English Language and Literature Commons^™

Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, And The Government Of Species By Neel Ahuja, Amrita De

Critical Humanities

In lieu of an abstract:

There is no better way to preface this review of Neel Ahuja’s rich analysis of the “government of species” in his book, Bioinsecurities: Disease interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species than to dive right into the heart of the ongoing interconnected infectious dis-ease crisis.

Introduction: Pandemic And The Global South, Puspa Damai

Critical Humanities

In lieu of abstract: Critical Humanities is a child of the coronavirus pandemic. As paradoxical as it may sound, the journal was born of our desire for community, conviviality, and survival in a world ravaged by disease, despair and death.

Biopower, Biopolitics And Pandemic Vulnerabilities: Reading The Covid Chronicles Comics, Pramod K. Nayar Ph.D.

Critical Humanities

This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collective trauma of the pandemic; on the other hand, these comics draw attention to the role the state plays in regulating bodies to be monitored, governed and, in some cases, deemed disposable.

Queen Academy, Hantian Zhnag

Master's Theses

As an upmarket novel exploring immigration and racial dynamics, Queen Academy lies at the intersection of Kathryn Ma’s The Chinese Groove, Timothy Wang’s Slant, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in style and subject. The protagonist Kang comes to the US from China to study statistics, but finds himself becoming a “potato queen”—an Asian gay man interested in dating white men only—and locked in self-loathing. It will take a heartbreak and treading the line of illegality to see himself again. Overall, by engaging with themes of immigration, belonging, and racialized desire, the novel takes the stance that the …

Trilingualism In The United States: A Case Study Of An Arabic And Greek Household, Seongyo Gwon, David E. Posada, Milly Romo

Symposium of Student Scholars

Recent studies suggest that trilingual families in the United States are experiencing limited resources due to failing efforts to promote heritage language (HL) maintenance, diversity, and language rights both nationally and locally. Using a case study methodology, this paper will address obstacles identified in an interview with an Arabic speaking mother raising a trilingual child along with a Greek speaking partner while living in a monolingual society (U.S.). There is a need to uncover complex language practices and issues that different trilingual groups in the United States experience in order to preserve their heritage languages (HL) and cultures. Qualitative data …

Apocalypse Eternal: "The Road" And "Parable" Series As Pilgrimage, Caleb Gurule

Senior Honors Theses

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road represent two different views on how humans create meaning in a postapocalyptic world. The authors’ writings utilize the critical dystopia genre, in which the protagonists’ surroundings are bleak but the possibility of redemption remains. As Butler’s Lauren Olamina travels from her burned-down home to a place where she can begin a new community with her religion, Earthseed, as the foundational structure, she brings together a group of diverse and useful people who aid her in her pilgrimage to a better place. The protagonist’s identity as a mentally impaired black …

A Material Stratum: Black Bodies And Environmental Exploitation In Edward P. Jones' The Known World, Julia Woodward

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

This paper seeks to reckon with the entwined realities of black lives, environmental degradation, and the Anthropocene through engagement with Edward P. Jones’ 2003 novel The Known World and Kathryn Yusoff’s recent critical work on the Black Anthropocenes. Yusoff contends that, “Literally stretching black and brown bodies across the seismic fault lines of the earth, Black Anthropocenes subtend White Geology as a material stratum,” (xii). This paper will examine the ways in which Yusoff and Jones are in conversation, and try to elucidate the ways in which the Anthropocene is both built upon and a harbinger of mass death. How …

Witness, Justice, And The Silent Confessional, Kortney Sebben

Graduate Review

Stories depicting injustice are inherently complicated by the limitations of language. Jacques Derrida’s “Circonfession” uses deconstructionist theory to describe the flawed nature of the confession in that proximity becomes problematic: those who experience are unable to authentically deliver the truth of that experience. Language also becomes an imperfect channel through which to deliver the truth; the truth lies in both a person’s ability to bring meaning to individual experience, but also, in an audience’s ability to interpret that experience; however, both sides of the conversation are challenged through an imperfect channel of communication. Therefore, silence of human behavior may very …

Bibliography For "Fiction Novels And Poetry By Hispanic Authors" Display, Isabella Piechota, Kalea Brown, Ruby Blakesleay

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about literature by Hispanic authors for Hispanic Heritage Month in September 2022 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University.

