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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Body Negotiating Unprecedented Movement, Mei Bock Jan 2024

The Body Negotiating Unprecedented Movement, Mei Bock

Honors Projects

A collection of poems exploring threads including the Lower East Side, immigration, stray animals, art, and Chinese-American identity.


Reframing Mourning: Liberatory Grief In Post-Tragedy Chinese American Women’S Fiction, Sophia Li Jan 2024

Reframing Mourning: Liberatory Grief In Post-Tragedy Chinese American Women’S Fiction, Sophia Li

Honors Projects

My project approaches discussions of Asian American melancholia and mourning with a specific focus on contemporary Chinese American women’s fiction. Scholars such as David Eng, Shinhee Han, and Anne Anlin Cheng have long spotlighted the prevalence of depression among Asian American populations, particularly those with immigrant backgrounds, and they variously adopt psychoanalytic approaches to understand Asian American mental health and intersectional identities. Looking beyond psychoanalytic models, my project focuses on the works of Yiyun Li, Jenny Zhang, and K-Ming Chang to explore diverse forms of post-tragedy positionality. I read the authors paratextually, not only to locate them within legacies of …


The Ethiopian Student Movement And The Dilemma Of Eritrean Sovereignty, Liat G. Tesfazgi Jan 2024

The Ethiopian Student Movement And The Dilemma Of Eritrean Sovereignty, Liat G. Tesfazgi

Honors Projects

From the perspective of Ethiopian royalists, Pan-Africanists, Marxist internationalists, supports of union, and the broader international community, Eritrean nationalism revealed distressing fissures in many different arguments for preserving Ethiopian territorial unity– arguments not necessarily or explicitly problematic, but nevertheless in opposition to Eritrean demands for the right to national self-determination. For the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) specifically, Eritrean sovereignty demanded a reconfiguration of Pan-African unity that conflicted with Ethiopian exceptionalist historiography. Through an analysis of student politics at Haile Selassie University, from 1960-1974, this thesis seeks to complicate existing historiography on the ESM by examining the periodically divergent experiences of …


Ethnicity And Territory: Cultural And Political Autonomy For African Descended Colombians Through Law 70, Ayana Opong-Nyantekyi Jan 2023

Ethnicity And Territory: Cultural And Political Autonomy For African Descended Colombians Through Law 70, Ayana Opong-Nyantekyi

Honors Projects

Colombia has the second largest African descendant population in all South America due to the transatlantic slave trade that stripped millions from their homeland and brought them to present day Colombia. While African descendants have been a part of the region’s history for over five centuries, it was not until 1993 with the establishment of Law 70 that the Colombian government acknowledged the culture and rights of African descendants. This thesis analyzes the historical, social, and political underpinnings of Law 70, its implementation, and aftereffects. I argue that Law 70 acknowledges a lived identity of rural African descended Colombians as …


Love Is Real & I Just Had Some For Dessert: Legacies Of Communal Care & Compassion In Asian Diasporic Women's Food Writing, Miki Rierson Jan 2023

Love Is Real & I Just Had Some For Dessert: Legacies Of Communal Care & Compassion In Asian Diasporic Women's Food Writing, Miki Rierson

Honors Projects

In this project I work to recover influential yet often erased Asian American female immigrant chefs and food authors from the mid-twentieth century to the present, situating their contributions in a deep-rooted tradition of diasporic women who used cooking as a means of communal agency and care. Immigrant Asian cookbook authors and chefs have long faced internal criticisms from their own diasporic communities of either inauthenticity or engaging in “food pornography,” to use writer Frank Chin’s term—a line of criticism that Lisa Lau has elaborated on as “re-Orientalism.”Though these criticisms should not eclipse the works themselves, I discuss and counter …


Religious Negotiation And Identity Formation: Reading Material Religion In Oaxaca’S “Guelaguetza Oficial”, Rene Sebastian Cisneros Jan 2023

Religious Negotiation And Identity Formation: Reading Material Religion In Oaxaca’S “Guelaguetza Oficial”, Rene Sebastian Cisneros

