Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

The Monkey In The Looking Glass: Fairies, Folklore And Evolutionary Theory In The Search For Britain's Imperial Self, Tessa Katherine Jacobs

Scripps Senior Theses

In his groundbreaking work of postcolonial theory, Orientalism, Edward Said puts forth the idea that imperial Europe asserted an identity by constructing the character of its colonized subjects. Said writes that his book tries to “show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). The object of this thesis is a related project, for it too is a search for imperial Britain’s surrogate or underground self. Yet rather than positioning this search within the British colonies, this thesis takes as its context a …

La Sociolinguistique Postcoloniale En Amérique Hispanophone Et En Afrique Francophone : Un Drame Linguistique En Deux Actes, Eva Valenti

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes the sociolinguistic situations in postcolonial Latin America and francophone North Africa (the Maghreb) through a comparative lens. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Spain and France’s differing colonial agendas and language ideologies affected the relationships between colonizer and colonized, and, by extension, the role that Spanish and French play(ed) in these regions after decolonization. Finally, it explores how Spain and France’s contemporary discourses frame colonial participation in the two languages’ development, and the psychological effects these ideologies have had on the formerly colonized.

Say It Loud: An Action Research Project Examining The Afrivisual And Africology, Looking For Alternative African American Community College Teaching Strategies, Daniel E. Mitchell

CGU Theses & Dissertations

For this study, the researcher sought to implement a visual arts-based Afrivisual to help inspire, motivate and empower African American students in gaining a culturally relevant education in Euro-American-centered schools. Using the Afrivisual in this work as an action-oriented tool the researcher sought to expose African American students to an African historical context.

This research project utilized three African-centered theoretical frameworks: (1) Afrocentricity, (2) Africana Philosophy, and (3) Africana Critical Theory. The problem this work addresses is found in four areas, (1) American history is Eurocentric, (2) African history has been distorted, (3) Africa’s contribution to world civilization has been …

Family Support Factors In African American Families That Promote Academic Achievement For Male Middle-School Students, Osie Leon Wood Jr.

CGU Theses & Dissertations

One of the most consistently reported challenges in the education literature is the underachievement of African American males at all levels of the education pipeline - from elementary and secondary schools through to postsecondary education. African American boys are falling behind and they are falling behind early. This research focuses on resources within the home environment that are available to support the educational achievement of African American boys. There are a number of mechanisms through which parental involvement in the home and at school may promote academic success that are being examined: parental involvement in school activities, expectations that parents …

Debating Difference: Haitian Transnationalism In Paul Gilroy’S Black Atlantic, Jamella N. Gow

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Blacks who have descended from the nineteenth century Atlantic slave trade have historically debated and worked to claim a sense of cultural identity that reflects their African heritage and their identity as diasporic. I am particularly interested in how people of the black Atlantic claim their multiple identities since, for people of a diaspora, one main factor is the fact that they inhabit multiple spaces but cannot call any home. How does transnationalism become a better way to describe the cultural identity of those in the "black Atlantic" since these people have to create new or adapted identities as they …

Framing A Blaxicana Identity: A Cultural Ethnography Of Family, Race And Community In The Valley Homes, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, 1955-1960, Ana Viola Thorne

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Framing a Blaxicana Identity: A Cultural Ethnography of Family, Race and Community in the Valley Homes, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, 1955-1960 (Blaxicana Identity) is set within the construct of identity formation, against a backdrop of color and culture clash, and the social construction of race. The author's narrative will constitute contextual introductions to discussion topics and iterate direct correlations of her lived experience to larger community and cultural accounts that helped to shape aspects of her Blaxicana identity. The individual and community perceptions of what it means and what it feels like to grow up Negro, Mexican and female in an …

An Ethico-Politics Of Subaltern Representations In Post-9/11 Documentary Film, Joseph D. Parker

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

The World War Without End (WWWoE), formerly known as the War on Terror,ii is one of those rare occasions when a gendered subaltern population comes to the attention of the nation-state. If the subaltern is understood as something akin to illiterate rural women from the global South, then she now has the full attention of the White House and Downing Street, the US State Department, CNN and Time magazine.iii In official state positions and in media coverage, interest in the subaltern is often expressed in humanitarian attention to the rights or freedoms of these subaltern women in order to justify …

The Trials Of A Comfort Woman, Erica Park

CMC Senior Theses

The trials of a comfort woman was never revealed after the conclusion of WWII. More than half a century has passed before the name was uttered on the international stage. Why the sudden break of silence? What is the response of the Japanese government. In this paper, we discuss the issue of the comfort women and the the political implications it holds on Japan. Japan's failure to accept wartime reparation, largely due to Allied intervention, has resulted in the widening gap between Japan and Asia. This paper focuses on the combination of increased US influence as a result of the …

A Place Like This: An Environmental Justice History Of The Owens Valley - Water In Indigenous, Colonial, And Manzanar Stories, Monica Embrey

