Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons^™

Multicultural Women Writers, Nashieli Marcano, Jennifer Jacobs

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

Literature Review Of The Literary Term “Interpretation”, Lavonne J. Yazzie

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

[Review Of The Book Looking For Lorraine: The Radiant And Radical Life Of Lorraine Hansberry, By I. Perry], Kaa Vonia Hinton

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Chicago, Illinois, native, Lorraine Hansberry wrote the highly acclaimed A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first play produced on Broadway by a Black woman. The play's title is inspired by one of poet Langston Hughes's poems, "Harlem," and focuses on a Black American family with dreams of buying a home in a white neighborhood in segregated Chicago. A Raisin in the Sun is taught widely in high schools and colleges in America, and most of us who are aware of Hansberry know about the critical success of her play, but do we know much more than that about …

"Free Indirect Suicide: An Unfinished Fugue In H Minor", Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In this lyric essay/work of creative nonfiction (listed among “Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction” in Best American Essays 2020), Seo-Young Chu uses poetry, autotheory, and creative nonfiction to explore the generational trauma/postmemory han she inherited from her parents and the importance of destigmatizing mental illness through dialogue.

Suffering And The Black Female Narrative In The Twentieth Century, Aquilah Jourdain

Dissertations and Theses

Adventure, romance, and happiness are not large parts of the stories Black women tell. If we had to name ten mainstream literary novels released in the last 50 years that featured Black women central to the plot — and included the aforementioned themes — we would be hard-pressed to find them. Though there are real life accounts of love, joy, and adventure in the lives of Black women, why do we see these life experiences documented sparingly? In the stories written by andforBlack women, where can Black female readers find joy in their history and culture without elements of grave …

"Woven Into The Deeps Of Life": Death, Redemption, And Memory In Bob Kaufman's Poetry, Peter Davis

Pomona Senior Theses

The scholars who have taken up the task of writing about Bob Kaufman have most often done so in response to a perceived demand: the lack of Kaufman scholarship, readership, anthology, publicity, canonization. The basis of this need is clear: Kaufman is almost never included as even a third-string Beat, a fringe Surrealist, or an underappreciated Jazz performer. To the committed readers of Kaufman – and almost all of his readers seem to be committed ones – it’s unforgivable. These various canons, major (mid-century American poets, Beat poets) and minor (Jazz poets, American Surrealists), are clearly missing one of their …

The Road That Got Us Here, Kayla M. Rotz

English Department: Traveling American Modernism (ENG 366, Fall 2018)

This article attempts to explain the romanticism of Native American culture existing in The United States and how it came to be. Through a chain of events this romanticism began. Forced Migration caused a social divide creating a separate social space for Native American people. Because of this negative social space we may see hegemony begin to take place. The American Government took Native children from their homes and forced them to assimilate into the general American population, thus creating a domino effect. In many cases children carry on a culture for other generations. However if these children are forced …

Resonant Texts: The Politics Of Nineteenth-Century African American Music And Print Culture, Paul Fess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Resonant Texts: the Politics of Nineteenth-Century African American Music and Print Culture, investigates musical sound as a discursive tool African American writers and activists deployed to contest enslavement before the Civil War and claim citizenship after Emancipation. Traditionally, scholars have debated the degree to which nineteenth-century African American music constituted evidence of black culture and marked a persistent African orality that still abides within African American textual production. While these trends inform this project, my inquiry focuses on the ways that writers placed elements of musical sound—such as rhythm, melody, choral singing, and harmony—at the center of their …

Reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson Through The Eyes Of A Creole, Patrice E. Jones

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Abstract Over the last fifty years scholars have worked to recover the work of late nineteenth, early twentieth-century writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Many scholars have acknowledged the impact of New Orleans culture and history in her writing as well as attempted peel back the layers of her stories in order to understand her commentary on structures of race, class, and gender in nineteenth-century New Orleans. This hybrid paper, both creative and academic, subjective and objective, is a reading of her work through the Creole lens. Reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson through a Creole lens illuminates the radical nature of her work which has …

No Tv For Woodpeckers By Gary Barwin, If Pressed By Andrew Mcewan, And Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics For A Toxic World By Christine L. Marran, Michael D. Sloane

The Goose

Review of Gary Barwin's No TV for Woodpeckers, Andrew McEwan's If Pressed, and Christine L. Marran's Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World.

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …

Straddling Two Words: Biracial Identity In "Flight", Rachel Ramlawi

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

If borderlands are the space between two territories that is the space bi-racial people occupy every day. Their entire life is lived in the space between creating a unique form of othering where they’re never fully part of either community their parents belonged to. In Sherman Alexie’s novel Flight, the Narrator Zits is a bi-racial Native American teenager who constantly grapples with his identity. Through the theme of past-lives Zits is able to embrace both parts of his ethnicity, establish his identity, and grow up. It is a coming of age tale that is remarkably unique. This paper draws …

Aas 267 African American Literature, Anne Rice

Open Educational Resources

A survey course that will take us from the early days of enslavement to the present. We will read, analyze, and discuss literary texts written by African Americans, paying particular attention to the political, historical and social context that informs these texts.

