American Studies Commons^™

Becoming-Belieber: Girls' Passionate Encounters With Bieber Culture, Kortney Sherbine

Occasional Paper Series

In this article, I draw on French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) notion of becoming to consider the ways in which these encounters with people, materials, and technologies are productive, creating space for Beliebers to come into relationship with one another and with popular culture in ways that are new and that I never could have anticipated during my more carefully organized and school-curriculum-driven interactions with girls during my six years as an elementary school teacher. Through my current research into young girls’ after-school fanaticism, I have been able to come to know girls differently than I knew …

Book Review - Jim Crow, Literature, And The Legacy Of Sutton E. Griggs, Michael K. Law

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Book Review - South Of The Etowah: The View From The Wrong Side Of The River, Diana Hartle

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

What The Tides May Bring: Political "Tigueraje" Disposession And Popular Dissent In Samaná, Dominican Republic, Ryan A. Mann-Hamilton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is a historical and ethnographic project that delves into the conflictive relationship between the development of the Dominican state and the formation of the community of the port city of Samaná. The African diasporic community of Samaná has actively constructed the local space throughout shifting political projects, while sustaining their collective voices against the waves of dispossession crashing on their shores. Using a combination of archival research, participant observation, oral history and ethnography, I document multiple instances of state intervention to understand how the Samaná community has been coerced over time to consent to these processes. I juxtapose …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

National Register Of Historic Places (Nhrp) Eligibility Determinations For Previously Recorded Archaeological Sites At Wright Patman Lake, Bowie And Cass Counties, Texas, Bryan C. Harrell, Chris Sypniewski, Alex Decaro, Nick Linville

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

Between 19 October and 11 November 2015, SEARCH conducted National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) eligibility determinations at previously recorded archaeological sites at Wright Patman Lake in Bowie and Cass Counties, Texas. This project was conducted under Contract W912HY‐11‐D‐0002, Task Order 0006 between the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Fort Worth District, and SEARCH.

Introduction To New Work In The Empirical Study Of Literature And Culture, Aldo Nemesio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Toward An Aesthetics Of Adaptation In Empirical Research, Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, Pascal Nicklas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research" Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas discuss the requirements and potential of empirical research into the reception of adaptations: adaptation is one key strategy in the creation of literature and art in general. The creative process and product of adaptation has its counter-part on the side of reception. Empirical research into the aesthetics of adaptation aims at the experimental elucidation of the physiological background and the establishment of a model describing the perceptual underpinnings of the act of seeing an adaptation as adaptation. This implies evolutionary biological reasoning …

Methodological Reflections On Investigating The Reception Of Fiction In Public Spaces, Katarina Eriksson Barajas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Methodological Reflections on Investigating the Reception of Fiction in Public Spaces" Katarina Eriksson Barajas discusses how to find and approach research participants in public spaces. Eriksson Barajas's study is based on tenets of the empirical study of literature. Reader response and reception theories and discursive psychology are both employed in the analysis. This approach, called discursive reception studies, enables researchers to analyze the role of social interaction in the co-construction of the experience of, in this case, a film or a play. Eriksson Barajas discusses the following methodological issues: 1) how to gain access to "naturally" occurring …

Young Adults In Sweden On Reading Literary Fiction In Print And Electronic Media, Skans Kersti Nilsson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Young Adults in Sweden on Reading Literary Fiction in Print and Electronic Media" Skans Kersti Nilsson analyses 16-25 year old young adults' reflections on the reading of fiction in printed books versus electronic media. In Nilsson's study focus group interviews were conducted to gauge how conversations on the importance of reading literary fiction develop inside and outside the learning environment of school. The results suggest that young adults derive benefit from reading fiction and that they think this activity yields more benefits than reading fiction on electronic media or viewing filmed literature. Results also suggest that participants …

Toward An Empirically-Generated Typology Of Weblog Genres, Maciej Maryl, Krzysztof Niewiadomski, Maciej Kidawa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Empirically-generated Typology of Weblog Genres" Maciej Maryl, Krzysztof Niewiadomski, and Maciej Kidawa propose a typology of weblog genres based on empirical data, namely on the analysis of metadata and the study of blogs' content. In Study 1 they explore 287 categories used by Polish bloggers to classify their blogs. The analysis shows that most categories are topical, but some could be useful for genre analyses. In Study 2 they analyse "syntagma" combinations of 2-3 categories assigned to 88 252 blogs on one of the Polish blog platforms. Through quantitative analysis and clustering 3 main groups …

