Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Strong Women Make Strong Nations”: Women, Literature, And Sovereignty In Paula Gunn Allen And Virginia Woolf, Kristin Czarnecki

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay places Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas alongside Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Reading these landmark texts together helps establish a transnational dialogue essential to twenty-first-century literary and feminist studies. A Room of One’s Own and The Sacred Hoop resonate with each other in striving to recuperate women’s history and literature, long denied or suppressed by patriarchal tenets and texts. A fruitful dialogic also emerges between Three Guineas and The Sacred Hoop, both of which argue for the eradication of patriarchy in favor of female-centric social …

The Sophist In The Cave: Education Through Names In Plato's Republic, Daniel Propson

Wayne State University Dissertations

The Cratylus is often considered an isolated dialogue in Plato’s corpus, and the major theses of the Cratylus are often seen as disposable and problematic elements in Platonic thought. When one carefully compares this dialogue, however, to Plato’s comments elsewhere about rhetoric and dialectic, a set of fascinating connections emerge. In this dissertation, I argue that the Republic ought to be read in light of the Cratylus. In the former dialogue, Plato is vitally concerned with the use of accurate language in his republic, a fact most clearly brought out by his accusation against demagogues: that they “give names” to …

The Fashion Diplomacy And Trade Of Kashmir Shawls: Conversations With Shawl Artisans, Designers And Collectors., Deborah Emmett

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

We travelled to the semi rural outskirts of Srinagar in Kashmir to the home of Muneer, a kani shawl weaver. In a small room on the third floor of his house Muneer sat side by side with his friend Hamid at their loom. Each weaver worked pulling small sticks wound in pashmina threads through the weft while carefully referring to a paper tucked under the warp threads on the loom. The woven design on kani shawls is formed by the manipulation of small wooden sticks called tojis that interlock different coloured threads to complete each weft of the shawl. The …

Applications Of Cross Dyeing With Natural Dyes, Catharine Ellis

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

I am a weaver and a dyer with a passion for continued investigation of these disciplines. My work integrates the two processes of weaving on the loom and dyeing the cloth after it is removed from the loom. I have spent over 25 years developing and refining a technique that I have named woven shibori. Supplemental threads are woven into the cloth while it is on the loom. Once the weaving is complete, the supplemental threads are used to gather the cloth, creating a resist for dyeing or shaping.

Both weaving and dying are essential to the final textile. I …

Growing A Dye Garden, Donna Brown

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Imagine looking out from your patio to an inspiring vista of the Denver Botanic Gardens Chatfield Farms (DGB). Add to this a life-long love of natural dyes. Can you envision the garden down there, the blossoms of cosmos and coreopsis, the rows of indigo, the spreading madder, the hopi sunflowers nodding in the breeze? I am Donna Brown and this has been my vision ever since we moved to our “room with a view” that overlooks DGB, a 750 acre native plant refuge and working farm housing the Hildebrand Ranch, an historic homestead with cutting and herb gardens I am …

Bead And Beadwork Traditions: A Study Of Trade And Cultural Exchanges Across The Coast Of Gujarat, East Africa And The Red Sea, Medha Bhatt

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Indian cotton textiles were the key commodity that powered the Indian Ocean trade exchanges. Gujarat played a significant role not only in the manufacture of cotton textiles but also carnelian beads that was used for commercial trade exchanges in the markets of East Africa, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. While these two commodities of trade have been studied separately in detail, less well examined is the interaction between the two and the emergence of glass beads in the commercial exchanges of the trading communities of Gujarat. The bonding of the beads to the fabric led to a sophisticated …

From Chintz To Chita: A Brazilian Textile And The Construction Of National Identity, Willian Nassu

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Bilingualism has always been a constant in my life. My father’s side of the family migrated from Japan as my surname suggests, whereas my mother is of Polish descent. But while my father comprehends Japanese and my mother grasps some Polish, I was denied learning either languages. Since I was born and raised in Brazil, I have Portuguese as my first language, and acquired English as my second. The ability to use these two languages – sometimes mixed and other times switching – along with this multicultural background, has had some ripple effects. The first one was an inclination to …

Cutting Edge Technology: Knitting In The Early Modern Era, Jane Malcolm-Davies Dr.

