English Language and Literature Commons^™

Knowledge Networks: Contested Geographies In The History Of Mary Prince, Leah M. Thomas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

The History of Mary Prince, a West-Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) is the first published woman’s slave narrative. In her History, Prince describes horrendous physical violence to which she and other enslaved peoples of African descent are subjected as well as the corresponding psychological and sexual abuse they endure. While Prince “speaks” the sexual abuse to some extent, how she knows what she knows goes unspoken. She expresses her knowledge of reading and writing and, at times, of the law, but she does not explain how she obtains this knowledge or knows what she knows. Her optimism to …

Treading The Winepress; Or, A Mountain Of Misfortune, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, Jean Macdonald

Undiscovered Americas

“Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.”

So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in 1885–1886 instead of serialized in The Boston Advocate, would have been the second novel published by a black woman in the United States. Instead, Allen has been mostly forgotten by literary history. Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of editors Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean …

Deconstructing Turok: The Kiowa Dinosaur Hunter In Comics And Film (1954-2014), Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Articles & Research

The Dell and Gold Key Comics series Turok: Son of Stone (1954 ­ 1982) were groundbreaking in their introduction of a Native American protagonist who starred in his own adventure series instead of serving as the marginalized sidekick of a white male adventurer.

Saving Pocahontas: A Conversation On Gender, Culture, And Power In The Storied Saving Moment, Claire Ehr

Undergraduate Honors Papers

Pocahontas is a figure with much cultural capital, even today, and her influence was historically important to Native and European agendas alike. Pocahontas as a person indeed had a life that seemed to influence political relations between Native and European (specifically Powhatan, specifically English). However, the storied construct of Pocahontas has had significantly more cultural sway, influencing (or at least representing changes in) everything from gendered power dynamics to the interplay between the European Colonizer and the Indigenous Other.¹ Pocahontas’ image has been re-appropriated over and over throughout time to further political agendas and to represent the female and …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …

Contradictions Of Freedom In The Tempest And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Menaka Serres

Theses and Dissertations

In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610-1611) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) the character negotiate contradictions of freedom: the entitlements that justify violence as well as oppression on the one hand and rights that grant access to emancipation from violence and imposition on the other.

Increasing Faculty-Librarian Collaboration Through Critical Librarianship, Adrienne Gosselin, Mandi Goodsett

Michael Schwartz Library Publications

Through the lens of critical librarianship, librarians are becoming increasingly involved in social justice, civic engagement, and human rights issues. This paper examines the collaboration between a subject librarian and a faculty member in an assignment that engaged in Public Sphere Pedagogy (PSP), a teaching strategy with the goal of increasing students’ sense of civic agency and personal and social responsibility by connecting their classwork to public arenas; and project-based learning, wherein students develop a question to research and create projects that reflect their knowledge, which they share with a select audience.

Black Men Who Betray Their Race: 20th Century Literary Representations Of The Black Male Race Traitor, Gregory Coleman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Black Men Who Betray Their Race, gathers a literary archive in order to identify and introduce the “race traitor” as a heretofore unrecognized yet important trope within 20^th century African-American Literature. In addition to coping with the burden of racism, African Americans have had to put considerable energy toward negotiating the possibility of being perceived as race traitors by others within the African American community. This study tracks the possibilities and perils of black group identity in literary representations of black men, neither privileging opposition to the white world, nor celebrating black unity beyond it. Focusing …

Retelling The Classics: The Harlem Renaissance, Biblical Stories, And Black Peoplehood, Mina Magalhaes

Celebration of Learning

Applying social identity theory to the process of creating peoplehood can illustrate the positive power that literature has in uplifting marginalized communities by showing their worth. James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” and Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, both composed during the Harlem Renaissance, offer one way to create Black peoplehood by creating depictions of God’s love for His Black people through the repurposing of biblical stories. Through the implementation of social identity theory to Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Johnson’s “The Creation,” I argue that these two authors addressed the need among African Americans to …

