American Studies Commons^™

Forum Prompt: Approaching Indigeneity, Learning Modernity, Christine Bold

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

“Nourished By My Mother”: Zitkala-Ša And The Indian Sterilization Project, Lainey Wardlow

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Reclaiming The Black Personhood: The Power Of The Hip-Hop Narrative In Mainstream Rap, Morgan Klatskin

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Hip hop, as a cultural phenomenon, leverages rap as a narrative form in periods of acutely visible political unrest in the Black American community to combat pejorative narratives of Black America as revealed in the American criminal justice system’s treatment of Black Americans. Hip-hop themes were prevalent in golden-age rap of the 1980s in response Regan-era war-on-drugs policy, which severely disadvantaged the Black community and devalued the Black personhood. Hip hop used narrative to reclaim the Black personhood while it served to encourage political involvement in the Black community, urging Blacks to participate in rewriting the narrative of Black America. …

“Sprinkled, Cleansed, And Comforted”: The Early American Jail, Jacob Johnson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

The Ethos Of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric And The Democratic Function Of American Protest And Countercultural Literature, Jeffrey Lorino Jr

Dissertations (1934 -)

My dissertation, “The Ethos of Dissent: Epideictic Rhetoric and the Democratic Function of American Protest and Countercultural Literature, 1940-1962,” establishes a theoretical frame-work, the literary epideictic, for reading the African American social protest literature of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and the American countercultural literature of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. I argue that epideictic rhetoric affords insight into how these authors’ narratives embody a post-World War II “ethos of dissent,” a counterdiscourse that emerges out of a climate of dynamism deadlocked with controlling ideologies. Epideictic, the branch of rhetoric concerned with civic matters, commends or censures a particular individual, …

The Semi-Anti-Apocalypse Of Black Panther, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is one of a series of films reviews of Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler.

The Beholder, Allan Lake

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

A poem on the effect of landscape on the emotions.

Shifting Rurality American Gothic, Iowa Nice, Biotech And Political Expectations In Rural America, William D. Nichols 890252

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper traces the linkage between heritage landscape within the context of the election of Donal Trump. Trump's invocations of heritage riled certain regions of the US which had a distinct connection to Regionalism, both as a political idea and as an aesthetic practice. Focusing on Iowa, home to the quintessential American painting, American Gothic, the paper looks at modernity and agriculture, and how the two categories seem to rely on (but also negate) heritage. By examining what a genetically modified landscape might mean in relation to the historical image of the pastoral/provincial farmer, a network of frictions and …

Poetry Of Roe 8, Nandi Chinna

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Poetry of Roe 8

The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started …

Review Of Thinking Continental: Writing The Planet One Place At A Time, John Charles Ryan Dr

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Review of Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017) edited by Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall and O. Alan Weltzien

Saturn/Cronus-11, Joel Weishaus

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

“Saturn/Cronus-11” is from a Cosmography, an in-progress project of Literary Digital Art that invokes the gods of seven planets in our celestial neighborhood; plus The Sun, The Moon; and Incognita. It includes my trope of invagination: fragments exhumed from the authored corpus and transplanted into the body of a living text, which, along with superimposed images and animations, advances us toward a more magnanimous, transdisciplinary sphere. The project also includes notes.

The Multi-Vocal Trailscape Of The Natchitoches Trace: A Trail Of Tears, Trade And Transformation, Jade L. Robison

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper demonstrates how individuals have inscribed the Natchitoches Trace trailscape with meaningful narratives via oral traditions, historical accounts and material evidence, and considers how descendent populations curate their heritage in such a landscape. Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri River near St. Louis, the Natchitoches Trace stretches southwest through the Ozark region in Missouri and Arkansas, and onto Natchitoches, Louisiana. Created by pre-Columbian groups for trading purposes, the trail was later utilised by early European pioneer families for westward expansion. The 1830 Indian Removal Act forced the repurposing of the trail as a route of exile for displaced …

Imaginative Geographies: Visualising The Poetics Of History And Space, Clive Barstow

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This essay presents a visual dialogue about our relationship to place. I adopt Henri Lefebvre’s model of cumulative trialectics (1991) as a new thirdspace that more accurately represents the complexities of modern day geographies and hybrid communities by extending the binary analysis of the past and present and beyond the real and the imagined. Trialectics expand our understanding beyond physical geographies by suggesting a cerebral space that searches for new meaning and is therefore more radically open to additional otherness and toward a continuing expansion of [human] spatial knowledge and imagination.

