Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

Reading The Traumatic Moment: The Role Of Socioeconomic Systems In The Color Purple And The Bluest Eye, Andrea Doll

Undergraduate Theses

There are many points of sameness between Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Both novels occur in the mid-20th century and focus on protagonists within the same race, gender, and relative class. Of all the similarities between the texts, the most influential is the trauma, sexual and otherwise, shared between Pecola Breedlove and Celie. Most notably, both characters experience incestuous rape resulting in pregnancy shortly after their first menstruation. Despite their numerous shared events and attributes, what occurs after their sexual trauma differs drastically for each character. At the end of The Color Purple …

“Madam” Elizabeth: Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley’S Sisyphean Attempt To Join The “Cult Of True Womanhood”, Bella Biancone

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

Nineteenth century notions of femininity and etiquette were governed by strict societal standards. “True Womanhood” was defined by four fundamental virtues– piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. However, there was another pre-requisite for joining this revered cult¬: whiteness. No matter how pious or domestic a woman of color was, she could never hope to be considered a proper lady by Victorian standards. In discerning what it meant to be a member of that “cult of True Womanhood,” Black women were used to determine the boundaries of white womanhood; a “True Woman” was to be the antithesis of the stereotypical sexual and …

‘The Female Marine’ And ‘Clotel’: An Analysis Of Female Crossdressing To Escape Coercive Labor Situations In 19th Century American Literature, Kaelyn Ireland

Symposium of Student Scholars

Although illegal in many U.S. cities, crossdressing was a point of fascination for Americans of the nineteenth century. Stories of real women passing as men to serve in the military—for example, Revolutionary War veteran Deborah Sampson—enchanted readers and inspired writers, such as that of The Female Marine. Ostensibly written by its heroine, but most likely written by Nathaniel Hill Wright, The Female Marine was a popular story about a young woman who was forced to become a sex worker and cross-dressed to escape her situation, then enlisted in the Navy where she served abroad the U.S.S. Constitution. At …

Documentary Review: Belly Of The Beast, Clare Daniel

Feminist Pedagogy

Belly of the Beast (Cohn, 2020) chronicles the legal and political battle surrounding forced and coerced sterilization of women incarcerated in the Central California Women’s Facility during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Uncovering a contemporary example of eugenics and the institutional logics that protect and justify those practices, this film provides a crucial tool for feminist educators teaching about reproductive injustice, racism, gender-based oppression, and the power of feminist activism. In what follows, I briefly summarize the film and offer a discussion of how it might be used as a tool of feminist pedagogy by 1) providing an opportunity …

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …

In Place/Out Of Place Assignment, Peter Kabachnik

Open Educational Resources

This Geography assignment, ideal for Political Geography, Cultural Geography, Urban Geography, and so forth (and of course other related disciplines like Anthropology and Sociology), undergraduate courses, explores the concepts of in place and out of place. Based on a reading of the introduction of Tim Cresswell's 1996 book In Place/out of Place Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, this assignment is a great way to get students to think about these issues and connect them to their own experiences.

Valiant Consequences, Johnjulius Lodato

Student Publications

War and conflict are significant events that hold a reasonable possibility to alter countries and their cultural populations. These transforming effects can come in many forms, ranging from mental trauma to the abandonment or modification of culture and its ideals. In this illustration, perhaps no group has endured the same everlasting detrimental effects as the Native Americans and their underlying consequences stemming from World War 2. These detriments can be seen in the form of erratic drunken or violent behavior and forgotten traditions. On the contrary, these effects may have at one time been diminished and replaced by the gratitude …

Emotions In Work And War: Comparisons Of Emotional-Cultures Of New Deal Ccc Enrollees And Wwii U.S. Army Enlistees, 1933-1945, Maeve Losen

Master's Theses

Though the Great Depression and Second World War were consecutive eras and overlapped in numerous aspects, scholarship often overlooks the commonalities between these periods. To demonstrate these eras’ shared qualities, this thesis examines the relationship in emotional-cultures—the cultural norms that dictated how individuals felt and demonstrated their emotions—among Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollees and U.S. Army enlistees during WWII.

