American Studies Commons^™

Stay Woke, Langston A. Williams

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the pages of my thesis, I comprehensively analyze the processes, intentions, and production of my thesis film Stay Woke. My examination will exhaustively probe every stage of the film from development to preproduction to production to postproduction and beyond. Individual aspects of this process including writing, casting, locations, production design, cinematography, directing, budgeting, scheduling, and postproduction workflows will be detailed. As I make elaborations in each section, I will explain my learning experiences from each day’s new tasks, challenges, and lessons. All of these things will be framed with regards to the overall goal and themes of the …

On Vinyl: Revival & Survival, Thom Leavy

Capstones

As a record collector and journalist, I take stock of what they mean to me while searching to better understand the “Vinyl Revival” of the past decade. I meet and pick at people who’ve worked with the medium at its height, its demise, and today. We talk about what digitization has done and will do to music, and what vinyl means to them.

https://readymag.com/u29439050/onvinyl/

Springsteen: In The American Tradition, Alex Mcdonough

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Springsteen’s music serves as a platform for not only the working poor, but also the pariahs of American society. Like other classic American singer-songwriters, Springsteen uses his music to explore tragedy in the American life, imbuing each song with a quiet, sometimes darkly humorous humanity. Through his songs, Springsteen has defined an altogether different type of American story, one that weaves tragedy, comedy, and the tedious minutiae of daily life. Springsteen considers each element of every story he tells to be distinct and important in its own way, creating a sense of purpose for even the lowest of the low.

Bohemians: Greenwich Village And The Masses, Joanna Levin

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"This chapter traces the convergence of 'the revolt against puritanism' and 'the revolt against capitalism' in the 1910s, focusing on the most celebrated American bohemia Greenwich Village - and on The Masses, the Village periodical that provided the most influential expression of the double-edged bohemian revolt. The effort to combine the personal and the political, the artistic and the social helped fuel a host of interconnected movements and alliances within the bohemian milieu, and the bohemians called upon both Marx and Freud in the effort to promote revolutionary change. Often riddled with internal contradictions and susceptible to forces of …

Spirituality Among Black Americans: A Hierarchical Classification Of The Family Strengths Model, Genese Clark

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

There is a need for disaggregate data pertaining to the perceived strengths of Black American families. This study identified which traits are salient and dominant among African-American families according to the Family Strengths Model. Utilizing this model, a mixed methods study was conducted among Black Americans living in Connecticut who identify with belonging to a family (N=59) to investigate the importance of six family strength domains. Results found the hierarchical rank (from most important to least important) to be commitment, spirituality/ spiritual wellbeing, appreciation and affection, positive communication, time together, and the ability to manage stress and crisis effectively. Additionally, …

Transnational Uses Of Mafia Imagery In Zadie Smith’S White Teeth, Andrea Ciribuco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Transnational Uses of Mafia Imagery in Zadie Smith's White Teeth" Andrea Ciribuco discusses the literary representation of multiculturalism in Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000). The novel focuses on multicultural encounters in Great Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on one site for these encounters: the character of Millat Iqbal, who joins a gang of teenagers and subsequently a radical Islamic group in his problematic search for identity and belonging. This search is characterized by Millat's tendency to define himself by reference to well-known pop-cultural Mafia figures, whom he …

With Great Power: Examining The Representation And Empowerment Of Women In Dc And Marvel Comics, Kylee Kilbourne

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout history, comic books and the media they inspire have reflected modern society as it changes and grows. But women’s roles in comics have often been diminished as they become victims, damsels in distress, and sidekicks. This thesis explores the problems that female characters often face in comic books, but it also shows the positive representation that new creators have introduced over the years. This project is a genealogy, in which the development of the empowered superwoman is traced in modern age comic books. This discussion includes the characters of Kamala Khan, Harley Quinn, Gwen Stacy, and Barbara Gordon and …

Pickering, Tammie & Gary Collins (Fa 348), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 348. Student paper titled “Trees in Folk Crafts” in which Tammie Pickering and Gary Collins explore the connection between trees and traditional folkways. Paper details the medicinal properties of sassafras tea, which is made from tree roots, the production of maple syrup, and the expressive crafts of wood-carving and carpentry. Data collected from three working-class residents of Caldwell County. Paper also includes field journals, recorded interviews, and transcripts.

