Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Victim Or Villain: Female Resilience And Agency In The Face Of Trauma In Chimamanda Adichie’S, Purple Hibiscus (2003) And Tsitsi Dangarembga’S, Nervous Conditions (1988), Adaobi Juliet Chukwuma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As long as disparities persist in the way women are treated as compared to their male counterparts, the issue of gender will continue to call forth literary productions. For this reason, female writers are on a mission to dismantle the stereotypes that keep women confined to societal roles. Grounded in a feminist framework, this study focuses on the gender disparity theme in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. The aim is to examine how these writers represent the trauma of women living in an African patriarchal system. The traumatic experiences of the female characters in both texts …

Restorative Practices In English Language Arts: My Journey Towards Linguistic Justice, Ariana Skeese

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this final portfolio, I examine anti-racist pedagogy in English Language Arts Education.

Enriching The Story: Asexuality And Aromanticism In Literature, Adrienne Whisman

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

This paper examines the role of asexual and aromantic coding within Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights and Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Both books utilize relationships and sexuality in order to portray arguments within the book. Brontë portrays Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship as transcending physicality, both as a way to portray them as soulmates but also to foreshadow events. Woolf utilizes Lily’s disinterest in sex and marriage as a way to contrast her to other women in the novel. Both characterizations can be read as asexual, or in Lily’s case also aromantic. This queer reading allows insight into the …

Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez

English Language and Literature ETDs

There is a war for recognition happening on the Hollywood battlefield. Traditionally, in every war there is an enemy and an alley; in this study, the enemy is systemic racism, and the alley is Black culture. That is, this dissertation seeks to detail the past, present, and future implications of this battle for truth, inclusion, and recognition in American pop culture. This discussion examines how various multi-media forms like literature, film, television, and comic books work as tools to combat racism in American society. More importantly, the theories presented in this text are all linked to actual tactics of military …

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology Of Verse By Negro Poets, Countee Cullen , Editor

Zea E-Books Collection

CONTENTS:

FOREWORD

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR • Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes • Death Song • Life • After the Quarrel • Ships that Pass in the Night • We Wear the Mask • Sympathy • The Debt

JOSEPH S. COTTER, SR • The Tragedy of Pete • The Way-side Well

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON • From the German of Uhland • The Glory of the Day Was in Her Face • The Creation • The White Witch • My City

WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT Du BOIS • A Litany of Atlanta

WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE • Scintilla • Rye …

Reflections On Queer Literary Representations In Contemporary Indian Writing In English, Aakanksha Singh

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

This reflection piece explores the importance of thinking beyond labels and categories for queer desires and queer expressions of love. Knowability and visibility of these desires through labels and categories has the potential and indeed does create awareness. This visibility, however, can inadvertently also create borders and perpetuate rigidity about queer desires, confining them to certain norms and limitations. The piece then reflects on mass media's role in creating these borders, particularly through the coverage of Pride Parades in India. Then by examining contemporary texts such as Amruta Patil's Kari (2008), Himanjali Sankar's Talking of Muskaan (2015) and Parvati Sharma's …

Adoration Above Objectification: The Promotion Of Other In Black, Mexican And Arabic Love Poetry, Joycelynn L. Baker

Honors Projects

This paper analyzes the philosophical fundamentals of sexual objectification and presents opposing literature, written in the 20th century, by Black, Mexican and Arabic male poets in contrast. In vigorous patriarchal environments that provide more opportunities to practice sexual objectification, the poets reframe male metaphysical perception and behavior in romantic or sexual contexts by promoting the autonomy and agency of women above themselves, and displaying their enjoyment of that situation. This paper will discuss how Western metaphysical philosophy impacts self-perception and belief in contemporary romantic contexts.

A Non-Normative Paradigm: Disability And Gender In Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature, Malena Sol Pendola Biondi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within nineteenth century society, normalcy is presented through unfeasible means of appearance and identity, leading to a rejection of the self. By exploring characters in Victorian gothic literature, who are marginalized by society, and invoking the work of Gail Weiss, Kim Hall, and others, this essay investigates the way these norms are immortalized through published representations and how they expose the lingering presence of rejection of disabled, queer, and gender-fluid bodies. Through the analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I look at the contextualization of marginalized existence compared to able-bodiedness and normalized …

Historical Sisters: Black Feminist Actions Across History And Literary Studies, Jazz A. Milligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to understand how the actions of Black women from the past have inspired the modern Black female literary movement. This thesis focuses on three historical women: Phillis Wheatley, Elizabeth Freeman, and Cathay Williams, and their literary sisters: bell hooks, Barbara Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins. By viewing the lives of these historical women through a modern-day lens, we can understand how their actions created a ripple effect that Black women are still discussing today. Black feminism did not start in a vacuum, and the actions of everyday Black women have pushed us forward to being more accepting …

