Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

Sacred Freedom: Sustaining Afrocentric Spiritual Jazz In 21st Century Chicago, Adam Zanolini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the historical and ideological headwaters of a certain form of Great Black Music that I call Afrocentric spiritual jazz in Chicago. However, that label is quickly expended as the work begins by examining the resistance of these Black musicians to any label. I theorize that this resistance is due to the experiences of Black history, throughout which labels have been used to enslave, exploit, and control people. I begin by discussing early musical labels, several important n-words, and then the innovation of African diasporic subjecthood and its labels. Then Black is examined, along with several corollary social …

Engagement And Resistance: African Americans, Saudi Arabia And Islamic Transnationalisms, 1975 To 2000, Jeffrey Diamant

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the 1960s, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has financed missionary efforts to Muslims around the world, attempting to spread a Salafi form of Islam that professes strict adherence to Islamic sacred scripture. The effects of this transnational proselytization have depended on numerous factors in “host countries.” This project explores the various impacts of Saudi transnational religious influence in the United States among African-Americans. By relying on previously unused documentary sources and fresh oral histories, it shows how Saudi “soft power” attempted to effect change in religious practices of African-American Muslims from 1975 through 2000. It provides the most detailed …

Institutionalizing Environmental Justice: Race, Place, And The National Environmental Policy Act, Keith K. Miyake

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I examine ways that the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) and its primary enforcement mechanism, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, have reshaped the state as a site for racial and environmental conflict by institutionalizing a particular form of environmental justice within governmental decision making processes. Combining archival methods and legal analysis, I develop three case studies involving community struggles over the social production of space that each engage the EIA process to different effect. The case studies were selected based on what they reveal about the ways that the environmental justice framework intersects …

(Sub)Versions Of Banditry: Ferréz’S Re-Appropriation And Redefinition Of The Marginal Identity, Marissel Hernández-Romero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines how Ferréz’s work is related to the 19^th and early 20^th century banditry narrative. The current study examines the evolution of the work of Ferréz and discusses his relevance in Brazilian and Latin America literature. However, this dissertation examines in what extent Ferréz’s work transgresses the genre in that he breaks its rules and departs from its traditions. Rather than being the voice of the elite put into the mouth of a lower-class bandit character, Ferréz’s bandits speak with the voice of the oppressed and subversively criticize the elite. His work is not viewed through …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

In Search Of Argentinidad: Identity Affirming Bodies In Movement In Latino-America, Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is a multi-sited investigation into the production of Argentinidad (the embodied feeling of Argentine national identity) post the economic crisis of 2001 known as el Argentinazo. A special attention is paid to the role of the body as a culturally and socially mediated site of identity formation. Additionally, this project engages with the intersections of cultural and psychoanalytic theories that have influenced Argentinean self-identity in addition to social identities that are negotiated in moments of personal and national crisis. This project examines the roles and relationships of family and migration within Argentinean diasporic communities originating from the Provinces …

The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a provocative style of autobiographical verse had emerged in postwar America, literary critics christened the new genre “confessional poetry.” Confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s are often characterized by scholars of contemporary poetry as a cohort of writers who, unlike previous generations before them, dared to explore in their work the personal and inherited traumas of mental illness, family suicides, failed marriages, and crushing addictions. As a result, the body of work these writers produced is often experienced as a collection of stylized, literary self-portraits. What can these self-portraits reveal to us about the connection between confessional poetry …

A Cosmic Connection: For Anthropologist Catherine Besteman, Reunion With Somali Bantu In Maine Was Life Changing., Gerry Boyle

Colby Magazine

Reunited with Somali Bantu families after decades, anthropologist Catherine Besteman chronicles their lives.