Pomona Senior Theses

This text provides an environmental justice analysis of the stories of the people who lived in the Owens Valley, who watered its land and cultivated its crops—pine trees, apple trees, and kabocha alike. Telling the personal stories of challenge and resistance that manifested alongside the oppressive forces of military and state domination provides the opportunity to align forcibly relocated, exploited and incarcerated people’s struggles throughout time. This text starts with The Nü’ma Peoples who were the first humans to live in the Owens Valley and continues with the struggle for empire between rival colonial empires of agriculture and distant urban …

"No Modern Joshua": Nationalization, Scriptures, And Race, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

With the United States as primary context and point of reference, this essay aims to show how inextricably the modern world phenomena of nationalization, scriptures, and race have been inextricably woven together in the United States. The rhetorics and ideological and political orientation of Frederick Douglass offer an analytical wedge. A speech Douglass delivered in Washington, D.C., in 1883 was part of the celebration of the twentieth year of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, an event seen as an appropriate and meaning-charged occasion to take stock of the plight of black peoples in the country. His assessment that in …

The Bible As Read By African Americans, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

African Americans engagements with the Bible suggest much not only about who the people of the Bible are, how they sound and think, and what they mean and communicate but also about how Scripture functions in society and culture. African Americans use of the Bible as Scripture is varied and wide-ranging and has a storied history. These engagements should be understood as reflections of a people's long and continuing efforts to define and empower themselves. They are at once "readings" of the people of the worlds with which they were forced to negotiate. These engagements reflect the people's consistent aspiration …

Subjugated Knowledges And Dedisciplinarity In Cultural Studies Pedagogy, Joseph D. Parker

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Discussions of the contested politics of academic fields that have emerged from social movements often emphasize course content while deemphasizing the ways that power circulates through specific sites in the academy. Certainly women's studies, queer studies, and the different ethnic studies fields have struggled to maintain links to the social movements that engendered them. and a concomitant focus on social change. In a more complex fashion, the same is true of postcolonial studies. Similarly, cultural studies may be understood as an academic field emerging from class-based social movements that are affiliated in complex ways with various Marxist analyses whose academic …

So Very Hard To Go: An Action Research Project On Cultural Affirmation, Roberto David Lacarra

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This action research textbook has been developed as a cultural affirmation method to address the transfer problems faced by Chicano students in community college. The textbook will reach out to students in classrooms and engage them in building social networks that create, support, and reinforce their positive experiences in community college. The primary objective of this project is to provide cultural and practical tools to community college students enrolled in Chicano/a Studies courses so that they can use to replace their fear of failure and potential for self isolation with cultural pride and validation of their achievements. The approach is …

Will Another White Male Be Elected President In 2008?, David E. Drew, Hedley Burrell

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Barack Obama. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bill Richardson. The field of minority and female candidates for president has never been so strong. But the question remains: Despite the expected presence of an African- American, a woman, and a Latino, will America in 2008 elect yet another male president of northern European descent?

No one can say for certain, but we hope this streak ends soon, because it's important that America elect its leaders from the full breadth of talent available in its diverse population.

Book Review: "Yet With A Steady Beat: Contemporary U.S. Afrocentric Biblical Interpretation" By Randall C. Bailey, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Written at different times for different purposes and occasions, by African American scholars who are differently oriented and differently situated, eight essays have been collected and edited by biblical scholar Randall C. Bailey with a particular focus and purpose in mind. Such focus and purpose are not elaborated upon in the editor's slim introduction. Aside from the issue of the quality of the essays - of uneven quality, as is the case, as everyone knows, with almost all collected essays - what is at stake in this volume, and all volumes that are collections of essays by different authors, is …

Book Review: Ed. Musa W. Dube, Other Ways Of Reading: African Women And The Bible, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

I take great delight in having the opportunity to review this collection ofthirteen essays having to do with contemporary African women and their engagements of the Bible. Ably edited and introduced by Musa W. Dube, Senior Lecturer in the New Testament in the Department ofTheology and Religious Studies at the University ofBotswana, the essays have been long awaited. They fill a tremendous need--among and beyond the women of Africa. They inform and challenge and inspire communities far beyond the circle ofthe discussants in the book. They make a dramatic statement about the powerful voices and sentiments and creative impulses of …

Book Review: Then The Whisper Put On Flesh: New Testament Ethics In An African American Context, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

This book is a bold and challenging project that, for various reasons, few scholars these days would even dare attempt. It aims to bring together the methods, approaches, and agenda of "cultural interpretation" of the New Testament, "biblical ethics," and the study of "African American Christianity."

Martyrs Of Miscegenation: Racial And National Identities In Nineteenth-Century Mexico, Lee Joan Skinner

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Contemptus Mundi Means "...Bound For The Promised Land...": Religion From The Site Of Cultural Marronage, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The basic assumption behind this project is that all humanistic inquiries more or less explicitly involve self-discovery. I have chosen to try to be more rather than less explicit. I have realized for some time now that I am both a problem and a promise for the primary field in which I was academically socialized: biblical (New Testament) studies as defined and practiced by the guilds of biblical scholars in North America. I have provided enough evidence that I can “play the game” that the guilds require in terms of publications, research projects, and general scholarly orientation. And as such …

Past As Present, Present As Past: Freedom To Read The Self And The World, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Historical inquiry of the sort that seeks, in its different but necessarily naive ways, merely to "establish the facts," or merely to "defend the race," or "my people," or "my religion/denomination," or "our position," simply to accuse the other as source of current problems, needs to be identified for what it is and renounced. Such "history" is problematic, not so much because it has no insights or tells no truths, but because it cannot generally even adequately, or critically, problematize the "facts" and "truths" it discovers and engages. Put another way, this type of history seems unable to address the …

African Americans And The Bible, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Rationale for a History of "Readings": The history of the engagement of the Bible among African Americans is dramatic and complex and has important implications for biblical interpretation. It provides the student of the Bible not only a conceptual window onto a dramatic and complex history of self-definitions and worldviews among those in the modern world who now call themselves African Americans, but also the opportunity to rethink the basic hermeneutical assumptions about biblical interpretation, especially its focus upon the ancient text and/or ancient historical situation as the starting and end point of interpretation. The critical juxtaposition of the Bible …

The Bible And African-American Culture, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The history of the influence, uses, and functions of the Bible among African Americans is dramatic and complex, and reflects the different, sometimes conflicting, sociopolitical and religious self-understandings, orientations, and aspirations of a dominant segment, if not the great majority, of African Americans.

Reading Texts As Reading Ourselves: A Chapter In The History Of African American Biblical Interpretation, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Literature, especially religious literature, ideally aims to trigger degrees of empathy in readers who share a particular universe of meaning, with the goal of entertaining, provoking, challenging, and persuading. The literary text that has achieved something of the status of a "classic" is one that has consistently--that is, "beyond its time...beyond its space"--proved to be engaging and empathetic, consistently challenging and inspiring the spirit, provoking thoughts and arresting the imagination of those generally sharing a universe of meaning, or culture. But such texts, precisely because of their empathy-producing qualities, should also inspire among readers again and again over time a …

Book Review: Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations In Black America, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Foreword To Old Ship Of Zion, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Walter F. Pitts died July 20, 1991. I did not know him personally; I came to know only a part of him through the manuscript-obviously an important part of his life-that has been transformed into the book now before the reader. If that which is created is in the image of its creator, I suspect that had I met Walter Pitts I probably would have liked him very much; I know I would have been impressed by him, and would have learned a great deal from him.

At first, when I was asked by Oxford University Press to review Pitts's …

African American Traditions And The Bible, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Introduction: Reading the Bible = Reading the Self and the World. African Americans' engagement of the Bible is complex and dynamic. It is a fascinating historical drama, beginning with the Africans' involuntary arrival in the New World. But as sign of the creativity and adaptability of the Africans and of the evocative power of the Bible, the drama continues to the present day, notwithstanding the complexity and controversies of intervening periods. Thus, there is in African Americans' engagement of the Bible potential not only for an interpretive history of their readings as a history of their collective self understandings, visions, …

Ascetic Behavior And Color-Ful Language: Stories About Ethiopian Moses, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The characterization of the fouth-century Black (Ethiopian) monk named Moses in late ancient Christian hagiographie narratives opens wide a window not only onto particular understandings of, and propaganda about, ascetic piety and religious orientations to the world, but also ancient (non-black) Christian sensitivies to racial/color differences. Four ancient sources— Palladius' Lausiac History, Sozomen's Ecclesiastical History, the anonymous Apophthegmata Patrum, and Acta Sanctorum—are analyzed on the basis of a recent translation.

African Americans And The Bible: Outline Of An Interpretive History, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Since every reading of important texts, especially mythic or religious texts, reflects a "reading" or assessment of one's world, and since the Bible has from the founding of the nation served as an icon, a history of African Americans' historical readings of the Bible is likely to reflect their historical self-understandings—as Africans in America.

Historical Study As Cultural Critique: A Proposal For The Role Of Biblical Scholarship In Theological Education, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Some things are a bit clearer to me today than they were a decade or so ago. For example, I can now better understand and articulate the reasons for my initial and continuing interest in biblical studies. It was the recognition of the pervasive influence of the Bible in the historical experiences of African Americans that first inspired the interest. The importance of the Bible among African Americans is not of significance to me because it is assumed to be unique in the history of the United States. I am quite aware of the historical importance of the Bible among …

Historical/Cultural Criticism As Liberation : A Proposal For An African American Biblical Hermenutic, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Historical and cultural criticism can serve to aid minority, culturalist readings of the Bible to stand with integrity against alien imperialistic readings. Historical criticism is necessary in order to gain perspective on the historically determined nature of all religious constructs, including those in biblical texts. Cross-cultural analysis is necessary in order to interpret the symbols and referents of biblical cultures and contemporary dominant cultures, so as to determine which symbols and referents from any culture are relevant and affirming.