Collins, Gary & Tammy Pickering (Fa 346), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 346. Paper titled "Hog Killing in Western Kentucky" in which Gary Collins and Tammie Pickering discuss the cultural significance of farm-raising hogs and the foodways traditions that result from the slaughtering process. Using slides and interviews, Collins and Pickering document a hog killing that took place in January 1986 on a farm in Trigg County, Kentucky.

Hensley, Jennifer Lynn (Fa 351), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 351. Paper titled "The Music Barn" in which Lynn Hensley discusses the founding of The Music Barn, a local music venue in Warren County, Kentucky. Hensley's main informant is Joe Marshall, a country music artist, community organizer, and owner of The Music Barn.

Fox, Randy (Fa 350), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

FFinding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 350. Paper titled "Fiddle About: Ed Carnes-Contest Fiddler" in which Randy Fox charts the history of fiddle playing and the rise of "contest fiddling" during the traditional music revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fox's main informant is Ed Carnes, an old-time fiddler who won the Kentucky State Fiddle Championship in 1981. Carnes details his beginnings as a fiddler, the recording of his fiddle-tunes album, and his travels across the country to different fiddling contests.

“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman

Doctoral Dissertations

The central claim in this dissertation is that much contemporary African American cultural expression would be better conceptualized not as “post-black,” as some would have it, but as what I call “meta-black.” I use the preface “meta-” because while this contemporary black identity also resists sometimes constrictive conceptions of “authentic” black identity from within the African American community, I diverge from theorists of “post-blackness” in observing the ways that, as Nicole Fleetwood observes, blackness necessarily “circulates” within a technologically-driven mediascape, and these postmodern black subjects work within and against the constraints of this aural-visual regime of blackness in order to …

Review: Swimming In Hong Kong, Stephanie Chan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A review of Swimming in Hong Kong (2016), a short story collection by Stephanie Han.

“‘Relentless Geography’: Los Angeles’ Imagined Cartographies In Karen Tei Yamashita’S Tropic Of Orange,”, Cristina M. Rodriguez

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

What would a map of Los Angeles drawn from the ground up look like? In his groundbreaking work The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre argues that the conceived space of urban planners is fundamentally distinct from lived space, which cannot be mapped out. In her impressive city-wide narrative, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) demonstrates the effects of imposing conceived space upon the lived space of inner city Los Angeles residents, and what happens when the counter-model of space being lived by a city’s inhabitants rebels. Yamashita’s text mirrors this disjuncture between represented and lived space through the …

An Unfinished Conversation: An Interview With Yiyun Li, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview of fiction writer and memoirist Yiyun LI.

Introduction To Volume Eight: Wins And Losses, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

"I Am Your Father", Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Star Wars is supposed to be a generic mythological story with archetypes and narrative structures that transcend all cultures, both in space and in time."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the influence of movies on our culture from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/i-am-your-father/

Chronology And Itinerary Of The Career Of Will Marion Cook: Materials For A Biography, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Will Marion Cook (1869-1944) devoted his creative life to the musical stage as composer, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, producer, director, violinist, pianist, librettist and lyricist, as well as making important contributions as an author and educator. One of the foremost American musicians of his generation, and regarded by many in the African American community of his day as its leading composer, he was, in contemporary eyes, an eccentric, irascible genius of great heart. This document assembles a chronology of the principal public events of his life.

A biography of Will Marion Cook by Marva Carter, Swing Along (2008) is an excellent …

Explaining Theory-Guided Research Through The Big Bang Theory, Brittnie Peck, Scott Christen, Stephanie Kelly

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

The Big Bang Theory is a comedy aired on CBS that features the lives of a group of scientists. Like many people, the characters in this show find it difficult to avoid taking their work home with them. Thus, most episodes are rich with research terminology and demonstrations. This paper details an activity that provides a fun means of introducing students to the role of theory in guiding research through the use of The Big Bang Theory.

Uprising, Issue 4, [Fall 2017], University Of Northern Iowa. Northern Iowa Student Government.