Julia Lossau describes thirdspace as a space that ‘…tends …

Becoming Human In The Land: An Introduction To The Special Issue Of Heritage: Landscapes, Drew Hubbell

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This introduction to the special issue of Landscapes theorizes the questions suggested by the theme, "Landscape: Heritage." Weaving personal narrative with literary criticism, cultural studies, human geography, and ecology, the essay examines the way humans become human by developing complex relationships with landscapes over time. As landscapes contain the physical traces of human habitation and development, certain narratives of human inhabitants are written and memorialized in and by those landscapes. The monumentalization of specific heritages leads to contests between human groups who require certain heritages to be memorialized, but not others. Greater awareness of one's humanity requires recovery of polyphonic …

The Manner Of Your Scramble, Henry D. Goldkamp

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

N/A

Haiti: Black Leadership, Art, And Life, Danielle Legros Georges, Helen Jospeh, Anaëlle Séïde, Rocky Cotard, Mosheh Tucker

Lesley University Community of Scholars Day

Join Lesley students and faculty in a discussion of the leading role Haiti has played in struggles against slavery and colonialism in the Americas and globally; its historic and consistent rejections of white supremacist values and dangerous stereotypes in the contemporary moment; and the lived experiences of Haitians working as artists, therapists, learners, teachers, here at Lesley who draw on pioneering Haitian models of epistemology and ontology—on Haitian sources of strength, community, resilience, and vision. Images will also be projected.

Archbold, Annie And Barbara Dubczak (Fa 379), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 379. A reel-to-reel audiotape recording of a program titled “Documents in Sound: A Sample in Folk Arts,” which was sponsored by the Barren River Regional Arts Council with funds from the Kentucky Folklife Foundation. According to the tape summary, the program includes five separate features, which can be played as individual vignettes or as a full 29-minute program. Features include traditional artists and cover topics such as woodworking, broom making, basket making, weaving, and drawn work.

Motherhood Makes A Matriarchy, Lily Mann

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

This analysis will discuss the topic of matriarchies, how they created, and how they are sustained. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Coven are used as examples of matriarchies, wherein Hawthorne’s matriarchy is at its start, whereas Murphy’s matriarchy is coming to a potential end. This will be examined through a comparative analysis between the characters in Hawthorne’s early American work with the characters in Murphy’s contemporary work. Ultimately, Hawthorne’s matriarchy is much more insidious and potentially damaging to a patriarchal norm than Murphy’s reclusive patriarchy. Hawthorne’s matriarchy has the option to disrupt a patriarchal …

Alien Lands, Carissa Mosley

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Alien Lands has been an academic year-long study and cross-media art endeavor, researching the history of palm trees in Los Angeles and documenting their current presence. I photographed and made videos of the palm trees in Los Angeles and ended the project with a ceremonial installation/performance, grieving the colonial history and unsustainability of palm trees by ironically commemorating them. This body of work is meant to provoke discussion of palm trees' iconicization, their ubiquitous invisibility in our environment, their colonial history, and their likely nonexistent future.