Bibliography Of Contextual (Systemic And Empirical) Approaches In The Study Of Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Fictionality And The Empirical Study Of Literature, Torsten Pettersson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Fictionality and the Empirical Study of Literature" Torsten Pettersson surveys three types of studies and argues for research which disentangles fictionality from other aspects of literariness. Pettersson conceptualizes the basic paradoxical phenomenon that made-up stories can influence readers' perceptions of the real world and presents an empirical study of the impact of fictionality based on a five-page narrative presented to two groups of young Swedish readers as an extract from an autobiography and a novel, respectively. A questionnaire elicited reactions to the narrative, as well as attitudes to fictionality and to literary reading in general. Results include …

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage …

Teaching Literature Through Online Discussion In Theory And Practice, Monica Manzolillo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Teaching Literature through Online Discussion in Theory and Practice" Monica Manzolillo focuses on the teaching of literature at the university through on-line discussion. Integrating discussion-based techniques with the predominant lecture mode is necessary because we need to modify students' merely receptive attitude, and help them develop the fundamental skills of reading, interpreting, and criticizing literary texts. Compared to live discussions, electronic communication has the advantage of providing a more relaxed atmosphere where social conventions are less important and this encourages positive interaction among students. Manzolillo illustrates the experimental use of the website Learning Literature http://www.learningliterature.it/ as support …

Paratexts In Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, And Medial Format Usage, Stefano Calzati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Paratexts in Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, and Medial Format Usage" Stefano Calzati compares a number of contemporary travel books and travel blogs. Calzati's objective is to promote a bridging approach between the digital and the analogue that goes beyond their differences. He posits a critique socio-linguistics where online multimodal texts are analyzed by identifying layers of analysis. Against these compositional models, Calzati suggests a double move: on the one hand, he applies Gérard Genette's notion of "paratext" to travel blogs and on the other he extends the concept of "hypertextuality" to travel books. From his analyzis …

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?: Food Inequlaity And Black Americans, Christina Foster

Capstone Collection

Food insecurity is an issue that plagues many people throughout the world. It only requires a brief search on the United Nation’s (U.N.) World Hunger Map to determine that this is indeed a worldwide crisis. Conversely, within the United States, the issue of hunger is often treated as “minimal” in comparison to other countries. A deeper inquiry into hunger within the U.S. reveals an even more disturbing connection: the role of white supremacy and systemic racism in regard to hunger. Academic research pertaining to food access is quite recent. Be that as it may, it is of no surprise that …

Black Lives Matter: Why Black Feminism?, Analexicis T. Bridewell

First-Gen Voices: Creative and Critical Narratives on the First-Generation College Experience

In this essay, the author explores the inclusive nature and focal range of the Black Lives Matter movement in an effort to demonstrate how the goals of the movement are grounded in Black feminism. Ultimately, Bridewell concludes that creating inclusive spaces for the exploration of intersectional identities can help bring justice and equality not only to the Black community, but to all lives that have be oppressed or marginalized.

Beyond Metropolises: Hybridity In A Transnational Context, Raihan Sharif

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Beyond metropolises and within transnational contexts, investigating hybridity discourses is long overdue. This article argues that the epistemic violence embedded in such discourse has grave implications for the very impoverished nations and peoples with whom it claims solidarity and that, because this discourse is trendy in academia, its service to neoliberal capitalism is both easy to miss and important to expose. Interstices of postcolonial hybridity discourses, development discourses, and environmental justice discourses—dominant versions of which are segregated from contextual issues—as produced in Western academia and exported to third world countries for appropriation as developmental efforts—reveal epistemic violence, the manipulation of …

The Amazing Adventures Of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through The 20th Century [Table Of Contents], Craig Saper

Biography

“A cross between an intellectual biography of this literary dynamo and a picaresque novel. Bob Brown has found a sensitive, insightful, and appreciative biographer who knows not only how to narrate (and condense) his amazing adventures but also how to draw the connections that make this overflowing life of letters seem all the more meaningful and significant in our era of digital multimedia.” —Louis Kaplan, Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media, University of Toronto

"Do Not Fashion The Other": Representing Contemporary Haudenosaunee Literature 2016, Michael Patrick Brewster

Master's Theses

Historically, the issue of representation in postcolonial studies is one of some contention. While scholarship might recognize the necessity for highlighting the plights and struggles attendant to postcolonial societies, the primary literature being studied is most often written by natives of those societies themselves. This gap is especially evident with Indigenous cultures, because there are relatively few Indigenous scholars working in the academy. We are at the point now when we have a multiplicity (but not a plurality) of Indigenous voices writing literature (poetry, memoir, fiction, film, etc.) and academic criticism. However, there is value in non-Natives reading and writing …