Del Ornitorrinco A La Radio Ambulante: La Nueva Crónica Latinoamericana En La Era Neoliberal, Ulises Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the presence of neoliberal hegemonic imaginaries in narrative journalism written in Latin America between 1995 and 2021.

There are strong connections between a period of decline in the readership of some of the authors of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the penetration of neoliberal economic policies in the region (with the privatization of State companies and the expansion of the telecommunications industry), and the renewed interest in non-fiction writing published by a number of print publications in the region during the last decade of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st Century, as in magazines …

The Second-Person Point Of View In Three Contemporary Latino Short Stories, Rocio L. Uchofen

Student Theses

ABSTRACT

The Second-Person Point of View in Three Contemporary Latino Short Stories

By

Rocio L. Uchofen

Advisor: Professor Alyson Bardsley

The “you” discourse is dynamic, it generates an interaction, it implies a dialogue between narrator and reader. The investigations about the use of the second person in the narrative discourse generally go beyond English language frontiers, the discussion has not finished and narratological investigations have more texts to analyze as fiction in second-person narration is not an unusual occurrence in contemporary literature. The analysis of three short stories written by Latino writers Daniel Alarcon, Junot Diaz and Sandra Cisneros intends …

Indigenous Women’S Resistance And Healing From Colonial Violence: A Study Of Literature And Art, Demi Riendeau

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The purpose of this research is to flip the story of colonization form the perspective of the colonizers, and instead, make room to discuss the power and strength that Indigenous women hold to resist and exist despite the genocidal nature of settler-colonization. This is specifically done through the information given by literature written by Indigenous authors and artwork created by Indigenous peoples. Through these depictions of women, both fictionally and non-fictionally, we see the numerous ways that Indigenous women heal, build community, and resist colonial powers. Throughout the reading and analysis of about fifteen unique texts, there were some particular …

Octavia E. Butler’S Earthseed And The God Of Change, Mercedes Alayna Reid-X

Honors Program Theses and Projects

It is my intention in this paper to define Butler’s Change God and illustrate how she created it to end oppression in all forms. It is important to start with a bit of background on Butler herself, sharing how her upbringing and experiences in life influenced her feelings about religion. These feelings are what encouraged writings such as the Parables, helping the reader to understand why Butler felt the need to create a new type of religion instead of making use of one that already existed. Next, I include an introduction to Butler’s journey as a Black science fiction writer. …

Blood Quantum? Native Dna? Indigenous Lineage? The Complexities Of Native Authenticity And Identity, Grace Thayer

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Unlike any other ethnic minority in the US, Native Americans are required to authenticate their Indianness, or their relation to Native peoples, in order to qualify for tribal citizenship and justify their identity as Indigenous peoples. In order to become citizens of a Native nation, or to even be considered Indigenous in the eyes of the United States government, Native peoples are often required to prove their Indigeneity, or Nativeness, through blood, DNA, and other seemingly quantifiable measurements. No other minority group is forced to prove their legitimacy to be a citizen of their community in the United States, yet …

Without Permanence: Mapping Multi-Genre, Cross-Disciplinary Frameworks For Trans* Studies, Jesse Jack

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project takes a cross-disciplinary and multi-genre approach to Transgender (Trans*) Studies to proliferate diverse and ambiguously-gendered representations of trans* experiences across time. It identifies the emergence of rhetorical intertextuality in recent trans* literatures as a discursive response to the biopolitical regulation and erasure of ambiguously-gendered, trans* experiences. It identifies the intersecting influences of twentieth- and twenty-first-century medical paradigms, surveillance apparatuses, popular trans* autobiographies, and archives in representing and exceptionalizing certain trans* experiences over others. In contrast, this project engages in a close reading of Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing (2016) and Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl …

Lgbqt Immigrants Coming To The United States: The Problems They Face, Nya Brewster, John Holman