"If They Don't Tell You, The Hair Will": Hair Narrative In Contemporary Women's Writing, Darina Pugacheva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The history of colonial and racial oppression made hair stories and testimonials fundamental to understanding hair as a unifying element particular for women of African descent in the post-slavery era. Seen as such, their hair narrations provide the first-person perspective of their life experiences while at the same time inviting a critical investigation of colonial and racial oppression. Contemporary women writers develop these types of narrations into a special language of hair that helps them tell a story that is not apparent or straightforward. This literary device that uses hair to uncover deeper social and political issues is bound up …

The Color Of Invisibility, Bryan A. Vanmeter

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an analysis of Ralph Ellison’s use of color terminology in his novel, Invisible Man. By taking an in depth look at the circumstances in which Ellison uses specific color terms, the reader can ascertain the author’s thoughts on various historical events, as well as the differences between characters in the novel such as Ras, Dr. Bledsoe, and Rinehart.

Dmt And “The Man Box:” Provoking Change And Encouraging Authentic Living, An Arts-Based Project, Steven Reynolds

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis explores the mind-body experience through an arts-based research approach to examine, and redefine the emotional capacity and usefulness of males through societal determinants that limits and hinders men from living their authentic selves. Through the lens of a metaphoric “Man Box” 112 men participated in a workshop recreating their personal narratives of socialization through, style of dress, coping mechanisms, belief systems and who they should be as men through society's standards. In the “Man Box,” male bonding, and emotional feelings are discouraged, while the objectification of women, material property and physical/emotional strength are encouraged. This research investigates the …

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

Forging A People: Visual Culture In The Illustrated Press Of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, Pablo Martin Zavala

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I trace the methods by which different sectors of society – from writers, journalists, photographers, political militants, graphic artists, activists, and intellectuals, to the State – imagined collective subjectivities in the illustrated printed press while negotiating with

current phenomena like modernization processes and political ideologies. With the stroke of the pen, pencil, or carving tool, these image makers had the power to craft what it meant to be a worker or a peasant. At times tinged with satire, and at others with realism, the images were part of various efforts to forge a people. I argue that …

“Flowing Along The Wall”: Anarcha-Feminist Bioethics And Resistance In Octavia E. Butler’S Dawn 2019., Theresa Mendez

Master's Theses

Science fiction (sf) texts conversant with the temporal play between past, present, and future push readers to imagine the extremes of human and environmental existence, interaction, and potential. Simultaneously, despite the sf genre’s tendency to traffic in extremes, these texts provoke readers to consider the ways in which these imagined worlds are grounded in history as well as in the contemporary social moment. As Donna Haraway has argued, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (306). This illusory boundary must continue to be traversed in order to consider how sf literatures, particularly those which imagine …

Paper: Investigating The Work Of William Styron: The Perpetuation Of The Fantastic Hegemonic Imagination, William Sikich

Womanist Ethics

William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner depicts a fictitious characterization of the historical Nat Turner. Styron, a white southerner, assumes Turner's perspective in order to tell a speculative story about his slave rebellion of 1831. Similarly, he tells the story of a fictional holocaust survivor in his novel, Sophie's Choice. The decision to take on these perspective evinces some arrogance on Styron's part, and the way in which he executes the narrative of each novel delivers their stories with varying levels of respect to their subjects: Styron's indirect telling of Sophie's story allows Styron some freedom to speculate, while …

The Woman We Don’T Want To Be: The Anti-Heroine In American Women’S Modernisms, Madison Priest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Anita Loos’ Lorelei has a baby because “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” Edith Wharton’s Undine uses hers as a pawn in divorce negotiations with the child’s father. Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Angela abandons her sister so her boyfriend won’t guess she’s black, and Nella Larsen’s Helga frustrates and alienates everyone she loves. Yet these protagonists were subject not just to gleeful mockery and sanction, but to furtive pity, uncomfortable recognition, even envy. Each age calls for its own bogeys; and the anti-heroine was, I contend, the perfect instantiation of American …

Two Poems: Stop Time Before; Forsaken Ones, Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This creative work features two poems: Stop Time Before; Forsaken Ones

Tolkien, Self And Other: "This Queer Creature." By Jane Chance And Tolkien And Alterity Eds. Christopher Vaccaro And Yvette Kisor, Jason Fisher

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

No abstract provided.