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

New scientific evidence of trade in raw materials and finished goods for the knitted textile trade is emerging from a study of more than 100 extant knitted caps from the 16th century. These long-overlooked archaeological data are being re-excavated from museum archives for analysis in innovative ways. The caps are recorded in European collections as having been shipwrecked, deliberately concealed, preserved in peat bogs, or discarded as beyond use. Many were unearthed during construction work in cities, during building renovations or discovered on the seabed in far-flung locations across Europe – as far north as Norway and as far south …

Shifu: A Traditional Paper Textile Of Japan, Hiroko Karuno

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Looking back at the history of Japanese textiles, the beginning seems to be braiding and/or netting fibers made from tree bark or tall grass (Jomon period - approximately C13th - C10th BC.). Weaving seems to appear after the mid-Jomon period. Silk was brought into Japan in the late-Jomon to the Yayoi period (600BC-200AD), and for a long time its use was restricted to the upper class. During the Momoyama period (1573-1603) cotton seeds were introduced and cotton grown in Japan. By the mid-Edo period (1603-1868) cotton cultivation had spread over the southern part of Japan, and cotton became available to …

Textile Art As A Locus Of Colonization And Globalization: The Tapestry Project, Eunkyung Jeong Mfa, Ph.D.

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Tapestry Project was a 3+ year effort to plan, fund, design, create, and exhibit a 7’ x 14’ work of collaborative fiber art in a small rural community in Western Oklahoma. This project was remarkable for the ways it exhibited the historical concepts of colonization and globalization. From its inception, the project featured aspects of colonization, since the project’s formally trained founder envisioned herself sharing her knowledge and experience with interested but untrained local amateurs both for nobler purposes but also in order to help ensure her own tenure and promotion. While the “colonial oppressor” eventually succeeded in this quest, …

Byzantine And Oriental Silks From A Royal Shrine In Denmark Ad 1100, Anne Hedeager Krag

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In Denmark, in Odense, the Danish King Canute IV was murdered July 10, 1086, from behind in front of the altar in Albani Church. The king was killed together with his brother Benedict and seventeen of his knights, by Danish rebels. His half-brother Eric I “the Evergood” (ruling 1095-1103) achieved Canute’s recognition as a saint from Pope Urban II in 1098, and in 1100 the shrine containing the body of St. Canute was installed at the high altar of Odense Cathedral.1 St. Canutes remains were wrapped in a silk weaving with eagle motif and put into a shrine. Today the …

Tablet Weaving In Myanmar, Tomoko Torimaru

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Tablet weaving is one of the oldest techniques of expressing patterns, including script, with a warp thread. It is practiced in an extremely limited area and was considered a rare weaving technology. However, in the past it was developed to a level of highly skilled production among the people of Burma (now Myanmar). The scripts reveal the patronage of specific Buddhist believers and sometimes the provenance of the textile. The script on the belt that secures the covering on the sacred book of the palm leaf manuscript of Myanmar includes dates that establish that this type of weaving was practiced …

Importing Irish Linen And Creating American ‘Art Moderne’: An Analysis Of An Early 20th Century Trade Catalog, Lacy Simkowitz

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

During the late 1920s, a collaborative effort was launched by designers and manufacturers in the United States to develop indigenous modern decorative arts and unite art with industry. They were motivated by the realization that Europe surpassed U.S. in the production of contemporary furnishings—a fact made evident at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925, an event that the U.S. tellingly declined to participate in because it believed it could not meet the requirement of presenting new and original designs.1 The exhibition, a selection of which toured the US in 1926, became a model for the …

Mending As Metaphor: Finding Community Through Slow Stitching In A Fast Paced World, Ruth Katzenstein Souza

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

There is a growing movement toward repair and mending to combat the waste and over consumption that is so toxic to our planet. The environmental damage caused by textile production is the second greatest source of pollution after the oil industry.2 In light of these immense issues that are complex and overwhelming I found myself asking; “what can I do to add to the repair of the world?” I realized that we need to mend what we can in our immediate life; to truly see what needs our attention and to assess what is broken and see beauty in the …

Imagining Conquest: El Tapiz And Postrevolutionary Mexico*, Regina A. Root

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

When submitting my abstract over a year and a half ago, I had many questions of the artifact to which I would dedicate a year of intense study, the so called Tillett tapestry. I took a giant leap of hope, planning ahead with radical optimism, knowing that nothing had been published before about this subject and thinking through the material I had. Following the leads in this project became more of a Pandora’s box than imagined because its archival recovery process and oral interviews with family members and relatives converged and diverged in unexpected ways. What seemed remarkably obvious became …

The Textile Artist’S Archive: Approaches To Creating, Collecting And Preserving Artistic Legacy, Jessica Shaykett, Kathleen Mangan, Lia Cook, Stephanie Zollinger Dr., Fannie Ouyang

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The catalyst for the following discussion of the artist’s archive in the context of fiber and textile art grew out of several in-depth consultations I have had in my time as librarian and archivist at the American Craft Council, two examples of which I’d like to briefly highlight in this introduction. First, a series of phone calls from Jenelle Porter and Sarah Parrish, senior curator and research fellow respectively, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Porter and Parrish were researching artists for “Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present”, the first exhibition in over forty years to examine abstraction in fiber art …

Engineered Ikat Textile Of Gujarat - A Design Intervention, Shohrat S. Saiyed, Reena Bhatia Ph.D.