The full course site is available at https://aas267.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, And Environmental Narrative By Alexa Weik Von Mossner, David Tagnani

The Goose

Review of Alexa Weik von Mossner's Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative.

Pecan Grove Review Volume 19, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

Creative writings by students, faculty, and staff of the St. Mary's University community.

The Inevitability Of Decay: Disability In Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea, Dominic Robin

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

To many, Ernest Hemingway embodies a certain image of "masculinity," one centered around ability and physical performance. Such a narrative ignores the truly complicated and dynamic shape his understanding of the body took. Through an analysis of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, I examine the form this ideology took in his later life, focusing particularly on Hemingway's evolved understanding of the body. Through this research, a more nuanced picture of Hemingway emerges, one that recognizes the complicated and dynamic nature his view of the "able" body took.

Disarming “Nature” As A Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining Of Futurity And Environmental Ethics Through Memoir, Sam Lauer

Master’s Theses

In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.

Douglass’ Reply To A. C. C. Thompson’S ‘Letter From Frederick Douglass,’ As Reprinted In The Anti-Slavery Bugle: A Critical Edition Of Both Letters, With A Summary Of Maryland’S Fugitive Slave Laws, Kayla Hardy-Butler

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Kayla Hardy-Butler presents a famous letter by Frederick Douglass, as it was published in Ohio, with the letter that prompted it. This edition also includes a summary of Maryland slave statutes from the time to better explain the day-to-day experience of slavery debated in this correspondence.

African American High School Students’ Perceptions Of Their College Counseling Experience, Latonya M. Turner

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study looked at high school African American students’ perceptions of their college counseling experiences. Much research has been done to highlight the views and/or perceptions of various stakeholders regarding college counseling with respect to African American students (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000; Hossler & Stage, 1992; Ng, Wolf-Wendel, & Lomardi, 2014). A few examples of stakeholders are administrators, teachers, parents or guardians, and college-going organizations. However, little research exists on the views and or perceptions of college counseling from the student’s perspective (Howard, 2003). Knowing the perceptions of students provides a better understanding of how African American students in …

A Refuge For Jae-In Doe: Fugues In The Key Of English Major, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

"A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major"

Author(s):

Seo-Young Chu (see profile)

Date:

2017

Subject(s):

Feminism, Creative nonfiction, Asian American literature, Sonnets, Social justice, Trauma

Item Type:

Essay

Tag(s):

#MeToo, Stanford, women in academia, early american

Permanent URL:

http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/cp82-8f39

Slave Rebellion, Fugitive Literature, And The Force Of Law, Jeffrey Hole

First-Year Honors Program Research Seminars

From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the revolt aboard the ship Amistad in 1839, from Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831 to the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—on land and on sea, in U.S. territory and international spaces—slaves and abolitionist allies resisted the legal doctrines and martial enforcement of the slave system. In this presentation, we will explore how nineteenth-century literature imagined and depicted slave rebellion, particularly in the decade before the Civil War and in the aftermath of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. A component of the Great Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act strengthened a set …

Chop-Suey: Asian Bodies Consumed In The Harlem Renaissance, Cole Chang

Gateway Prize for Excellent Writing

No abstract provided.

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Book Review - Among The Living, Linda M. Golian-Lui

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Zora Neale Hurston: Scientist, Folklorist, Storyteller, Mary Catherine Russell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper examines the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston and her contribution to American literature in the 20th Century. While previous critical analysis of Hurston’s work has focused primarily on her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, this paper examines Hurston’s career by taking a holistic approach to the body of her literary works. Hurston’s early career as an anthropologist is shown to provide a foundation for her later interest in folklore. In turn, her connection and participation in the Harlem Renaissance gave Hurston’s writing a nuanced and individualized style as part of the American modernist …

A Girlhood Among Ghosts, An Experimental Project, Maple Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation” – Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace.

I do not believe I know devastation. I think to be devastated means one has to experience extreme pain, and live in the aftermath of trauma. I think of this in terms of war, famine, and immigration. A little self-reflection shows that in the twenty-something years of my life, I have not encountered any of the three things listed.

What I do recall, however, is the first time I picked up Maxine …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

Magical Politicism: History And Identity In Gabriel García Márquez’S Fiction, Isabel C. Henao

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Gabriel García Márquez establishes the importance of identity, names, and narrative in order to highlight the importance of recognizing the past for a country that has allowed history to be rewritten and, as a result, forgotten. Márquez writes about what happens to a character with no history, for whom it then becomes imperative that the other characters orchestrate a narrative, thereby allowing Márquez to critique the neocolonialism and imperialism that occurred in Colombia. This strategy can be seen in several of his most well-known works—the short stories “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in …

“Without Stopping To Write A Long Apology”: Spectacle, Anecdote, And Curated Identity In Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom, Anjelica La Furno

Theses and Dissertations

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom unapologetically challenges traditional nineteenth-century notions of race and gender by way of its treatment of spectacle, anecdotal use, and assertion of authorial choices that contradict the expectations of a white abolitionist audience. Its most challenging feature is what I will call Ellen’s “curated identity.”