Dissonances Of Dispossession: Narrating Colonialism And Slavery In The Expansion Of Capitalism, W. Oliver Baker

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project studies how ethnic American literature of the long nineteenth century represents the relationship between the dispossession of lands and lives—the histories of settler colonialism and slavery—and the making of democracy and capitalism in the United States. We often think of this relationship in terms of temporally distinct stages in which the formal equality of democracy and the marketplace overcome and thus leave behind the direct domination of colonization and enslavement. However, I focus on how the early novels of Indigenous, African, and Mexican American writers from the period of manifest destiny to the New Deal era represent the …

Exalted And Debased: Psychological/Sexual Conflict As Bildungsroman In Half Of A Yellow Sun, Anne Lance

Scholars Week

While many still view the Bildungsroman, novels of formation or coming of age stories, as the purview of stuffy formation novels like Dickens’ Great Expectations or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, there is significant scholarship that suggests a recent revolution in the genre that centers women, people of color, and males in post-colonial or war-torn spaces.

My paper examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun as an example of a Bildungsroman through the focalization of one of the main characters, Ugwu, as he endures two psychologically conflicting sexual experiences, one …

Zemlja And Pioneer Day, Natalie D-Napoleon

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

Poems: Zemlja and Pioneer Day by West Australia born author Natalie D-Napoleon.

Snorkel Virgin, Emma J. Young

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

Snorkel Virgin

Plunging Down Under, Ian Smith

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

Plunging Down Under

Solastalgia, Nostalgia, Exhilarating, Immersive: Landscapes: Heritage Ii, David F. Gray

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

Landscape: Heritage II presents the scholarly and creative contributions to Landscapes, Volume 9, Issue 1.

Complete Issue 1, Volume 9

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

The complete issue 1 of volume 9, Landscapes Journal.

Muddling The Middle: Cynical Representations Of Ethnic Relations In V.S. And Shiva Naipaul, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay from the collection, Seepersad and Sons: Naipaulian Synergies, Kevin Frank argues that coming from a creolized society, unlike their father, Seepersad, V.S. and Shiva Naipaul's representations of "race" and ethnicity in their works is cynical, favoring one side in the Indo- and Afro-Caribbean racial antagonism, mainly because of their anxiety about "Black Power."

In A Child's Place: Centering Black Girlhood In Black Feminisms Through The Bildungsroman, Taylor L. Bailey

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines the effects of misogynoir— a specific form of oppression Black women experience due to the intersection of being deemed inferior in both race and gender— on the development of Black girlhood. In Black feminist theory and criticism, though, the language used often subordinates Black girls and does not ascribe adequate import to their experiences. Using the Black girl bildungsroman, specifically The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, as a way to survey the effects of misogynoir and the significance of homosocial, intraracial bonding, I argue that Black feminisms should center Black girlhood …

Leaving A Little Heaven Behind With Coltrane, Or: The Performance Is The Archive, Ismael Santos

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines what an Audience-Centered Archive could look like, and the advantages of opening up the spaces of archival scholarship in connection with studies focused on Jazz. This thesis will explore how inherently self-limiting are traditional structures of the Archive, with the contradictory nature of Jazz Archives brought to the forefront: to archive a music like Jazz necessarily entails losing what makes it so special, losing the improvisational facet of Jazz. This thesis draws from sound studies and performance studies, along with a focus on the recording technologies that entail differences in interpretation and American history. This focus of …