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

India – the country of rich heritage and culture is pictured through its traditional textiles which are kept alive through generations by the craftsman and his workmanship. Patola of Patan known as a double ikat silk textile, manifests the richness of heritage craft in dazzling colours and admirable motifs, but is a time consuming yarn resist textile. It cannot be duplicated anymore, since the GI recognition is served for its products under the name Patan Patola. The low cost variants of the celebrated Patan Patola have emerged in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat since last four decades as a single …

Sadu Weaving: The Pace Of A Camel In A Fast-Moving Culture, Lesli Robertson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

As a Fulbright Specialist in Kuwait in 2015, I was introduced to a textile known as sadu, which loosely translated means “moving at the pace of a camel.“ This rich textile has been a part of the traditionally nomadic Bedouin culture of the Middle East, and is front and center in fast moving Kuwait. Hugging the shores of the Arabian Gulf, Kuwait is at the intersection of desert and gulf, a nation full of progress, forward thinking, and contemporary approaches to practically everything. On Gulf Road, right in the heart of Kuwait City sits the center of sadu weaving, Beit …

Some Of The Weavings Used In Turkish Bath In The Context Of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Ayşem Yanar, Feryal Söylemezoğlu, Zeynep Erdoğan, Özlen Özgen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Hand weaving has a very old history in Anatolia. In addition to carpet and rugs, almost in every region it could be possible to see local weavings. Some of the weavings perished and others still continue to exist. These weavings which have to be evaluated as intangible cultural heritage have been protected by the geographical indication suspended license in order to protect them from losing their unique properties. Changes in the dynamics of tourism with the improvements in technology and the emergence of alternative forms of tourism, have increased the importance of local and touristic products. Turkish Bath has always …

Kashmir Shawls: The Perfect Exemplar Of A Textile Shaping And Being Shaped, Joan Hart

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The history of the Kashmir shawl and its stylistic progress and appropriation by other cultures reveals that an art form can be viewed as is (sui generis), and also in a context of social life that is not always what we would like to celebrate. And because the shawls have been made over centuries, this context has changed frequently.1 The Kashmir shawl is very special because it combines: a material that is extremely rare and luxurious which we now call cashmere or pashmina, a weave structure that is unique in its region and very complex, a symbolism of design motifs …

Revitalization Of The Handloom Heritage Of Chhota Udepur, Gujarat, Bhatia Reena Phd., Pawar Pooja M.Sc.

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The rich and beautiful products of the weavers of India have been rightly called “Exquisite poetry in colourful fabrics.” These beautiful traditional textiles were woven on the simple loom and the technique has been passed on through generations. However, many traditional weavers have either lost or are fast-loosing the essence and aesthetics of their indigenous crafts and craftsmanship. The researcher’s concern is for the preservation and revitalization of one such handloom heritage, the tribal cloth of Chotta Udepur, Gujarat, before it vanishes from our sight was high. Snow ball technique was used to draw a convenience sample. The data was …

Using The Variationist Comparative Method To Examine The Role Of Language Contact In Synthetic And Periphrastic Verbs In Spanish, Jenny Dumont, Damián Vegara Wilson

Spanish Faculty Publications

Language contact and linguistic change are thought to go hand in hand (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1994), however there are methodological obstacles, such as collecting data at different points in time or the availability of monolingual data for comparison, that make claims about language change tenuous. The present study draws on two different corpora of spoken Spanish — bilingual New Mexican Spanish and monolingual Ecuadorian Spanish — in order to quantitatively assess the convergence hypothesis in which contact with English has produced a change to the Spanish verbal system, as reflected in an extension of the Present and Past Progressive forms at …

In God’S Land: Cinematic Affect, Animation And The Perceptual Dilemmas Of Slow Violence, Salma Monani