Honors Projects

The Oaxacan Guelaguetza Oficial is a folk-dance festival in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico which takes place on the last two Mondays of July each year. This state-sponsored celebration of Oaxacan identity is intertwined within histories of Indigenous religious belief and Catholic everyday practice. The Guelaguetza Oficial can be traced back to late 19thcentury celebrations venerating the Virgen del Carmen Alto. Oaxaqueños today predominantly practice an Indigenous-Catholic tradition whose rituals, festive scripts, pantheon of popular saints, and immanent understandings of heavenly power over earthly events can be traced back to negotiations between Indigenous forms of popular belief …


The Crossroads We Make: Intergenerational Trauma And Reparative Reading In Recent Asian American Memoirs (2018-2022), Josh-Pablo Manish Patel Jan 2023

The Crossroads We Make: Intergenerational Trauma And Reparative Reading In Recent Asian American Memoirs (2018-2022), Josh-Pablo Manish Patel

Honors Projects

This project extends reparative reading practices to recent Asian American memoirs, specifically trauma memoirs from the past five years (2018-2022) that detail personal trauma and communal, intergenerational trauma. Reparative reading is explored within five memoirs: Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know (2022), Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019), Phuc Tran’s Sigh, Gone (2020), Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (2020), and Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know (2018). In considering the reparative turn in Asian American memoirs, this thesis draws on and extends Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative frameworks and bell hooks’ theories on pedagogy and love. A critical analysis …


Re-Envisioning The Tropics: Nick Joaquin's Philippine Gothic, Ella Marie Jaman Jan 2022

Re-Envisioning The Tropics: Nick Joaquin's Philippine Gothic, Ella Marie Jaman

Honors Projects

This paper examines selected stories from Filipino author, Nick Joaquin, through a gothic lens. Drawing from recent development in Gothic studies, I work within a tropical gothic and postcolonial gothic framework to suggest a localized "Philippine gothic" represented within Nick Joaquin's work. Stories examined include the novel "The Woman Who Had Two Navels," as well as the short stories "Summer Solstice, Mass of St. Sylvestre," and "The Order of Melkizedek."


Minor, Ugly, And Meta: Feelings In Contemporary Korean American Literature, Kyubin Kim Jan 2022

Minor, Ugly, And Meta: Feelings In Contemporary Korean American Literature, Kyubin Kim

Honors Projects

In 2019, Korean American writer Cathy Park Hong published her memoir Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning in the midst of a turning point in Asian American politics. Hong describes minor feelings as “emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Used as a concept to summate the Asian American experience in white America as living in a country where one’s reality is constantly questioned and made invisible, minor feelings forges an affective framework to study minoritized, diasporic literature. …


Empire Of Horror: Race, Animality, And Monstrosity In The Victorian Gothic, Grace Monaghan Jan 2022

Empire Of Horror: Race, Animality, And Monstrosity In The Victorian Gothic, Grace Monaghan

Honors Projects

This project examines Victorian England through the analysis of three Victorian gothic novels: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903/1912), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). The end of the nineteenth century and the final years of the Victorian era brought with them fears and uncertainties about England’s role in the world and its future, fears that the Victorian gothic sought to grapple with, but inevitably failed to contain. In examining this genre, I draw on “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (Chatterjee et al, 2020), which calls for the field of Victorian studies to center racial theory. As …


Unraveling Paradise: Colonialism And Disguise In German Language Literature, Brigita Kant Jan 2022

Unraveling Paradise: Colonialism And Disguise In German Language Literature, Brigita Kant

Honors Projects

For centuries, the Pacific Islands have been disguised by Europeans through the trope of “island paradise." Despite Europe’s role in bringing colonization and racial oppression to Oceania, the dominant narrative has been that Pacific Islanders lead simple lives, untouched from the complicated aspects of the “modern world.” This narrative has enabled White outsiders to fantasize about the Pacific Islands as a place for personal denial of Western social conventions, simultaneously allowing White European men to fetishize and possess Pacific Island culture and identity. My honors project will closely examine three fictional German language texts- Haimotochare (1819), Der Papalagi (1920) …