Immigration Scholarship: History, Trends and Development in Global Immigration

This reading focuses on research specific to Crime Rates against the LQBTQ+ immigrant community in South American Countries during the 2000’s era to current times. It illustrates the difficulties asylum seekers face in the United States while also discussing crimes that happen to immigrants of different sexualities and gender orientations. This emerging topic of gender and sexuality of immigrants will pertain to societal as well as political factors. Typically in rural and communist countries, the government outlaws the LGBTQ community and has the strictest consequences for individuals who are a part of that community . Living with consequences of that …

"The Personal Is The Political And The Political Is Personal:" Engendering Understanding Through Global Allegory In Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist And Exit West, Nicole Ordonez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West by British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. In both novels, Hamid uses the representational literary device of allegory to present what I will frame as works of “global allegory,” or novels of global literature that present the world as one interconnected space rather than as one divided by borders and nations. In doing so, I will be situating my argument as a rebuttal of Frederic Jameson’s “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson draws a distinction between works of third world and first world literature along the lines of allegory. …

The Flow Of (Re)Memory In African American And Nubian Egyptian Literature: Morrison, Oddoul, And Mukhtar, Bushra Hashem

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to define the term rememory, which Toni Morrison coins in her novel Beloved, and explore its interplay with water imagery in the novel and in two Nubian short stories, namely Haggag Oddoul’s “The River People” and Yahya Mukhtar’s “The Nile Bride.” The three narratives have core common features: they centralize water bodies as key sites of events, they depend heavily on the retelling of history and mythology, and they are told predominantly from the perspective of women. How do the writers weave rememory, history, and mythology to produce these narratives? Are they attempting to …

The Burdens And Blessings Of Responsibility: Duty And Community In Nineteenth- Century America, Leslie Leonard

Doctoral Dissertations

The Burdens of Responsibility traces the emergence of moral responsibility as both a concept and problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Drawing on a range of sources –works of literature, philosophy, domestic manuals, newspaper archives – I show how many Americans began to conceive of moral responsibility as distinct from both duty and rules of behavior prescribed by traditional social roles. Although ethicists today take this distinction for granted, it was an emergent and problematic space in the nineteenth-century United States, brought into being by historical forces, including the rise of market capitalism, abolition, changing women’s roles, and increasing concern …

Passing Down: Nella Larsen's Questioning Of Eugenic Ideology, Sky R. Mcleod

Anthós

This article looks at Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing and examines how eugenic ideology of the time period are explored and critiqued through the story and characters. The novel follows two light skinned black women who grew up together and are reunited as adults. This reconciliation takes place under the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance where the expectations of New Negro womanhood mix with a growing wave of eugenic thought and practices. In the 1920’s many influential thinkers, including black leaders such as W. E.B. Du Bois, were convinced that the only way to move the human race forward was …

Lyrical Rapturing In Danticat’S Work: Transcending Haitian Cultural Silence Through Narrative, Johanna M. Piard

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Edwidge Danticat’s work has been praised for the visceral, deeply personal ways she writes violence, suffering, death, and loss, leading scholars to theorize that dehumanization is a central motif in the Haitian and Haitian diasporic experience. This causes Haiti to be generally considered, as Jerry Philogene describes, “a socially dead space”. Danticat ventures into this “socially dead space” in her recent memoirs, reflecting on the traumatic experiences of her two paternal figures, her father and Uncle Joseph, her complex feelings around her mother’s death, and the value of Haitian art in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Danticat creates a …

“An Eternity Or Two Later”: Family Of Choice In Elaine Castillo’S America Is Not The Heart, Caroliena E. Cabada

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Many of the challenges faced by environmental activists are issues of scale. How can vital changes be enacted and sustained over the necessarily long time scales of environmental restoration? Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018) illuminates a possible avenue for activists engaged in environmental justice work. Parts of the book contains extensive flashbacks to Hero’s, the protagonist’s, time as part of a cadre of the New People’s Army in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship. Though the NPA is not strictly an environmental activist group, the organization takes their cues from queer ecofeminist frameworks and the intersections between …

