Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Diam's: The Politics Of Autobiography And Avatarhood In The French Republic, Taryn Marcelino

Journal of Gender, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Studies

Diam’s is a French female rapper otherwise known as Mélanie Georgiades who was prominent in France’s music scene from 1999 up until 2010 when she retreated to a small village in the French countryside. Her claim to fame was her anti-racist lyrics but what grabbed the media’s attention was her reappearance in the public sphere wearing a veil. In this article, I trace her career from her lyrics, music videos, and finally to her autobiographies which she published during her retirement from music. By following her work, I analyze the avatars of Diam’s and Mélanie to portray her journey from …

Mapping Out Our Space In Stories: A High School Curriculum For A Social Justice Tour Of San Francisco, Elena Ramírez Robles

Master's Projects and Capstones

How do youth engage with the spaces around them? In what ways might students connect their personal, lived knowledge to the politics and intricacies of space? The manners in which schools approach outside-of-school learning includes non-critical Place-Based Learning and field trips as optional material; however, doing so breaks the powerful relationship waiting to be explored between Critical Geography and Critical Education. This field project uses Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of The Production of Space and Rhythmanalysis as foundations to argue for the implementation of Critical Geography into high school curricula, and offers a 9-week high school curriculum to create a student-led …

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …

Mitigating Black Claustrophobia: Space, Trauma, And Healing Modalities In The Postcolonial Narrative., Saleema Mustafa Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the space or spaces of blackness and the black body in the United States. This nation was shaped by the institution of slavery, and its greatest legacy is the trauma that still resonates in social structures and spaces complicating the lived experiences of many. The various responses to these traumas are documented in literary form by authors who serve as cultural witnesses. The narratives featured in this research project, collectively and individually, offer a voice to the traumatic plight of individuals in the U.S. who struggle to contemplate and rectify the traumas of this nation’s past. This …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Are (We) Going Deep Enough?: A Narrative Literature Review Addressing Critical Race Theory, Radical Space Theory, And Black Identity Development, Kala Burrell-Craft

Educational Foundations & Leadership Faculty Publications

A narrative literature review was conducted to examine how researchers address the concept of intersectionality using critical race theory, racial space theory, and Black identity development. A Boolean search revealed 18 articles met criteria for consideration. Multiple reviews occurred to isolate the articles that contained all the search criteria and multiple reviews occurred that selected the Boolean phrase or phrases that the researcher was searching for. Thirteen of the 18 articles met one or more search criteria and were included in the review, however, no articles matched 100 percent for inclusion. Thus, indicating we are not going deep enough in …

Affect And Manhattan’S West Side Piers, Ricardo J. Millhouse

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Derek P. McCormack (2010) argues, "Affect, is like an atmosphere: it might not be visible, but at any given point it might be sensed ... Emotion, in turn, can be understood as the sociocultural expression of this felt intensity" (643). This paper puts McCormack (2010) and Ben Anderson (2009) into conversation to think through the ways in which atmosphere in relation to affective and emotive life has been conceptualized. I center the affective atmospheres that happen with queer bodies that make New York's west side piers queerly affective. I use "queer bodies" to signal the dis-identification with heteronormativity or binaristic …

Configurations Of Space And Identity In Hip Hop: Performing “Global South”, Igor Johannsen

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

The spatiality of culture, specifically Hip Hop, and the reverberations between space and identity are the core concern of this essay. In deconstructing and contextualizing the concept of the Global South by discussing the practices of respective Hip Hop communities, this paper aims at laying bare the oversimplifications inherent in those seemingly natural spatial dimensions. The Global South can, thus, not be understood as a concise and objective term. Instead, it implies a highly normative concept and can be made to reveal or conceal specific attributes of the culture in question. Deliberately creating a cultural and artistic discourse in which …

Writing The Experiences And (Corporeal) Knowledges Of Women Of Color Into Educational Studies: A Colloquium, A. B. V. M. M. Armstrong-Carela-Martínez-Pérez-Ruiz Guerrero

Pedagogy & (Im)Possibilities across Education Research (PIPER)

In this colloquium, we share collaborative ideas that came about during a weekend retreat. We center our discussions on Chicana and Black feminisms and Womanism, specifically addressing how women of color feminisms inspire us; imagining/defining space; tensions within our sisterhoods; transforming (inner)coloniality by embracing our lived herstories; and how Chicana and Black feminisms and Womanism transform educational studies. We leave readers with hopes for our-selves, our fields, our sisters, and for the world. While not exact tellings of our pláticas during our retreat, we capture and share the essence of burning questions, ideas, and hopes that arose for us when …

Villes Et Espaces Africains : Pour Une Géocritique En Contexte Postcolonial, Yves Clavaron

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

As for geocritics, postcolonial studies consider questions of representation according to a contextualizing approach, scrutinizing geogrophical and sociopolitical settings. This paper aims at studying methodological affinities between geocritics and postcolonialism in order to observe to what extent Bertrand Westphal’s approach could respond to a postcolonial context and allow for an interpretation of African space – mainly urban – in a few francophone novels by Mongo Beti, Bernard Dadié, Ahmadou Kourouma, Henri Lopes, Alain Mabanckou, Patrice Nganang and Tierno Monénembo.