9/11 Memorials : Contested Memory, Competing Narratives, And Healing., Jennifer A. Fraley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I examine the role that monuments and memorials play in our lives including artistically, historically, and culturally. I begin by examining what monuments and memorials are and how these public works should be their own classification of public art. I argue there are many things these works can be (place of mourning, celebration, historical marker, etc.) and should not be (a single source for a historical accounting); yet, memorials do have the necessary condition of creating a referential relationship between the viewer and the memorialized objects. Without this relationship, the work fails as a memorial. Memorials are …

When Ink Turned Into Bullets: The Effect Of The Press In Buffalo, New York And The Nation Along With Its Role In Igniting A Civil War, Nicole C. Kondziela

History Theses

The American Civil War was a multi-faceted conflict: North versus South, states’ rights versus federal law, slavery versus abolition. Due to increasing and constant advancements in technology, this was the first war in American history that developed in full view of the public through newspapers. The Industrial Revolution and capitalism allowed the press to evolve into rich and powerful soap boxes for political bosses and editors alike to voice their opinions far beyond the village square. Unbeknownst to much of the public at the time, the Union had been at the mercy of newspaper editors and politicians in a grand …

Family, Housing, And The Political Geography Of Gay Liberation In Los Angeles County, 1960-1986, Ian M. Baldwin

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examines the gay liberation movement in Los Angeles County through the lens of housing rights. It illustrates how sexual justice activism evolved in tandem with the fates of the welfare state and urban politics. Like racial minorities, queers have been stymied by economic barriers. Beginning in the 1930s, federal housing agencies established “family” requirements to housing subsidies, which the state defined through biology or marriage. In L.A. County, activists worked to overcome this heteronormative barrier at the grassroots and within the political establishment. Binding gay liberation to economic and family justice, queers opened housing shelters and social service …

Movements, Music, And Meaning: A Comparative Analysis Of Cultural Narratives In Vietnam Era And Post-9/11 Anti-War Music, Jonathan Nathaniel Redman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of widely circulating cultural narratives in the lyrics of approximately eighty anti-war songs from the Vietnam and post-9/11 eras. Unlike prior movements and music research, this thesis privileges culture over movements and views movements as cultural antennae both picking up on trends and cultural narratives, and broadcasting their own altered cultural meanings back into the “cultural airways.” It sees music as a cultural medium which acquires cultural meanings from its surroundings, alters those meanings, synthesizes new ones, and perpetuates old ones. Drawing on comparative and narrative analysis approaches informed by grounded theory techniques, this thesis …

Walking In American History: How Long Distance Foot Travel Shaped Views Of Nature And Society In Early Modern America, Brian Christopher Hurley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The industrialization of transportation, first with railroads, and then with automobiles, took Americans away from foot transport, changing how Americans interacted with one another and viewed their surroundings. The dissertation traces the walking trips of five central figures in this era of mechanized transport, the personal impact of their experiences while walking through a land they were accustomed to skimming across, and the ways in which these personal revelations led to changes in the national consciousness. Walking upright was central to the development of homo sapiens as a species, and shaped the way they interacted with their environment. Certain aspects …

"In The Land Of Tomorrow": Representations Of The New Woman In The Pre-Suffrage Era, Natalie B. O'Neal

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This digital anthology explores feminism in selected short fiction by women writers from the 1911 run of the popular women’s magazines Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Farmer’s Wife. This fiction furthered the women’s rights movement by allowing women to imagine a world similar to their own with a heroine who voiced their desires and enacted change. Rather than the more experimental, inaccessible literature of avant garde high modernist writers consumed by the upper class, popular fiction reached a wider, middle class audience and was more effective at producing a progressive zeitgeist following the stilted Victorian …

Empathy In Its Entirety, Callie Reymann

Best Integrated Writing

Reymann critically analyzes three novels through the lens of empathy and then applies her critical analysis and observations to her experiences as a person diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Conflicting Cultural Identity And The Baz Benin In Edwidge Danticat’S Claire Of The Sea Light, Kellianne Rinearson

Best Integrated Writing

Rinearson explores the connection between the gangs in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and mythological figures in Haitian folklore thus adding nuance to the discussion of Caribbean cultural identity.

The Grimké Sisters: Radical Defenders Of Women’S Rights And Abolition, Megan Bailey

Best Integrated Writing

Bailey examines the intersection of gender and religion in the abolition movement of the American Civil War and argues that the Grimké sisters’ effectiveness in preaching against slavery was undermined by the perception that they were too radical.