"He Didn't Mean It": What Kubrick's The Shining Can Teach Us About Domestic Violence, Kelley O'Brien

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With Second Wave Feminism and the Women’s Rights Movement, 1970’s Americans began to see a shift in gender norms affecting how we relate to one another, particularly within a family structure. Scholars have noted an anxiety permeating the decade over the potential negative ramifications of such a drastic cultural shift. We see these issues of gender politics played out in numerous popular films from the 1970s and into the 1980s. Kubrick’s The Shining, like many horror films of the time, preys upon the societal fear for the family, due to these shifting gender norms, by featuring a crumbling patriarch (Jack), …

Performing "Hurt" : Aging, Disability, And Popular Music As Mediated Product And Lived-Experience In Johnny Cash's Final Recordings, Adam Davidson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sitting at a rarely examined intersection between aging, disability, and popular culture, this project explores how the aging body becomes the disabled body in the context of popular music. In what follows, I trouble the distinction between bodies and mediation, between lived-experience and cultural product, and I argue that the voice of the aging artist engages with his lived-experience even as he performs socially-constructed conceptions of aging and disability.

I read Johnny Cash’s 2002 cover of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” on American IV: The Man Comes Around as a performance of the singer’s age and disabled condition. Through pain- saturated lyrics, …

"Tell Nobody But God": Reading Mothers, Sisters, And "The Father" In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Cheryl Hopson

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

In my reading of The Color Purple, I make several interconnected arguments, the first being that “The Father,” that is any male, sanctioned by patriarchy, and in the context of a patriarchal, sexist male order, disrupts what would otherwise be a powerful and sustaining relationship, that of the mother-daughter relationship. I continue that sisterhood that is multifaceted and intergenerational serves as a corrective to the disrupted maternal and filial relationship. It is sisters in the novel and not mothers who step in to “mother,” that is nurture, protect, support, as well as challenge one another, even in the most harrowing …

Writings: Sandy Hill Sink, Edna Louise Saffy

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Handwritten pages, Sandy Hill Sink and miscellaneous writings.

Failing To Move Forward: Journalism, Media, And Affect In David Fincher's, Nicholas Orlando

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) offers a critique of the mass media’s efforts to restore American valiance with heroic narratives of ordinary people in the aftermath of 9/11. Amending prior scholarly readings of Zodiac as a serial killer narrative, I reconfigure my analysis by taking Fincher at his word and treating it as a journalism film. Borrowing a term from political theorist Elisabeth Anker, I argue that, unlike other contemporary journalism films, Zodiac is constructed as a “melodrama of failure” that, rather than seeking mastery, unveils the instability of evidence and the obsessive uncertainty of procedure.

With his film sitting between …

The Promised Body: Diet Culture, The Fat Subject, And Ambivalence As Resistance, Jennifer Dolan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class Americans have considered the thin body--ostensibly the result of self-control and self-discipline--a moral imperative and a symbol of good citizenship. In this thesis, I provide a critical perspective on fat studies by examining the ways in which the field authorizes itself in a society that deems the fat body unhealthy, costly, and immoral. As one potential solution to fat-hatred, fat studies proposes fat-positivity, but I argue that fat-positivity requires an extraordinary act of imagination in which the fat person overcomes what I term the ideology of thinness and subsequently feels good about …

Writings: Project Notes, Edna Louise Saffy

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Handwritten project notes.

Game Night (Movie Review), Joshua Matthews

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Although Game Night is escapist in good ways, it’s just a fine draft of a movie."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the movie Game Night 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/game-night-movie-review/

Social Identity Theory And Public Opinion Towards Immigration, Maurice Mangum, Ray Block Jr.

Political Science Faculty Publications

Several scholars have called upon social identity theory to investigate the relationship between an American national identity and American public opinion on immigration. Lacking a uniform measure of American identity, by and large, scholars find that a two-dimensional conception of American identity influences these opinions. Our review suggests that the extant measures of American identity do not fully account for the various aspects of social identity theory. We capture more fully the different components of social identity theory. By doing so, we find that American identity has five dimensions. Therefore, in this analysis, we advance a more comprehensive measure of …

La Voix Des Meubles Scence Iii Script, Unknown

Marie-Jeanne Laurendeau

Undated La Voix des Meubles script with notation in French and notes on the back of the final page.

La Voix Des Meubles Script, Unknown

Marie-Jeanne Laurendeau

Undated La Voix des Meubles script with notation in French.