Non-Lieux Dans Le Roman Africain Postcolonial Francophone : Formes Et Enjeux, Adama Coulibaly

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In the postcolonial African novel, new places are appearing, next to or replacing the former prison site. They can validly be read as «non-places» whose presence and implications in texts must then be questioned. Attempting a literary re-appropriation of an anthropological notion, this contribution analyzes three novels whose fictions are built around places of transit (of non-places) such as hotel, road and... container. These three figures of the non-place call for a writing of horizontality, rhizome, ephemeral, spatial mobility that reactivate the question of the fictitious or moving identity of the African subject from space.

(Un)Making The Food Desert: Food, Race, And Redevelopment In Miami's Overtown Community, William Hall

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, efforts to transform food environments have played a key role in urban revitalization strategies. On one hand, concerns over urban food deserts have spurred efforts to attract supermarkets to places where access to healthy food is difficult for lower income residents. On the other, the creation of new spaces of consumption, such as trendy restaurants and food retail, has helped cities rebrand low-income communities as cultural destinations of leisure and tourism. In cities around the US, these processes often overlap, converting poorer neighborhoods into places more desirable for the middle-class. My dissertation research examines the social and …

Architecture Of Diversity: Using The Lens And Language Of Space To Examine Racialized Experiences Of Students Of Color On College Campuses, Michelle Samura

Education Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"[A]n examination of racial diversity in higher education requires serious consideration of space... [A] spatial perspective offers a lens for locating and examining processes of racialization. And a spatial approach also provides a language participants and researchers can use to talk about the discreet ways race still operates in everyday interactions, including subtle forms of racism that are overlooked or ignored because race is often understood by students to matter less today. Essentially, a spatial approach sheds light on race relations and racial structures in tangible campus environments."

The Central American Question: Nicaraguan Cultural Production And Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, Oscar A. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the cultural production and political history of Nicaragua from the 1960s to the early 1990s and interprets Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman alongside Central America’s literary boom period, the nation-building project of the revolutionary letrados, and race relations between Nicaragua’s Pacific region and its two autonomous sectors of the Atlantic coast. It is argued that Central American ways of seeing are colored by the interplay between a revolutionary past, the myth of the pure Indio or mestizo, and the erasure of national identity in the US contact zone. Rather than recuperating a Central American identity, it …

Heterogeneous Time And Space: Han Shaogong’S Rethinking Of Chinese Modernity, Yanjie Wang

Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works

This article is set against the post-Mao official discourse on modernity, in which the conceptualization of a homogeneous, progressive time dominates the public consciousness. The focus is on Han Shaogong, one of the most important writers and cultural theorists in contemporary China, and on how he imagines a heterogeneous spatiotemporality away from the centralized and teleological paradigm. Han’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of time and space puts the homogenized, Hegelian-Marxist, developmentalist logic at the core of China’s modernization project into question. The article begins by examining how the linear and evolutionary concept of time has determined the perception of history …

''Get Your Asphalt Off My Ancestors!'': Reclaiming Richmond's African Burial Ground, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

By treating spatial conflict as one way communities wrestle with the memory and legacy of slavery, this article unites critical landscape analysis, a tool of legal geography, with legal and cultural analysis and recent scholarship on African American reparations. A slave cemetery lay beneath a parking lot in Shockoe Bottom, a neighborhood of downtown Richmond that was once a major slave-trading hub. In recent years, controversy arose over the site’s use, generating racially charged local debate and two failed lawsuits seeking to preserve the site. This article examines the significance of the African Burial Ground controversy by analyzing its symbolic, …

Postures Féminines Dans L’Oeuvre De Calixthe Beyala, Carmen Husti-Laboye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The aim of this paper is to analyze, through the example of the feminist positions proposed by Calixthe Beyala in the novels she wrote between 1987 and 2007, the change of the novelist’s ideological and artistic perspective. It emphasizes the progressive loss of critical voice to the advantage of a new voice wishing to understand itself as individuality in its world. This study reveals the novelist’s contribution to the construction of a new position of the individual in the context of French social and cultural life.