American Images In Hip-Hop Culture., John Ike Sewell Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines recurring motifs and personas in hip-hop.

Interviews with influential hip-hop scholars, writers and music industry personnel were conducted and analyzed using qualitative methods. Interview subjects were selected based on their insider knowledge as music critics, hip-hop scholars, ethnomusicologists, publicists, and music industry positions.

The vast majority of constructed imagery in hip-hop is based on a single persona, the gangsta. This qualitative analysis reveals why gangsta personas and motifs have become the de facto imagery of hip-hop. Gangsta imagery is repeatedly presented because it sells, it is the most readily-available role, and because of music industry pressures.

This …

The Sociopolitical Construction Of Race And Literary Representations Of The Biracial Subject, Kara Fontenot

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Twentieth-century American literature incorporates interracial and biracial themes that bring to light the often unnamed and unrecognized biracial identities of many Americans. Unfortunately, despite the potential value for a deeper understanding of the construction of race, these themes have seldom been seriously considered in the context of reevaluating the nature of the system that creates racial labels and categories until the recent emergence of postmodern critical theories. This thesis examines the black-white interracial themes and biracial protagonists in Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) in order to explore the texts' representations of systems of hegemonic power that …

Noticias De Naccs, Vol. 35, Nos. 3-4, Winter 2006, National Association For Chicana And Chicano Studies

Noticias de NACCS Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Atanarjuat And The Ideological Work Of Contemporary Indigenous Filmmaking, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

Ilanaaq is the latest North American example of “playing Indian” (Deloria 1998), a practice with vast historical precedent. With ilanaaq, Canada joins a host of nations who have turned to symbols of local indigeneity to assert their national distinctiveness. Such appropriation presents indigenous artists with a dilemma. The current flowering of indigenous letters, art and cinema in North America is generally taken as evidence that Canada and the United States, as thriving multiculturalist democracies, have broken with an earlier history of the expropriation and displacement of the Americas’ indigenous peoples. The art bears witness to a new historical period, in …

Toward A Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article re-examines racial and ethnic identity within the context of pedagogical attempts to instill a positive white identity in white students who are conscious of the history of white racism and white privilege. The paper draws heavily from whiteness studies and developmental cognitive science in arguing (against Henry Giroux and Stuart Hall) that a positive notion of white identity, however postmodern its construction, is an oxymoron, since whiteness designates less a cultural/ethnic ethos and meaningful way of life than a pathological structure of privilege and narrowminded cognitive habitus.

Naccs 32nd Annual Conference, National Association For Chicana And Chicano Studies

NACCS Conference Programs

Visión: Articulating, Imagining, and Contextualizing Chicana/o Spaces
April 13-17
Hyatt Regency

Coyote's Tale On The Old Oregon Trail: Challenging Cultural Memory Through Narrative At The Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, Jackson B. Miller

Faculty Publications

This essay examines the oppositional narratives presented in a Native American museum in order to explore the efficacy of narrative as both a strategy for resistance to hegemonic narratives of the settling of the West and a medium for sharing culture. The positioning of the museum visitor as co-participant in the museum’s narratives is also considered, with a particular focus on the relationships among narrator, story, and audience. Finally, the narrative of tribal life presented in the museum is evaluated for its potential as a vehicle for both cultural change and continuity.

Where Do White People Come From? A Foucaultian Critique Of Whiteness Studies, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves to normalize. A case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white …

Spivak After Marx After Derrida, Philip Leonard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Spivak is often viewed as an unequivocally deconstructive theorist, and she frequently reinforces this impression by proclaiming her allegiance to Derrida's ideas. Recent comments by her suggest, however, that there are limits to her deconstructive convictions. This essay considers some of Spivak's debts to Derrida's work, though it is primarily concerned with those occasions when she states her misgivings about his ability to understand postcoloniality, global power, and resistance movements. Reading Marx more accurately would, she insists, have allowed Derrida both to grasp capitalism's complex logic and to consider the effects of subaltern interventions upon capitalism's global authority. Such an …

History Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

En-Gendering Critical Spatial Literacy: Migrant Asante Women And The Politics Of Urban Space., Epifania Adoo-Adare

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The power of spatial configurations in our everyday social practices and ideological constructions of place and identity cannot be denied. As an architect and an Asante woman who has always lived in African and diasporic cities, I am particularly interested in how Black women’s socioeconomic lives have been constituted, situated, and enacted in western urban spatiality. I believe that Black women the world over are disproportionately represented in unsuitable and inadequate urban spaces and are also underrepresented in urban development decision-making processes. Also, as a Black female architect intent on imagining and constructing radical architectural counter-narratives within hegemonic spatial politics, …

Gender And Cosmos Emplaced: Women's Houses And Men's Houses In Bariai, West New Britain, Papua New Guinea, Naomi Mcpherson

Pacific Studies

In Papua New Guinea, the men's cult houses are dramatic examples of vernacular architecture that have overshadowed the importance and symbolic meanings of the domestic dwelling, or women's houses. This essay is an ethnography of house forms, specifically women's houses and men's cult houses in Bariai, West New Britain. The focus is on relationships of articulation between the built environment and gender concepts within the framework of Bariai cosmology, which show how gender concepts and relations are emplaced and the built environment is gendered.

Intellectual Property And Indigenous Peoples: Adapting Copyright Law To The Needs Of A Global Community, Megan M. Carpenter

Law Faculty Scholarship

The definition and scope of intellectual property and associated laws are under intense debate in the emerging discourse surrounding intellectual property and human rights. These debates primarily arise within the context of indigenous peoples' rights to protection and ownership of culturally specific properties. It is true that intellectual property laws are based on Western, developed markets, Western concepts of creation and invention, and Western concepts of ownership. But whatever their origins, those laws have been, and currently are, the primary vehicle for the protection of artistic, literary, and scientific works worldwide. To segregate indigenous interests from this international legal regime, …

Introduction (Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi Television, 1955-1969.), Steven Classen

Faculty Publications - Department of Communication and Cinematic Arts

The broadcast complex that houses WLBT-TV remains today where it has always been, a few blocks outside the modest cluster of skyscrapers that defines downtown Jackson, Mississippi. Built in the 1950s a short distance from prominent businesses and seats of government, the center's managers have long enjoyed proximity to political and economic power. But as the years have passed, station planners have faced the problem of updating the center's aging physical plant and technologies. The architectural results are an eclectic mix- a layering of the new upon the old- as a consequence of repeated remodeling projects. While the station's original …