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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
The (Mis) Representation Of Racialized Minorities: Barbie Dolls As Social Problems In India, Namrata Ashvinbhai Bhadania
The (Mis) Representation Of Racialized Minorities: Barbie Dolls As Social Problems In India, Namrata Ashvinbhai Bhadania
English Faculty Publications
The relation between commodities and consumers is directly related to the transactional relationship between kids and their interaction with the toys. The paper aims to critique how female representation through Barbie Dolls in popular culture shapes female identity. Production and consumption of Barbie dolls in India became a way of socializing mechanism to educate young Indian girls on the concept of beauty. A notion of beauty is attached to blue eyes, skinny waist, and fair skin giving rise to “American Exceptionalism” (Madsen, 2009, p. 14), where the model nation conceptualizes itself though national identity where perceiver compels to transform themselves …
Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol
Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol
English Faculty Publications
This chapter draws attention to the lack of parks and nature recreation amenities during the 1920s and 1930s in predominantly African American city neighborhoods through Langston Hughes’s political poetry, specifically his blues-inflected ballad “Park Bench,” as well as “Chicago’s Black Belt” “Restrictive Covenants,” and “One Way Ticket.” Through the figure of the tramp/vagrant/bum, “Park Bench” voices a protest against inequality mapped into city space. Asserting that access to nature should be a fundamental condition of a democratic society, the poem situates the park bench as a charged site for public dialogue. The chapter argues that this poem and other Hughes …
"Saying 'I Do' All Over Again": The Throwaway Ornamentalism Of Promises Weddings Vow To Break, Marc A. Ouellette
"Saying 'I Do' All Over Again": The Throwaway Ornamentalism Of Promises Weddings Vow To Break, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
This article details a project that involved collecting the necessary items to produce a set of wedding pictures. While photographs have long been understood as indexical signs, the process of collecting the items via trips to thrift stores reveals a host of additional indexical signs through the set of underlying contextual cultural constraints surrounding the difference between the rituals of the marriage rite and the wedding as a public, performative practice. Indeed, the second hand items leave indexical and material traces of the excess and the disposability of weddings, while the pictures offer the material connection to the ostentation of …