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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Listening/Reading For Disremembered Voices: Additive Archival Representation And The Zong Massacre Of 1781, Jorge E. Cartaya
Listening/Reading For Disremembered Voices: Additive Archival Representation And The Zong Massacre Of 1781, Jorge E. Cartaya
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis grapples with questions surrounding representation, mourning, and responsibility in relation to two literary representations of the ZONG massacre of 1781. These texts are M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! and Fred D’Aguiar’s FEEDING THE GHOSTS. The only extant archival document—a record of the insurance dispute which ensued as a consequence of the massacre—does not represent the drowned as victims, nor can it represent the magnitude of the atrocity. As such, this thesis posits that the archival gaps or silences from which the captives’ voices are missing become spaces of possibility for additive representation. This thesis also examines the role voice …
Bleaching To Reach: Skin Bleaching As A Performance Of Embodied Resistance In Jamaican Dancehall Culture, Treviene A. Harris
Bleaching To Reach: Skin Bleaching As A Performance Of Embodied Resistance In Jamaican Dancehall Culture, Treviene A. Harris
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines how skin bleaching can be understood within the cultural context of Jamaican dancehall. I argue that as a cultural practice, skin bleaching can be viewed as a critique of the concomitant structural inequalities precipitated by colorism, which is a by-product of racism. In proposing skin bleaching as a queer performance of color, I attempt to illustrate the manner in which the lightening of the skin exposes the instability of racism and colorism as socially constructed, discursive regimes. If race and skin color are biological and embodied facts dictated by social reality, then bodies, which are racially marked …