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Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority

Negotiating Home In The Long Poem: Amatoritsero Ede’S Transpatiality, Mathias Iroro Orhero Mar 2025

Negotiating Home In The Long Poem: Amatoritsero Ede’S Transpatiality, Mathias Iroro Orhero

Faculty Publications

In this paper, I argue that Amatoritsero Ede uses the long poem to negotiate the idea of home in an African diasporic context. As a form that carries the implications of length, time, and space, the long poem has been used by poets to interrogate the way we structure the world and to deconstruct grand narratives. The figure of the Black immigrant is one that destabilizes grand narratives of nationalism. This makes the form important in its capacity to ask important questions about nation and tradition even as it transgresses them. As a writer from the Niger Delta, a marginal …


Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston Jan 2024

Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …


Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller Jan 2023

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …


Migration And Displacement In Twenty-First Century Magical Realist Fiction, Laura Duncan Fontenot Nov 2022

Migration And Displacement In Twenty-First Century Magical Realist Fiction, Laura Duncan Fontenot

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In “Migration and Displacement in Twenty-First Century Magical Realist Fiction” I discuss identity development and the search for belonging of displaced people within twenty-first century magical realist novels. In each instance, the characters undergo some form of change heralded by a magical moment or moments. The “magic” allows the authors to literalize underlying cultural tensions by physically altering some aspect of a character. The changes are not mere metaphors, they are literal, bodily transformations. The first stage of this process are magical thresholds that allow passage in space and time far beyond the conventions of reality. A magical threshold literalizes …


'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott May 2022

'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 …


Women Of Power: Mapping The Spiritual Journeys Of Caribbean Women Across Regional Fiction As Portrayed In The Book Of Night Women, Texaco, And Erzulie's Skirt, Natalie Sandy D'Auvergne-Lamotte Jan 2022

Women Of Power: Mapping The Spiritual Journeys Of Caribbean Women Across Regional Fiction As Portrayed In The Book Of Night Women, Texaco, And Erzulie's Skirt, Natalie Sandy D'Auvergne-Lamotte

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary Caribbean fiction serves as an active agent for refining and expanding definitions of Caribbeanness. This study aims at demonstrating how Caribbean writers use representations of Caribbean women to contribute to an opaquer regional vision that argues against homogenizing ideas of Caribbeanness. The Book of Night Women, Texaco, and Erzulie’s Skirt, respectively written by Marlon James (Jamaica), Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), and Anna-Maurine Lara (Dominican Republic), work by making space for more historically accurate and locally representative images of Caribbeanness through the Caribbean women they portray. Though characters live on different islands (at different times), they still manage to represent …


Will To Remember: Counter-Archives In The Work Of Alvarez, Danticat, And Díaz, Megan Elizabeth Feifer Aug 2018

Will To Remember: Counter-Archives In The Work Of Alvarez, Danticat, And Díaz, Megan Elizabeth Feifer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues the essays, fiction, non-fiction, and non-profit work of authors Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz produce counter-narratives that when assembled, create a counter-archive of the Rafael Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship and its lasting effects. To support this claim, I analyze the various genres and medias they employ throughout the late 20thand early 21st centuries as redressing not only the “official” state history of the dictatorship, but also the overarching construction of history with a capital “H”. Through a close reading of form and the thematic concerns present in their work, I demonstrate how they …


"Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall": Reflections On Colorism, Healing, And Resistance In Literature And Social Media, Sarah Lorena Webb Jun 2018

"Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall": Reflections On Colorism, Healing, And Resistance In Literature And Social Media, Sarah Lorena Webb

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Colorism is a warped mirror image problem. A mirror is anything we refer to, consciously or not, for feedback about ourselves. A mirror is warped to the extent that it disempowers or disenfranchises those reflected in it. Speculative mirrors expose the distortion of warped mirrors by revealing positive or subversive alternatives. Speculative mirrors help us conceive of theories that resist harmful ideology. Newly aware of the distortion of warped mirrors and newly equipped with the tool of speculative mirrors, we may choose to engage in self-reflection—the process of composing one's own affective and empowering or tactical self-concept. Projecting one's self-reflection …