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

Conspicuous Technique: Black Avant-Garde Poetry And The Politics Of Aesthetics, Ryan Gato

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is comprised of two essays on the politics of aesthetics in postwar American black experimental poetry. Within the domain of contemporary poetry scholarship, this study serves three distinct yet interrelated purposes: 1.) to intervene within ongoing debates about the relation—or purported lack thereof—between black artistic practices and those of the historic and American avant-gardes by emphasizing the politics of aesthetics; 2.) to offer a critique of the usage of the discourses of postmodernism and of black aesthetics in the field by elucidating the historicity of their conceptual frameworks; and 3.) to provide an alternative to contemporary scholarship’s narrow …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 23, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

Borrowed Mantles: Neoclassicism, Theology, And The Construction Of Authority In Phillis Wheatley-Peters, Zoe N. Lament

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how Phillis Wheatley-Peters established literary and intellectual authority within an eighteenth-century world that questioned both her authorship and her intellectual capability as an enslaved Black woman. Rather than focusing on the external validation provided by the prefatory materials to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), this study argues that Wheatley-Peters constructs authority through the poetry itself. Specifically, it explores how her use of neoclassical poetic conventions alongside Christian theological language functions to establish credibility and strengthen her moral and intellectual arguments.

Through close readings of poems including "On Being Brought from Africa to America" and …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 22, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

The Musical, The Spectacle, The Spiritual, And The Political: An In-Depth Analysis Of Amiri Baraka’S 1972 Album, It’S Nation Time – African Visionary Music, Ryan St. Martin

Theses and Dissertations

Perhaps no work is a better representation of Amiri Baraka, the Black nationalist, than the 1972 album, It's Nation Time – African Visionary Music. The album serves as an amalgamation of the most present themes during that point in his career: the musical, the spectacle, the spiritual, and the political. Through a track-by-track analysis of the album, we can better understand Baraka's social outlook at such a pivotal period in the Black culture visionary's career.

Visibility In The Redacted Space: What Censored Poetry Reveals About Guantanamo Bay Prison And The Individuals Trapped Inside, Chase Portaro

English and Creative Writing Capstone Projects

This paper discusses what readers can understand about Guantanamo Bay and the larger setting of America's Islamophobic "War on Terror" through the poetry of individuals detained inside of Guantanamo Bay Military Prison. In 2002, Mark Falkoff, with the help of a team of lawyers, translators, and human rights advocates published a collection of twenty-two detainee-authored poems, titled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. This paper discusses the emerging neo-colonial subjectivity of America's War on Terror, as it analyzes the available writings of Guantanamo poets. The new language of subjectivity of victims of contemporary American empire is defined by suppression, as …

Poetic Tracks And Treading On Indigenous Lands: Examining Marlatt And Warland’S And Akiwenzie-Damm’S Literary Travels To Australia And Aotearoa, Christine C. Campana

The Goose

This paper considers the work of poets who travel from the area of the Indigenous land of Turtle Island now known as Canada to the Indigenous territories of Australia and Aotearoa. The poets engage in different forms of movement on the land that reveal varying degrees of awareness of and respect for Indigenous sovereignty. In particular, I put “17:00 / coming into Port Pirie” and “30/5 8:50 / past Menindee” from Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s 1988 Double Negative, an understudied collection of poetry in which the lesbian poets traverse Australia by train while reflecting on travelling through “(ab) …

Pecan Grove Review Volume 21, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

Strategies Of Liberation And Empowerment In Maya Angelou's And Audre Lorde's Black Feminist Literature, Lydia Jernigan

Student Works

The progression of second-wave feminism in America saw Black feminist writers such as Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde utilizing literature, and notably poetry, to resist against their oppression, due not only to their gender but also to their race. Lorde states in her 1977 essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” that poetry, for women, “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” One of the aims of Lorde’s explicitly political poems—as …

I, Discomfort Woman: A Fugue In F Minor, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

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 …

Poetry Beyond The Page: A Case For Spoken Word Poetry In Florida's Secondary Classrooms, Sarah Matherly