Building Home In Diaspora: New York’S Jewish Left And The History Of The Bronx Housing Cooperatives, Micah Benjamin Wilson Jan 2022

Building Home In Diaspora: New York’S Jewish Left And The History Of The Bronx Housing Cooperatives, Micah Benjamin Wilson

Honors Projects

This thesis investigates three predominantly Jewish housing cooperatives that emerged in the Bronx in the late 1920s. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, the United Workers Cooperative Colony (the “Coops”), and the Sholem Aleichem Houses offered garment workers utopian retreats from the drudgery of Lower East Side tenements where Jewish immigrants arrived in droves between 1890-1920. With each cooperative housing a distinct faction of the Jewish Left––from socialists to communists to Yiddish nationalists––the Bronx housing cooperatives, more than experiments in communal living, were the site of a highly contested battle over competing Jewish cultural and political worldviews across the 1930s and 1940s. …


Jigs, Reels, And “Realness”: An Investigation Of Ideas Of Authenticity And Tradition In New England French Canadian Music, Lowell Ruck Jan 2021

Jigs, Reels, And “Realness”: An Investigation Of Ideas Of Authenticity And Tradition In New England French Canadian Music, Lowell Ruck

Honors Projects

Franco-American culture is increasingly recognized as an integral part of the heritage of Maine and New England, and has attracted growing academic attention in recent years. But while many scholars and cultural promoters focus on the French language in their work on this subject, few studies have considered the position of traditional music in Franco-American communities in the 21st century. This thesis examines French Canadian traditional music as it is played in New England and the ways in which musicians think about authenticity and tradition in their art. Using material from ethnographic interviews, it illuminates how musicians draw from …


Mémoire Et Souvenir Dans L'Imaginaire Antillais - Maryse Condé Et Fabienne Kanor: Identité Et Existence Noire Aux Antilles Et En France, Elijah B. Koblan-Huberson Jan 2020

Mémoire Et Souvenir Dans L'Imaginaire Antillais - Maryse Condé Et Fabienne Kanor: Identité Et Existence Noire Aux Antilles Et En France, Elijah B. Koblan-Huberson

Honors Projects

L’histoire d’un peuple est en grande partie liée à sa mémoire, aux souvenirs et commémorations des évènements passés et des ancêtres.En raison de la colonisation et ses conséquences, les habitants des îles de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique vivent un malaise vis-à-vis de la mémoire en tant que peuple antillais.Par conséquent, il est important de se demander comment, après la déshumanisation effectuée par l’extermination des premiers habitants, les Caraïbes et les Arawaks, l’esclavagisation des Africains, et la colonisation des territoires antillais, une nouvelle conceptualisation de la mémoire peut mener à une nouvelle conceptualisation de l’existence et de l’identité pour …


Leadership From Within: Founders, Advocates, And Organizational Networks Operating In Maine's Immigrant Community, Samuel Robert Kenney May 2019

Leadership From Within: Founders, Advocates, And Organizational Networks Operating In Maine's Immigrant Community, Samuel Robert Kenney

Honors Projects

Much of the discourse surrounding African immigration to Maine has centered on the provision of public services that facilitate community development and integration. This project investigates different types of leadership strategies employed by African individuals in Maine that advance community objectives. When African immigrant leaders are empowered to affect public policy, they re-frame traditional conceptions of aid-dependency and vulnerability commonly applied to African immigrants in media and popular culture. Through leadership in nonprofit and civic spheres, African immigrant community leaders translate grassroots connectivity with informal networks into meaningful influence in the realm of public policy. This project focuses on the …


Visions Of Unity, Memories Of Violence: American Civil Religion And The Japanese American Incarceration, Brigitte Helene Mcfarland May 2018

Visions Of Unity, Memories Of Violence: American Civil Religion And The Japanese American Incarceration, Brigitte Helene Mcfarland

Honors Projects

No abstract provided.


Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein May 2013

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …