Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

"Follow The Bodies": (Re)Materializing Difference In The Era Of Neoliberal Multiculturalism, Briana Grace Brickley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a transnational literary archive in addition to analyzing shifting U.S. American cultural and political landscapes, and shows how critically attending to the various terms, figures, and valences of corporeality opens generative avenues for addressing the contemporary historical conjuncture, often referred to as the neoliberal capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism, understood here to be a complex, diffuse ideology that manifests in part as a number of broadsweeping economic changes—including widespread deregulation and privatization, the increasing influence of international financial organizations, governmental cuts in social spending, and structural adjustment programs for the formerly colonized nations of the global south—operates in …

Becoming Serpent: Mapping Coils Of Paranoia In A Neocolonial Security State, Rachel J. Liebert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What follows is a feminist, decolonial experiment to map the un/settling circulation of paranoia – how it is done, what it does, what it could do – within contemporary conditions of US white supremacy. Drawing on participant observation, interviewing, scientific artifacts, reflexive journaling, and a public art project, I enter white supremacy through a burgeoning form of pre-emptive psy to capture ‘the prodrome’ – a stage-cum-population-cum-figure at the center of a transnational program of research to identify and intervene on ‘pre-psychosis’. I argue that this nascent, contested, and accelerating movement is enacting a contemporary transition from …

What The Tides May Bring: Political "Tigueraje" Disposession And Popular Dissent In Samaná, Dominican Republic, Ryan A. Mann-Hamilton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is a historical and ethnographic project that delves into the conflictive relationship between the development of the Dominican state and the formation of the community of the port city of Samaná. The African diasporic community of Samaná has actively constructed the local space throughout shifting political projects, while sustaining their collective voices against the waves of dispossession crashing on their shores. Using a combination of archival research, participant observation, oral history and ethnography, I document multiple instances of state intervention to understand how the Samaná community has been coerced over time to consent to these processes. I juxtapose …

Understanding School And Interethnic Relations Of Mexican Immigrant Youth In A Post-Industrial Community, Roberto Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a dearth of literature on how immigrant groups understand minority groups in the United States, in particular, African-Americans. Increased technology and more rapid global movement in the 21st Century challenges 20th explanations of assimilation (Chicago School) and necessitates more research focused on how immigrant groups and racialized minorities interact to negotiate new worlds. This ethnographic research was conducted over thirteen months during 2012 and 2013 in a post-industrial neighborhood in the northeast that had been the site of 11 purported anti-bias attacks against Mexican immigrants during the summer of 2010. Research questions focused on: 1) Mexican immigrant youth …

Transatlantic Surrealisms, Imagined Homelands, And The Poetry Of Paul Laraque, Maxine C. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many theoretical treatments of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism(s), most notably Fredric Jameson and Alejo Carpentier’s foundational essays on magical realism, argue that the surrealism of the European metropole is a sophisticated avant-garde movement, in contrast to the blunt tool of Caribbean and Latin American surrealism which reaches back toward a precolonial past in order to bolster a nationalist project. Existing critical writing about Paul Laraque, a Haitian poet and surrealist identifies Laraque as Haitian first and foremost: as a political poet using surrealism solely in support of a nationalist project. This reading of Laraque’s work fails to reckon with …

The Remedy That's Killing: Cuny, Laguardia, And The Fight For Better Math Policy, Rachel A. Oppenheimer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nationwide, there is a crisis in math learning and math achievement at all levels of education. Upwards of 80% of students who enter the City University of New York’s community colleges from New York City’s Department of Education high schools fail to meet college level math proficiencies and as a result, are funneled into the system’s remedial math system. Once placed into pre-college remedial arithmetic, pre-algebra, and elementary algebra courses, students fail at alarming rates and research indicates that students’ failure in remedial math has negative ripple effects on their persistence and degree completion. CUNY is not alone in facing …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

Descent: American Individualism, American Blackness And The Trouble With Invention, Simone White

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Descent is metacritical, ranging across disciplines to take up – as flash points or instances – failed attempts to revolutionize knowledge, considering these as descents, or movements into the deep, that remain stiff or un-poetic in their attitudes toward the American truisms “individualism,” “blackness” and “invention.” Beginning with William Carlos Williams’ formulation of descent (as a practice necessary for establishing national literary identity) in In the American Grain, the project resolves around the question, How can the critic make peace with her desire to dominate the object of critique by proposing its perpetual sameness in relation to the critic? …

Dislocating Camps: On State Power, Queer Aesthetics & Asian/Americanist Critique, Christopher Alan Eng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that the history of Asian racialization in the United States requires us to grapple with the seemingly counterintuitive entanglement between “the camp” as exceptional space of biopolitical management and “camp” as a performative practice of queer excess. While each practice of camp has been theorized as exemplary of modernity, these considerations have been largely separated into studies of political economy on the one hand, and queer aesthetics on the other. Taken up predominantly in political philosophy and the social sciences, the former centers the death camps in Europe during World War II as epitomizing state violence within …

Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, And The Humanities, Frances H. Tran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation works from and through the field of Asian American studies, drawing on Asian Americanist cultural critique and minority discourse, to investigate the relationship among race, the politics of knowledge, and the epistemic function of the humanities. Proliferating discourses on “post-race” and “colorblindness” characterizing the present moment posit a progressive movement beyond racial division, towards recognizing and incorporating minority difference into the academy. However, even as issues like “diversity” have gained visibility as institutional objectives, I contend that this heightened visibility occludes the structural conditions that allow racialization to persist. In this project, I follow the work of thinkers …

A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …

A Means To An End: Articulations Of Diasporic Blackness, Class And Survival Among Female Afro-Caribbean Service Workers In New York City, Christine A. Pinnock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the oral histories and personal narratives of Afro-Caribbean women who migrated to New York from 1961-2008 and explores how they articulate and negotiate multiple identities surrounding diasporic Blackness, class, and gender. This dissertation studies Afro-Caribbean women in the spaces they live namely, the Northeast Bronx, New York City, and Westchester and takes an interdisciplinary approach to theorize Afro-Caribbean women's experiences. Based on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, this study explores the challenges of Afro-Caribbean women working in the service sector who perform as: domestics, healthcare workers, retail workers, and food service workers and …

Suburbs In Black And White: Race, Jobs & Poverty In Twentieth-Century Long Island, Tim Keogh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Suburbs in Black and White” examines how economic development shaped African American suburbanization on Long Island, New York from 1920 through 1980. After 1940, the fortunes of Long Island’s growing black population shifted from widespread poverty to upward social mobility, though by the 1960s, a divide emerged between the rising black middle class and black working poor, and distinctly ‘black’ suburbs emerged with problems familiar to postwar inner cities. While urban racial inequality is often framed in terms of housing segregation and the city/suburb divide, census and labor market data reveal that structural economic change across the New York metropolitan …

Immigrants In The Sexual Revolution: Perceptions, Participation, And Belonging, The Netherlands And Denmark, 1960s-80s, Andrew D.J. Shield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an historical study of first-generation immigrants in Denmark and the Netherlands in the 1960s-80s and their perceptions of the 'Sexual Revolution.' Foreign workers and post-colonial immigrants arrived during the same decades when laws regarding women's equality, contraception and abortion, homosexuality, pornography, adultery and divorce were challenged and reformed, in many cases in the context of intensive social movement activism. This research explores immigrants' perceptions of the dramatic changes in sexual and gender relations transforming Europe in the 1960s-80s, and the instances of immigrant solidarity with, and participation in, networks for social justice, women's equality, and sexual liberation.

Part …

The Fictions Of Whiteness: Transatlantic Race Science, Gender, Nationalism, And The Construction Of Race In Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1823-1867), Philip E. Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fictions of Whiteness argues that political beliefs preceded and determined the race science theories which nineteenth century American white novelists applied or invoked in their work, the inverse of the current critical consensus. For issues ranging from Indian removal to slavery and Reconstruction, and utilizing theories from of Condorcet, Buffon, Camper, Louis Agassiz, James Pritchard, Johannes Blumenbach, and George Borrow these authors shifted allegiances to divergent race theories between and within works, applied those theories selectively to white, black, and Indians characters, and applied the same scientific race theories to politically divergent rhetorical ends. By analyzing shifting application of different …

Locked In: Melancholia In The Modern American Prison Literature Of R. Dwayne Betts And Jarvis Jay Masters, Johnna Scrabis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the theme of melancholia in the writing of currently and formerly incarcerated African American men during the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Melancholia, with its rich history in literature from ancient times to the present, is discernable in the works of many people with prison experience. In their writing, melancholia is expressed primarily as a loss and as a disconnection with time, as well as an empowering creative force. The work of Jarvis Jay Masters and R. Dwayne Betts reflects the paradox of melancholia: just as it shows the depressive element of the condition, …

"The Planet Is The Way It Is Because Of The Scheme Of Words": Sun Ra And The Performance Of Reckoning, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This constellatory essay is a study of the African American sound experimentalist, thinker and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial Sun Ra (1914-1993) through samplings of his wide, interdisciplinary archive: photographs, film excerpts, selected recordings, and various interviews and anecdotes. In composing this essay, I particularly consider how these fragments resonate against each other, offering insight into how Ra radically subverts the restraints imposed upon him as a black man in the United States and thus transfigures his racial alienness into a liberatory, literally alien performance. This self-transfiguration allows Ra to transform such impossible restraints into a condition of possibility for reckoning. I …

Blazing New Paths From Ancient Footprints: Enactment Of Mexican Traditional Dance And Music (Folklórico) In A New York Urban Community Of Early Childhood Learners, Pamela Proscia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The research undertaken for this study centers on outside-of-school teaching and learning through the practice of traditional Mexican music and dance (folkloric musical culture or folklórico) as transmitted to children of early childhood age in a New York urban ethnocultural dance community. The study focuses on the ways in which the traditional Mexican music and dance community, as cultural producers, pass along knowledge and inherent values of Mexican heritage and on how the process of acculturation includes changes imparted through progressive western approaches to teaching movement.

The study incorporates a long-term sociohistorical perspective in order to contextualize the place …

Organizing Against Discrimination: The Chinese Hand Laundrymen Historical Niche And Ethnic Solidarity In America, Johnny Thach

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From the late 1800s to early 1900s, hand laundries developed into the first Chinese historical niche in America in conjunction with Chinese laundrymen's activism, community organization, and ethnic solidarity in response to the proliferation of anti-Chinese discriminatory ordinances and laws instigated by White laundries and government officials. Using primary sources and secondary historical examples, this thesis explores the formation of the niche through the collective actions of two Chinese laundrymen organizations: the Tung Hing Tong “("同心堂")” in California, and the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance in New York. This thesis demonstrates that not only were both organizations founded differently and for …

The Heterotopia Of Flight: Resisting The Domestic, Sarah Elizabeth Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The familiar image of a woman fleeing danger is a well-worn convention of heroine-centered fiction, a plot device inevitably resolved when the heroine returns safely to her home and family. This dissertation proposes a new reading of that narrative by asserting that rather than serving as a space of protection, the home poses the greatest threat to an individual's autonomy. If we understand the domestic as a space in which bodies are ordered and, more specifically, gendered, classed, and raced, the trope of flight from the domestic can be read as an act of resistance to subjugation. This act is …

Narratives Of Interiority: Black Lives In The U.S. Capital, 1919 - 1942, Paula C. Austin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs an urban, social and intellectual history of poor and working class African Americans in the interwar period in Washington, D.C. Although the advent of social history shifted scholarly emphasis onto the "ninety-nine percent," many scholars have framed black history as the story of either the educated, uplifted and accomplished elite, or of a culturally depressed monolithic urban mass in need of the alleviation of structural obstacles to advancement. A history of the poor and working class as individuals with both ideas and subjectivity has often been difficult simply because there are limited archival sources.

"Narratives of Interiority" …

Performing (Non)Profit, Race, And American Identity In The Nation's Capital: Arena Stage, 1950-2010, Donatella Galella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theatre socially reproduces and contests economic, racial, and national hierarchies. There is a dearth of scholarship on U.S. regional theatre because of middlebrow anxiety and yet, for that very reason, regional theatre demands attention as a fitting example of the site of struggle over different forms of capital. Located in Washington, D.C., Arena Stage is the ideal case study for both the invention of viable non-profit theatre and the negotiation of race and national identity in the United States. Arguably the closest institution the U.S. has to a national theatre, the company was the first regional theatre to send a …

Privilege In Haiti: Travails In Color Of The First Bourgeois Nation-State In The Americas, Philippe-Richard Marius