Son For Everybody: Exploring Afro Cuban And African American Relations Through Langston Hughes’ Translations Of Nicolas Guillén’S Poetry, Hayley R. Fernandez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the translation decisions made in Cuba Libre, Translated from the Spanish By Langston Hughes and Ben Frederic Carruthers, and to explore the contemporary image of Nicolás Guillén as expressed in recent projects regarding his work and legacy. Particular attention was paid to the historical and social frameworks Guillén employed in his own work and the same frameworks he and his poetry have been associated with in recent years. The larger importance of this piece was to take a look at how international Blackness existed and was worked with in literature at the …

Between The Visual And The Verbal: An Aesthetic Of Open Wounds In Post-Traumatic Experience Of The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), Maryam Ghodrati

Doctoral Dissertations

Trauma theory of the 1990s pioneered by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman has been criticized by postcolonial scholars such as Irene Visser, Michael Balaev, and Stef Craps for being neglectful of the trauma of the colonial world in adopting a deconstructivist approach and psychologization of experiences of trauma. This antagonism between the traditional and postcolonial trauma theory has resulted in even deeper isolation of the human subject at the center of this argument. In my research, I highlight the reality and materiality of traumatic suffering in the shared realm of the human body to suggest a need for …

Big Community In Little Chinatown: How Asian Americans (Re)Present Their Community Today, Meghan Morrison

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper looks at a series of modern Asian American pieces of media in order to analyze how women and LGBT+ depict and create their community, especially in relation to another marginalized ethnic group. By examining the relationship between these groups within popular media, we can uncover how Asian Americans choose to represent themselves and gain a deeper understanding on how marginalized groups choose to portray themselves.

T. Jackie Cuevas. Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Culture And Gender Variant Critique. New Brunswick: Rutgers Up, 2018., Caroline E. Tracey

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of T. Jackie Cuevas. Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Culture and Gender Variant Critique. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2018. xiii + 169 pp.

Priscilla Layne. White Rebels In Black: German Appropriation Of Black Popular Culture. U Of Michigan P, 2018., Mona Eikel-Pohen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Priscilla Layne. White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture. U of Michigan P, 2018. ix + 259 pp.

Adding A Dimension: Illustrating Triple Consciousness Theory In The African American Literary Tradition, Asia Wesley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the way gender expands and nuances W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness theory, which depicts the African American identity as a doubleness that is both American and Negro. Black feminist criticism’s nuanced formulation of DuBois’s formulation of Black identity allows the African American literary tradition to be seen through three lenses: an American, a Negro, and an African American’s gender identity. In order to further contemporize the pre-existing Black feminist criticism, I examine Hurston, Brooks, and Morrison in the three time periods that followed DuBois’s coining of double consciousness theory: (1) the Harlem Renaissance, (2) the Civil Rights Movement …

Being In The Black Queer Diaspora: Embodied Archives In A Map To The Door Of No Return, Alexandria Naima Smith

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Poet, novelist, and essayist Dionne Brand’s unconventional memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) provides a method for identifying how the embodied experiences of Black queer subjects form an archive for understanding operations of power within Black queer diasporas. Using the analytic of sensual worldmaking, a term I use to describe Black feminist narrative writing that locates embodied erotic and sensual experience as an authorizing source of knowledge about identity-based power dynamics, I illustrate how A Map to the Door of No Return offers a Black queer archive of experiences and narratives in the Black diaspora. Brand …

Recontextaulizing Literature: A Podcast Project Dedicated To Celebrating And Broadcasting The Voices Of Indigenous Authors And Storytellers, Xavier Hickey

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project is conducted with intention of exploring the sociocultural implications of a decentralized canon. Designed with Indigenous authors and storytellers in mind, this project perceives the way that literature and storytelling are improved by abandoning the universalized and Eurocentric literary canon and replacing it with complex and unique personal cultural contexts. As part of the overarching podcast project, this document looks to lay out a reading list that represents and enforces the power of recontextualized literature.

Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, And Maternal Power In The Novels Of Toni Morrison, Jonathan Garren

South Carolina Libraries

Jonathan Garren reviews Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison by Geneva Cobb Moore.

Miedo, Celebración Y Otredad Racial En El Cambio De Siglo: Hacia La Construcción Del Negro En El Discurso Artístico-Literario Cubano (1880-1933), Alberto Sosa Cabanas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The disrupting visual and literary languages of the turn of the 19^th century to the 1930’s constitute an area of research as a moment of crystallization of the Cuban national consciousness or identity. Writers and artists in Hispanic Caribbean region had to face the challenge of finding ways to include highly racialized elements (such as religion and popular culture) within the rhetorical space of the elites, in other words, what Angel Rama has labeled the "Republic of letters". The result of these efforts not only opened a new kind of negotiation of the idea of nation, but also meant …

Gender, Race, And Class In Various Aspects Of American Literature: A Portfolio, Harry Olafsen

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Harry Olafsen takes a closer look at various texts in American Literature, including women in 1960s country music, Us directed by Jordan Peele, and southern women's diaries from the Civil War.