Uprising

Inside this issue:
Viva la Bonita --- 6
Metro Records --- 11
Self Service --- 16
The Misfits --- 22
Power Surge --- 36
Going Back to Your Roots --- 44

“No But”—Understanding Sally Jenkins’ Friction With Feminism, Steven Master, Taylor Joy Mitchell

Publications

In a conversation years ago with the late, legendary college basketball coach Pat Summitt, Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins asked Summitt if she was a feminist (“To ‘Sum It Up”’). It seemed an odd question, considering Summitt’s unparalleled role in the rise of women’s athletics. Yet, for sports journalism scholars, Jenkins’ question was compelling for another reason. What if Summitt had responded by asking, “Are you?” Much like Summitt, Jenkins has achieved success in an overwhelmingly male-dominated profession, and she has moved the needle forward for women in sports and, by extension, for women in general. Her visibility allows …

Springsteen's Oppressed Working Class, Kaylee Bumpus

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Bruce Springsteen’s exploration through the lives of oppressed working class people has been a prevalent theme throughout the four decades of his musicianship. This paper will discuss the motivations, methods, and impact of the blue collar characters that Springsteen writes about in his songs. The characters from specific songs will be analyzed and placed into one of three categories: law-abiding working class citizens, dreamers attempting to flee desolation, or sympathetic criminals. Specific examples will be used from some of Bruce Springsteen’s more well-known songs, such as “Thunder Road”, “Born to Run”, “The River”, and “Born in the U.S.A.”, and other …

Impressive Failures: Mavericks Of Film Authorship And The Impossibility Of Success In Hollywood, Tom S. Davies

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation directly challenges the critical and commercial primacy of success attached to Hollywood films and their filmmakers, especially when one argues for or against their quality and/or importance within cinematic history. Through a process of shifting and multiplying perspectives within a broader narrative that is critical of what separates success and failure, certain films and filmmakers that were judged as failures or disappointments under impossible prerequisites of creating a successful film––commercially, aesthetically, or both–– are, instead, reconsidered as constructive counterpoints to the expectations of the Hollywood economic field of production as well as to the inevitable disappointment of the …

Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite

Creative Writing Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the second decade of the 21st century, academic comics studies is well established as a serious intellectual subject, but for many non-specialists, including university administrators, a sense of frivolity still attaches to comics. This brief essay braids together personal history and intellectual analysis: 1) it compares the cultural position of comics today to the position of novels in the 19th century; 2) it analyzes the complementary nature of the verbal and visual channels; 3) it argues that neither words nor pictures should be considered primary in a narratology of comics; and 4) that comics are eminently well suited to …

Christopher Pizzino. Arresting Development: Comics At The Boundaries Of Literature. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2016., Katlin M. Sweeney

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Christopher Pizzino. Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 2016.

Frances Gateward And John Jennings. The Blacker The Ink: Constructions Of Black Identity In Comics And Sequential Art. Rutgers Up, 2015., Evan B. Thomas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Frances Gateward and John Jennings. The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Rutgers UP, 2015.

Redrawing Of Narrative Boundaries: An Introduction, Frederick Luis Aldama

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

ReDrawing of Narrative Boundaries: An Introduction provides an overview of the comics studies field as it relates to discussions and debates regarding its relationship to the study of literature and the arts. It provides a snapshot of today's comics studies field, including how the scholarly essays collected for this special issue, “A Planetary Republic of Comic Book Letters: Drawing Expansive Narrative Boundaries," work to deepen and widen our understanding of comics, and comics from all over the planet. Individually and collectively they eschew the lean toward the fill-in-the-blank (lit, film, etc.) comparisons, and instead excavate and theorize comics on their …

Words + Pictures: A Manifesto, Jean Braithwaite

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the second decade of the 21^st century, academic comics studies is well established as a serious intellectual subject, but for many non-specialists, including university administrators, a sense of frivolity still attaches to comics. This brief essay braids together personal history and intellectual analysis: 1) it compares the cultural position of comics today to the position of novels in the 19^th century; 2) it analyzes the complementary nature of the verbal and visual channels; 3) it argues that neither words nor pictures should be considered primary in a narratology of comics; and 4) that comics are eminently well …

Enrique García. The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, And Alternative Comics. Pittsburgh: U Of Pittsburgh P, 2017., Magda Garcia

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Enrique García. The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2017.

Michelle Ann Abate And Gwen Athene Tarbox. Graphic Novels For Children And Young Adults. Up Of Mississippi, 2017., Carlos G. Kelly

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox. Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults. UP of Mississippi, 2017.