Senior Honors Theses

Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards, Florida’s most recent K-12 educational standards to promote literacy, lack the rising art of Spoken Word Poetry. However, Florida’s Department of Education should integrate Spoken Word into Florida’s Secondary curriculum. Spoken Word Poetry, by its definition, holds researched benefits that align with the B.E.S.T. Standard’s poetry recommendations and literacy-centered goals. In light of such benefits, Florida’s Department of Education should consider various Spoken Word poets and poems to include in Florida’s Secondary Curriculum, as well as explore the resources and integration methods included in this thesis for both teachers and students.

A Personal History Of Invasive Hands And Endangered Lovers, Samuel Paul Boudreau

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

I thought I could be ridden hard and put away wet, wet, wet. I thought death and rape and drunkenness and unrequited love were functions of a typical life, a this-is-how-it-goes kinda world. But, as I’ve emerged from hellish muck, there has been a realization: the way we treat each other and the soil, the aching earth, needs to change. “A Personal History of Invasive Hands and Endangered Lovers” explores the relationship between intimacy and pain through a history of ecology and consumption, a melancholy of sorts. It amplifies trauma as a call-to-action and refuses to sit and take it. …

Introduction To Creative Writing, Sheila Y. Maldonado

Open Educational Resources

English 220 Introduction to Creative Writing - readings and exercises in fiction, drama, and poetry

Pecan Grove Review Volume 20, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

Early Black Poetry, Social Justice, And Black Children: Receptions Of Child Activism In African American Literary History, Tabitha Lashay Joy Lowery

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In spite of the substantial amount of critical work that has been produced on the recovery of early African American literature in the last few decades, our representations of black authors are still limited. Current studies of early African American poets privilege the identification of African American literature with resistance to slavery. This identification has persisted and has made the field one-dimensional. My dissertation provides reception histories of four early black poets—Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, Frances Harper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar—to argue for and present an expansive understanding of African American literature. A thorough examination of these authors’ circulation …

Three Poems: The Dog At The Hospital; Bracken Ferns; Branta Canadensis, Pos L. Moua

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

These three poems reflect the speaker's refugee experience and his adjustment to the new land and the natural world and present an account of his love, companionship, and memory of war.

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 …

"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.

"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 …

Integration Of Local Poetic Voices: An Interview With Lawson Fusao Inada, Alma Rosa Alvarez, John Rafael Almaguer

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview with Lawson Fusoa Inada

African Poetry Libraries-A Global Collaboration, Lorna M. Dawes, Charlene Maxey-Harris

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

In 2014, the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) and the University of Nebraska (UNL)literary magazine-thePrairie Schooner established African Poetry Libraries in five countries; Ghana, Kenya,Uganda, Gambia and Botswana. The purpose of these libraries wasto support the creativity of aspiring and establishedpoets in their local communities. The University of Nebraska Libraries was asked toserve as consultants on the initiative by working with local volunteers to set up thelibraries and provideongoing assistance and advice to the new libraries during thefirst three years of their inception. The goal of the librariesis to support thelocal community of poets through access to contemporary poetry, and …

Sôhkêyihta: The Poetry Of Sky Dancer By Louise Bernice Halfe And Why Indigenous Literatures Matter By Daniel Heath Justice, Chad Weidner

The Goose

Review of Louise Bernice Halfe's Sôhkêyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer and Daniel Heath Justice's Why Indigenous Literatures Matter.

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.

Notes On Survival, Despite, Jason Harris

ETD Archive

In this collection of poems, the issue of damage-based thinking and desire-based thinking is being examined. It is being examined through the use of several different types of poetry techniques. Within the poems, the past, the present, and the future are examined and asks a larger question: How can we, as people take the daily violence that we encounter and find – and/or work our way to – joy.

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.

Pecan Grove Review Volume 18, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

Pecan Grove Review Volume 17, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

Pecan Grove Review Volume 16, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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

Pecan Grove Review Volume 15, St. Mary's University

Pecan Grove Review

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