Inequality In Ethnic Representation In Secondary-School Literature Textbooks And National Examination In Vietnam, Anh Nguyen

Honors Projects

This essay studies the dynamic between ethnic minorities and majority in the Vietnamese education system. By examining the appearance and representation of ethnic minorities in national literature curriculum, textbooks, and examinations, the analysis reflects the government's perspectives regarding the “appropriate” portrait of ethnic minorities' heritage and relationship with the majority. The study finds that Vietnamese education framework and content comply with the national construct of a Vietnamese identity across ethnicities. The state determines educational materials and selectively permits only aesthetic, politically benign, and Kinh-like narratives of ethnic minorities’ cultures, many written and/or chosen by Kinh authority rather than the ethnic …

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 …

From Theory To Practice: Establishing The Classroom As The Setting For Race Talk Through The Intentional Analysis And Discussion Of Poems By Authors Of Color, Cree Taylor

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

Modern-day racism exists in mostly subtle ways and is often felt most keenly in the classroom. When schools began the legal integration process in 1954, Black teachers were fired, all-Black schools were closed, and Black students were bused to the formerly all-White schools. In this new environment, Black students and all Students of color were forced to accept and adapt to an educational system that favored Whites over all other racial groups. Today, White Supremacy in education affects the establishment of state and national standards, school and district boundaries, and the un-fair disciplinary action taken against Students of Color. In …

Yone Noguchi And Miss Morning Glory: American Humor, Identity, And Cultural Criticism In The Works Of Yone Noguchi, Evan Connor Alston

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Yone Noguchi’s novels, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl and The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor-Maid, both published with the first decade of the twentieth century, have been the subject of study for scholars in the humanities for the past few decades. The research examines both novels in historical context and against his personal communications and his subsequently published works, understanding Noguchi not just as a Japanese immigrant but also a member of an American literary community. I compare the larger structing of the Diary to the works of his literary peers and mentors and demonstrate that understanding …

La Conquista RetóRica: La AutolegitimacióN De HernáN CortéS Y Su JustificacióN Del Colonialismo EspañOl A TravéS De Las Cartas De RelacióN (1519 - 1526), Kent Shi

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Phillis Wheatley And Judith Sargent Murray: Revolutionary Founders In Women’S Political Activism And Women’S American Literary Tradition, Rebecca L. Warwick

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

During the Revolutionary War the dominant belief, held by men and women alike, was that women did not possess the mental capacity or intelligence for politics. Many perceived that women were strictly domestic beings, and therefore could not participate nor contribute to the inherently political war effort. Nonetheless, a few brave women such as Phillis Wheatley and Judith Sargent Murray insisted on participating in the political dialogue of their new nation through their poetry.

Through the respective lenses of gender and race, Murray and Wheatley used their literary skills and intellectual abilities to engage with the themes of patriotism, freedom …

Saving Pocahontas: A Conversation On Gender, Culture, And Power In The Storied Saving Moment, Claire Ehr

Undergraduate Honors Papers

Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.¹ Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and …

Words As Weapons And Wisdom, Barbara Paige

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement were two seminal eras in American history. The Renaissance also referred to as the New Negro Movement was a literary artistic, and cultural movement, centered in Harlem in which writers produced large bastions of literary works. African descended people began to identify with their African past and intellectuals adopted Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist methodologies to overcome oppression. Their efforts laid a foundation for the Civil Rights movement. The Black Arts Movement, an era of intense literary artistic activism begun with the assassination of Malcolm X. Artist/intellectuals responded to a more hostile environment …

Retelling The Classics: The Harlem Renaissance, Biblical Stories, And Black Peoplehood, Mina Magalhaes

Celebration of Learning

Applying social identity theory to the process of creating peoplehood can illustrate the positive power that literature has in uplifting marginalized communities by showing their worth. James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, both composed during the Harlem Renaissance, offer one way to create Black peoplehood by creating depictions of God’s love for His Black people through the repurposing of biblical stories. Through the implementation of social identity theory to Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Johnson’s “The Creation,” I argue that these two authors addressed the need among African Americans to …

Bao Phi Interview, Elyse Warnecke

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Bao Phi is a Vietnamese American spoken and written word artist. Coming from a family of refugees from Vietnam, his escapism and life values he has found in literature have allowed for many great accomplishments, such as poetry championships, several books of poetry collections, and most recently, children’s books. He uses his life stories and lessons, as well as current events to guide his audience, as well as his daughter and younger generations, through a rather difficult world. His most recent project has been publishing a children’s book illustrated by Thi Bui.