The broad intent of this undertaking is to place the cultural history of the Great Depression and WWII in conversation and to show the advantage of inter- and multidisciplinary work by applying anthropological and historical theories of emotion. Though the historical …

Alice, Sheila J. Nayar

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Alice (2022), directed by Krystin Ver Linden.

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Unended Middle Passage: The Exhausted Flesh Of A Resistant Enslaved Woman, Yipu Su

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The supine position that characterized the existence of the captive Africans on the slave ship, “The Brookes,” haunted the two female autobiographers of the two mid-nineteenth-century slave narratives/autobiographies this essay discusses. Both Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs voluntarily adopted the supine position as their status of living when resisting sexual violence in slavery, which nevertheless exhausted their flesh. This essay draws on Hortense Spillers’ theory of flesh/body antithesis and Saidiya V. Hartman’s theory of gender construction in slavery to discuss the nature of intended exhaustion. This essay examines to what extent was the strategy of intended exhaustion efficient for both …

Review Of Fang Tang's Literary Fantasy In Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Women’S Literature: Imagining Home, Lilly Chen

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Wages Of Resistance: A Consideration Of Time In Jessica Hagedorn’S Dogeaters, Laura A. Wright

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Using the formal elements of Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn offers a pointed critique of class. Bringing Karl Marx’s discussion of time from Capital into conversation with Gèrard Genette’s narratological essay “Order, Duration and Frequency” I argue that Hagedorn’s depiction of time deliberately undermines the systems of power in the novel. Drawing particularly on Genette’s conceptualization of duration and frequency, I examine Hagedorn’s depictions of men and women at work, specifically the characters of Romeo Rosales and Trinidad Gamboa. Romeo and Trinidad are seldom mentioned in criticism of Hagedorn’s text, but these characters demonstrate Hagedorn’s attention to the working-class and serve …

Orientalism Restated In The Era Of Covid-19, Joey Kim

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay bridges a gap between an analysis of anti-Asian targeting and an analysis of Orientalism. Because histories of Orientalism and anti-Asian targeting pre-date the current moment, I demonstrate the centrality of Orientalism to the evolution of xenophobic language and sentiment in U.S.-foreign historical relations. I recount instances of anti-Asian, xenophobic, and “Yellow-Peril” rhetoric in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, I examine the racialization of COVID-19 as a trope of orientalism. This racialization, I argue, places the Asian-presenting body in a state of heightened visibility, precarity, and susceptibility to plunder. The newfound precarity of the …

Trusting In Narrative: An Interview With Susan Choi, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Volume Eleven: Reading, Writing, And Teaching In The Whirlwind, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Cover Of Volume 11, Emily Chan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

2022 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2022 IGGAD Conference: Who Owns This? Communities, Heritage, and Preservation.

An Appeal In Favor Of That Class Of Americans Called Africans, Lydia Maria Child, Paul Royster (Editor)

Zea E-Books in American Studies

The roots of white supremacy lie in the institution of negro slavery. From the 15th through the 19th century, white Europeans trafficked in abducted and enslaved Africans and justified the practice with excuses that seemed somehow to reconcile the injustice with their professed Christianity. The United States was neither the first nor the last nation to abolish slavery, but its proclaimed principles of freedom and equality were made ironic by the nation’s reluctance to extend recognition to all Americans.

“Americans” is what Mrs. Child calls those fellow countrymen of African ancestry in 1833; citizenship and equality were what she advocated …

Descendant, Sheila J. Nayar

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Descendant (2022), directed by Margaret Brown.

Committed To The Fragment: Feminist Literature And The Promise Of Wellness, Lynne Beckenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“I have never been able to blind myself” to the cruelty of a world that “destroys its own young in passing…out of not noticing or caring about the destruction,” Audre Lorde tells us in her 1980 “mythobiography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This quality, Lorde says, “according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.” In rejecting psychological self-possession as a sign of wellness, this passage also rejects it as one of sovereignty’s conditions. At the time of Lorde’s writing, this version of sovereignty already dominated the landscape of therapeutic culture in the United States, …

Unraveling The Geographies Of The U.S. Public Education System: An Analysis Of Scale, Segregation, And Hegemony, Olivia Ildefonso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Other than one or two studies that focus on specific state-wide systems of public education, there has been no accounting for how the U.S. public education system came about in relation to space and scale. My dissertation research seeks to fill in this gap. Through focusing on the development of public education in the North and the South, I provide a foundation for understanding the grounded and contested processes of scale production that largely determined the U.S. public education system’s design and function.