A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Literary critics conducting a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple diligently tend to the relationship between the two women, particularly at an intertextual level. This paper sheds light on an important third member of this relationship: Black women readers. An articulation of Black regality, which involves the incorporation of monarchical symbols and titles in characterizations of Black people, provides these readers with political tools poised to liberate Black women from hegemonic male authority and control. Examining the significance of adornment for the self exclusively to combat invisibility, the power …

'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For this project, I am interested in the study of nuanced self-representations of Black rage that appear within African American literary traditions, specifically the blues aesthetic, wherein artists narrativize a wide spectrum of intelligent and specific emotion--not just melancholy. Blues narratives in which Black people self-represent are in direct opposition to flattened narratives of certain affective modes such as anger as a useless, backwards, pathologized, and flat feeling that appear within dominant U.S. and global iconographies. What I see in the blues aesthetic is the capacity for a multichromatic approach to studying rage and Black authorship in America. By using …

Redefining Gender Violence: Radical Feminist Visions In Contemporary Ethnic American Women’S Fiction And Women Of Color Activism 1990-2010, Hazel Gedikli

Doctoral Dissertations

Redefining Gender Violence: Radical Feminist Visions in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction and Women of Color Activism 1990-2010 reconceptualizes state-sanctioned family disintegration as gender violence, most recently evidenced in the forced separation of the central Latin American asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border. It frames family separation as part of ongoing settler colonial history and delineates the gendered aspects of this form of state violence. More specifically, Redefining Gender Violence articulates a theory of gendered logic of dispossession through analyzing the novelistic representations of family (dis)integration by Native and Black authors and resistance strategies offered by women of color (WOC) activist …

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

Reclamation: The Crown Of African American Identity, Lindsey Kellogg

English MA Theses

African American voices have been the main sources of influence on society and culture. For this reason, it is important that African Americans speak up and reclaim their voices. Not only are their voices important, but the stories that lie behind the voices are what need to be amplified. With the application of postcolonial theory, this thesis takes modern stories located in North America depicting racist behavior towards African Americans from the year 1970 to present-day New York City in order to fully amplify the process of social struggle. As these narratives are passed down through generations serving as a …

Personhood And Objecthood: Examining The Speaker’S Interiority And Double Consciousness In Citizen: An American Lyric, Winnie Chak

English (MA) Theses

The interpersonal use of the “you” (the second person) in Citizen: An American Lyric commands the reader to not look away and bear witness to the interiority Black Americans’ consciousness. The essay examines the transformation of Rankine’s works that expands how double consciousness, found in Citizen, influences the creative writing space (the racial imaginary) and exposes the ongoing discrimination against Black Americans due to white privilege. Rankine’s other works Just US: An American Conversation and The Racial Imaginary compile viewpoints of both Black and white communities that remember moments that either they witnessed racist discrimination or experienced it in …

'As Vivid As Blood In A Sink': (Re)Reading Queerness And Repression In Teju Cole's Open City, Jack Hoda

Master's Theses

Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) is an exemplar work of contemporary fiction. For its complex representation of subjectivity, hypnotic narrative tone, and global political scope, the novel has been praised by readers and critics alike. Julius, the text’s first-person narrator, guides us along seemingly innocent wanderings throughout New York City, ruminating on history, art, and politics while presenting himself as the enlightened, cosmopolitan ideal. However, the shocking penultimate revelation that Julius raped a young woman from his past alters our encounter with the text and its narrator. We come to realize that this meandering novel is, in reality, a carefully …

Slow Violence, Cli-Fi, And Opportunities For Change How Bipoc Futurisms Promote Activism, Francisco Baeza

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The threat of anthropogenic climate change is discussed almost exclusively in terms of “scientific” data to the exclusion of the humanities. For some worlds, climate change has already destroyed their ways of life and forced them to adapt. Climate fiction – or cli-fi – written by BIPOC authors is one way we can begin to think of how the planet is not just one world but a plurality of worlds. This project centers authors and world-makers who come from communities that have been left at the margins of the science fiction and cli-fi genres. By looking at fictions from a …