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

In this paper, I argue that Indian independent filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Kumar's documentary In God’s Land (2012) blends animation and live-action to illuminate the destructive nuances of postcolonial literary scholar, Rob Nixon's notion of slow violence. In turning to cinema, I also suggest that In God’s Land’s “aesthetic strategies” further eco-film scholarship’s recent interests in animation, which have tended to highlight the mode's "feel good affect." I draw attention to In God's Land's hybrid of dark, discordant animation spectacle interspliced in the documentary live-action to articulate the potential of eco-animation outside of this affect. Ultimately, the film not only draws …

Writing In College: From Competence To Excellence, Amy Guptill, Aly Button, Peter Farrell, Kaethe Leonard, Timothee Pizarro

OER Main

Writing in College is designed for students who have largely mastered high-school level conventions of formal academic writing and are now moving beyond the five-paragraph essay to more advanced engagement with text. It is well suited to composition courses or first-year seminars and valuable as a supplemental or recommended text in other writing intensive classes. It provides a friendly, down-to-earth introduction to professors’ goals and expectations, demystifying the norms of the academy and how they shape college writing assignments. Each of the nine chapters can be read separately, and each includes suggested exercises to bring the main messages to life. …

Universalizing Primary Education In Sierra Leone: Promises And Pitfalls On The Path To Equity, Grace Pai

Publications and Research

What barriers remain in the progress towards achieving Universal Primary Education (UPE), and how does the UPE agenda affect out-of-school children? Through a mixture of historical, quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, this study examines these questions using the developing context of Sierra Leone as a case study.

Findings from over 100 interviews show that first of all, the most salient barrier that prevents children from participating in primary school is the fact that school is not free de facto in spite of the national abolishment of primary school fees in 2004. Rather than commonly cited constraints such as a …

Visionaire 66: Ritual, Maurizio Cattelan, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Weber

Visionaire

1 box (3 candles) Limited edition of 200 copies Three 9-inch-tall sculptural artist candles

"Visionaire releases its 66th issue, RITUAL, a set of sculptures in the form of sculptural scented candles created by three world-renowned artists. Featuring Maurizio Cattelan, Barbara Kruger, and Bruce Weber. Maurizio Cattelan gave Visionaire a particular Italian plunger that was reproduced at 100% scale. The scent of fresh roses is created by IFF perfumer Bruno Jovanovic, famous for his unconventional olfactory approach. Barbara Kruger transformed one of her iconic 2D works into a sculpture that smells like marijuana, a scent developed by IFF perfumer Laurent Le …

Aprender Com / Learning With: Collaborative Learning In A Portuguese Heritage Language Community, Simone Gugliotta

Spanish and Portuguese: Faculty Publications

Language attrition, the switch to a dominant language and the loss of proficiency in the original language, are problems confronted by some families in the United States who speak heritage languages at home. This article is about the conviviality and outcomes of a Portuguese-speaking community. The main goal of the project was to create an environment where ideas and techniques are negotiated to help children and parents maintain language and culture. Drawing on Vygotsky’s scaffolded participation, the article also describes how children, parents, a college student, and a researcher co-construct language learning with song and other playful activities to foster …

La Influencia De "La Brecha" En El Discurso Feminista De Los Setentas Y Ochentas., Carlos M. Coria-Sánchez

The Coastal Review

Chilean writer Mercedes Valdivieso (1924-1993), is well known for the social and subversive content of her works, specifically La Brecha of 1961.

La Brecha is of vital importance in the study of feminist novels within the Latin American context because with her revolutionary narrative at the beginning of the 1960's, the author denounces and destroys the social structures that oppress women and keep her under a state of dependence and subjugation under the patriarchal society.

The Reviving Project, Noor Sami

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

When Yushan Cassie Sun arrived in America in 2012, she already had big hopes for the future. A craft and material study major with a concentration in jewelry and metalsmithing, Cassie will graduate this May with some wonderful research experiences under her belt. e summer before she came to VCU, Cassie spent time learning the techniques of three crafts- men in China. As she lived and learned with them, she realized that although her learning was valuable, there were hundreds of other endangered craft techniques in China that she was not learning—and that’s what got her interested in what would …

Hip Hop Videos And Black Identity In Virtual Space, Joel Rubin

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

In this paper, I present an understanding of music videos as useful representations of the dynamism of blackness and black identity and in fact indicative of a post-regional turn in Hip Hop. In order to illustrate, I first examine how blackness is expressed in physical space with the advent of New York City's block parties and the Bay Area's "hyphy" movement. I then situate the importance of the music video in a contemporary understanding of visualized culture in virtual space. Applying this understanding to the performance and perception of blackness, I use the example of Canadian Hip Hop artist Drake's …