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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Reconstructing The Present/Past: Antimodernism And Early Film Reenactments, Alex W. Bordino Jun 2021

Reconstructing The Present/Past: Antimodernism And Early Film Reenactments, Alex W. Bordino

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the cultural history surrounding early film reenactments and elucidates their relationship with modernity. Beginning in the 1890s, motion pictures became part of modern unreality. In a world that seemed increasingly more abstracted from reality, antimodernism emerged in a variety of sectors as a quest toward authenticity. Early film reenactments, despite being ancillary fabrications of real events, aligned with this antimodern sensibility, which would ultimately, and somewhat paradoxically, inform modern culture. The motion picture’s appearance of reality at a cultural moment of modern disillusion, or in some cases outright discontent, formulated a simulated version of reality distinct from …


Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling May 2020

Writing Against History: Feminist Baroque Narratives In Interwar Atlantic Modernism, Annaliese Hoehling

Doctoral Dissertations

In the decades following the end of the Great War, paranoia and panic about survival and sovereign control were driven by unprecedented death tolls from war, disease, and economic disaster as well as by revolutionary agitation around the globe. This fear was channeled into policing gender, sexuality, and race; and the parameters of white, middle-class womanhood were weaponized for social control in the transatlantic imaginary. In this study, I identify two rhetorical-political figures that helped to shape this imagination: Surplus Women and Trafficked Women. In my analysis of the literature, these figures help to contrast domestic scenes, on one hand, …


Young Germans In The World: Race, Gender, And Imperialism In Wilhelmine Young Adult Literature, Maureen O. Gallagher Nov 2015

Young Germans In The World: Race, Gender, And Imperialism In Wilhelmine Young Adult Literature, Maureen O. Gallagher

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation shows how popular reading material for young adults was used to craft a new generation of German imperial citizens in the Second Empire (1871-1918). Uniting insights from contemporary postcolonial theory, gender studies, and the global history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, it shows the intersectional development of German national identity in the children’s and young adult literature of Wilhelmine Germany. As literature written by adults for young people, designed both to entertain and instruct, children’s and young adult literature offers a unique window on how Germany built nation and empire simultaneously during this period. Focusing on texts set …


Creating The Ideal Mexican: 20th And 21st Century Racial And National Identity Discourses In Oaxaca, Savannah N. Carroll Nov 2015

Creating The Ideal Mexican: 20th And 21st Century Racial And National Identity Discourses In Oaxaca, Savannah N. Carroll

Doctoral Dissertations

This investigation intends to uncover past and contemporary socioeconomic significance of being a racial other in Oaxaca, Mexico and its relevance in shaping Mexican national identity. The project has two purposes: first, to analyze activities and observations of cultural missionaries in Oaxaca during the 1920s and 1930s, and second to relate these findings to historical and present implications of blackness in an Afro-Mexican community. Cultural missionaries were appointed by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) to create schools throughout Mexico, focusing on the modernization of marginalized communities through formal and social education. This initiative was intended to resolve socioeconomic disparities …


All-American Vacationland: African American, Puerto Rican, And Italian Resorts In The Catskill Mountains, 1920-1980, Laura A. Miller Nov 2014

All-American Vacationland: African American, Puerto Rican, And Italian Resorts In The Catskill Mountains, 1920-1980, Laura A. Miller

Doctoral Dissertations

In the twentieth century, New York State’s Catskill Mountain resort area was an “All-American” vacationland. Each summer, many different racial and ethnic minorities sought a brief respite from their lives and labor in New York City at boarding houses, resorts, and bungalows scattered throughout the mountains. Collectively, these groups contributed to the development of a highly segregated resort area that reflected, on an exaggerated scale, the racial, ethnic, and class divisions within New York City and the nation as a whole in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the Catskills resort landscape through a comparative analysis of African American, Puerto …


Resurrection: Representations Of The Black Church In Contemporary Popular Culture, Rachel J. Daniel Nov 2014

Resurrection: Representations Of The Black Church In Contemporary Popular Culture, Rachel J. Daniel

Doctoral Dissertations

From 1997 to 2013, there have been multiple representations of the black church in popular culture. African American artists have always explored spirituality within black communities; in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, the increasing fame of Tyler Perry, T.D. Jakes, Steve Harvey, and other prominent African American Christians has placed black church culture on the center stage of American mainstream media. This dissertation examines contemporary black Christian popular fiction, stage performances, black church films, and rap music. These representations demonstrate that black church culture is distinct from secular black popular culture and white evangelical Christian …