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Who are the elites in the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere? Do Haiti's elites constitute themselves in a Blackness vs. Whiteness/Mulattoness opposition? Through the investigation of these questions, the central thesis of this ethnography emerges as the material unity in privilege of Haiti's colorist fragments. Noirisme, a fundamentalist strain of Haitian black nationalism that reached hegemony in the dictatorship of François Duvalier in the 1960s, is in marked retreat in contemporary Haiti. Its lingering influence nonetheless continues to foster a black qua black sociality among privileged black nationalists. Mulatto nationalism as political project and public discourse lapsed into …

What Condoms Can't Cover: Do Structural Factors Predispose Black, African American, And Latina/O Adults In Harlem And The South Bronx To Engaging In Hiv Sex Risk Behaviors?, Fabienne Snowden

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

More than thirty years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Black, African American, and Latina/o communities continue to demonstrate the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the US, accounting for 64% of all new infections and 58% of all AIDS diagnoses in 2009. Despite the longevity of this public health crisis, individually-based behavioral change approaches to HIV/AIDS prevention continue to be the most widely used and funded methods of combating HIV risk in Black, African American and Latina/o communities. These methods have been proven to lower the risk of HIV transmission, but HIV incidence in the US remains high at approximately 50, 000 …

Errant Memory In African American Literature Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Tristan Alexander Striker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I trace the complex black literary trope of errant memory through American and African American literature. Authors of African descent are constantly subjected to what I call Africanity, or the paratextual historicizing elements provided by white interlocutors that seek to impose specific caricatures and stereotypes on them and their works to force them into the American historical narrative that depends on their dehumanized and commodified status. These caricatures and stereotypes are rooted in an Africa imagined by these white interlocutors, one that does not match any reality. Authors of African descent transcend this paratextual Africanity through what …

Impact Of Ethnic Conflict On Development: A Case Study Of Guyana, Visnoonand Bisram

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study presents an alternative framework, from the dominant political and economic theories, for explaining the feeble and relatively slow pace of development of an ethnically divided, resource rich country.

The study, using primary and secondary sources, empirical evidence, and interpretive analysis, examines the emergence and role of racial conflict and its stifling impact on national development in Guyana, which represents an extreme case of a society plagued by racial division. Organizations including labor unions and political parties, as well as occupations and aspects of the economy, among other social constructs, are all racially divided. Utilizing an inter-disciplinary (sociology, political …

The Myth Of The Unteachable: Youth, Race And The Capacity Of Alternative Pedagogy, Cathy R. Borck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My research consisted of three years of qualitative inquiry, including 62 interviews with members of the Department of Education, school administrators, teachers and students, as well as a yearlong ethnography at a transfer school that I chose because of its history of success with the city's hardest- to-reach youth. To my knowledge, mine is the first formal study of New York City transfer schools. "Transfer schools" are New York City's public alternative schools, which serve "over-age, under- credited" high school students (i.e. students who are "behind" in school). These students experience many challenges and interruptions to their education, including homelessness, …

The Trickster In Nella Larsen's Passing (1929): Performing And Masquerading An American Identity, Rachael Miller Benavidez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines Nella Larsen's novel Passing (1929) and the performative nature of `passing' as white through the perspective of the archetypal trickster myth. I read the novel as a trickster tale that challenges gender roles and the construct of race in defiance of the dominant power structure that defines the American identity. I position the character Clare Kendry Bellew as a trickster figure, who performs an identity to defy race and gender roles. My argument challenges the general theory that black passing novels are solely tragic, and the perception that humor is not a pedagogical tool or representation of …

Native American Chic: The Marketing Of Native Americans In New York Between The World Wars, Emily Schuchardt Navratil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing on four key figures - Morris de Camp Crawford, John Sloan, Amelia Elizabeth White, and René d'Harnoncourt - this dissertation analyzes museum and gallery exhibitions of Native American art mounted in the United States, particularly New York City, during the interwar period, and documents the immediate and lasting impact these shows and their promotion had on the emergence of "Indian Chic" in women's fashion and interior design.

In the late 1910s, Crawford, a research editor for Women's Wear and honorary research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, mounted a campaign encouraging Euro-American designers to seek inspiration in …