In each of the seven chapters, I detail how fights over the structure and purpose of public …

2022 Mlk Keynote Address: Eddie Glaude Jr. Presentation, Center For Social Equity & Inclusion, Eddie Glaude Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Series

One of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including his most recent—the New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own—take a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy.

In his writing and speaking, Glaude is an American critic in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, confronting history and bringing our nation’s …

2022 Mlk Keynote Address: Eddie Glaude Jr. Pre-Event Presentation, Center For Social Equity & Inclusion, Eddie Glaude Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Series

One of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including his most recent—the New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own—take a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy.

In his writing and speaking, Glaude is an American critic in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, confronting history and bringing our nation’s …

Intro To Jazz, Jon De Lucia

Open Educational Resources

OER Based Syllabus for MUS 145 Intro to Jazz course at City College. Covers the history and development of jazz along with basic music fundamental vocabulary.

Paper Sons And Chosen Families: Blurry Archives And Non-Biological Kinship In The Chong Family Album, Sam Battles

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

In the face of Chinese exclusion and Victorian-era morality, this project presents a family photo album as a counter-narrative to racialized and gendered immigration policies. The photo album is from the Chong family who were part of a Chinese American community living in San Francisco around 1915. The paper follows the fluctuating and non-chronological layout of the album and the uncertainties within to analyze Chinese Americans family formations in the context of state control of Asian migrants, including hyper-policing and surveillance around immigration status, queerness, and class. The Chong family album demonstrates how Chinese Americans employed flexible definitions of family …

Legal Strategies Used By Black Men During The Antebellum Period, A. D. Banse

Digital Legal Research Lab

AD Banse, "Legal Strategies Used by Black Men During the Antebellum Period" [Research Poster]

Digital Legal Research Lab REU Site, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2022

The Missouri Statute of 1807 existed as the primary act that somewhat ensured the freedom of those enslaved and pursuing their freedom. The act refuted laws such as the Futgitive Slave Clause of 1793 and 1850, and the Missouri Compromise, which were evidence that slaveholders held decisive political influence and could cast the Constitution in proslave terms (Baker 2012). These clauses essentially gave enslavers the right to seize enslaved people who escaped to free states deepening …

Habeas Corpus: Breaking Reservation Boundaries, Samantha Byrd

Digital Legal Research Lab

Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky’s Petitioning for Freedom examines marginalized peoples’ use of habeas corpus in the American West from 1812 to 1924. This project has uncovered Indigenous manipulation of the American legal system to counter the challenges of colonialism. Indigenous peoples used habeas to protest, and sometimes successfully mitigate boarding school experiences, forced removal, and confinement on reservations. This study aims to show how Indigenous peoples and other minorities had a complex understanding of the law and used it to their advantage.

Advisor: Katrina Jagodinsky

A Home Shielded By Laws: Freedom Suits And Enslaved Mothers, Heidi Martin

Digital Legal Research Lab

This project collects, digitizes, and makes accessible the freedom suits brought by enslaved families in the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the United States Supreme Court. This project places families in the foreground of our interpretive framework of slavery and national formation.

Using TEI encoding, we focused on outcomes, relationships between individuals and the claim for freedom made. Using these data sets, I focused specefically on mothers petitioning for their children. Of the 508 cases I utilized, 131 included children and a parental figure. I set out to distinguish the additional burden mothers had …

In The Waiting: The Role Of The Slave Bastille In Antebellum D.C., Ellyzabeth Morales-Ledesma

Digital Legal Research Lab

In 1808 the Transatlantic Slave Trade ended and in turn the government created a federally protected human market. As the South's demand for human labor force increased the domestic slave trade rocketed and in turn created even more turmoil for the Black population if the United States. Slave Traders and Man-Dealers took advantage of the market and kidnapped Free Black men women and children. While waiting to be sold enslaved people would be admitted into holding cells and jails; this was the creation of slave jails and Slave Bastilles. Slave jails served as places where the horrors of a human …