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 92, No. 12, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

• Keltner, Bryson. Major Redz, Students Protest During Game
• Perry, Natalie. Parking & Transportation Services Make Additions Due to Construction
• Kast, Monica. Search Firm Used Closed Process in Past – President Search
• Miller, Callie. Presidential Search Committee to Meet Friday
• Wegert, Sally. Local Police Officers Will Receive Body Cams
• Carlson, Kylie. New Scholarship Endorses German Culture Studies
• King, Jennifer. Editorial Cartoon re: United We Take a Knee
• Take a Knee: Students Organize in Protest of Oppression
• Burgess, Kelly. Apples: A Well-seasoned Staple of Fall Food
• Hornsby, Morgan. Unbreakable Spirt – …

A Neocolonial Warp Of Outmoded Hierarchies, Curricula And Disciplinary Technologies In Trinidad’S Educational System, Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

I re-appropriate the image of a space-time warp and its notion of disorientation to argue that colonialism created a warp in Trinidad’s educational system. Through an analysis of school violence and the wider network of structural violence in which it is steeped, I focus on three outmoded aspects as evidence of this warp--hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies--by using data (interviews, documents and observations) from a longitudinal case study at a secondary school in Trinidad. Colonialism was about exclusion, alienation, violence, control and order, and this functionalism persists today; I therefore contend that hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies are all enforcers …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 92, No. 11, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

• Student Dies in Car Crash on Sunday – Stephanie Campbell
• Ares, Nicole. Graveyard Goats – Goat Browsers, Covington Cemetery
• Kast, Monica. Regents Debate RFP for Sports Complex
• Collins, Emma. U.S. Senate Candidate Jim Gray Visits Bowling Green
• Miller, Callie. Mocking Banners Gain National Attention – Vanderbilt University
• Kast, Monica. Regents Give Gary Ransdell Life-long Emeritus Position
• King, Jennifer. Editorial Cartoon re: Kentucky Senate Election Debate
• Demand Debate: Rand Paul, Jim Gray Need to Debate Sooner than Later
• Winstead, John. In Wake of Tragedy, Values Matter More than Facts – …

Strategies For Systemic Change:Youth Community Organizing To Disruptthe School-To-Prison Nexus, Jesica S. Fernández, Ben Kirshner, Deana G. Lewis

Ethnic Studies

The school disciplinary landscape across the United States changed significantly through the enactment of policies that criminalize students’ behaviors during the 1990s and 2000s. Schools began to involve the police and criminal legal system in school disciplinary issues that used to be handled by school administrators. This shift led youth of Color1 to increasingly come into contact with the juvenile legal system through school suspensions, expulsions, and referrals to alternative schools—what we characterize as the school-toprison nexus.

Conceptualizing the school-to-prison pipeline as a nexus, or interlocking system of power over youth, allows us to understand how the criminalization of youth …

Speaking And Mourning: Working Through Identity And Language In Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, Matthew L. Miller

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In my essay entitled “Speaking and Mourning: Working Through Identity and Language in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” I argue that the novel’s protagonist Henry Park finds himself at a critical juncture in his life at the novel’s beginning. I analyze the protagonist’s relationship to language acquisition and identity, which have been developed by Lee to be associated as traumas. Furthermore, these topics are complicated by the death of his son, Mitt. This loss is a trauma of the heart and of the self for the main character who sees a successful navigation of language and immigration lost by his …

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …

The Author As The Novel Self: Shirley Lim’S Sister Swing, Denise B. Dillon

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

While authorial omniscience is denied the biographer, I argue that Lim as novelist takes this advantage in Sister Swing as a tool through which to explore the development of self-identity through characterizations of three sisters that in combination form the tripartite self as proposed by Freud. Autobiographical memories of familial, social and cultural life experiences are the source from which Lim draws and fleshes out, in her novel, portrayals of family members seeking freedom through different ways and means. As a self-analyst probing deep within the psyche, Lim employs linguistic stylizations to express contrastive and yet complementary points of view …

Movement And Mobility: Representing Trauma Through Graphic Narratives, Stella Oh

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

The formal and stylistic movements found within the comic architecture of From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride interrogate the ways in which the visual and textual narrative can represent the emotional landscape of trauma and displacement through comics language. Engaging in a visual and textual critique of the global economy that trades in feminine identities, these graphic narratives interrogate the mobility and visibility of those who are trafficked. In these works, transnationalism is artistically embedded in consumptive practices of reading and seeing that reinforce or challenge Orientalist cultural assumptions about the Asian female body. Geographical movements of …

Rehistoricizing Differently, Differently: American Literary Globalism And Disruptions Of Neo-Colonial Discourse In Tropic Of Orange And Dogeaters, Patrick S. Lawrence

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Through a comparative reading of two important transnational Asian American texts, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, I argue that multiplicity of narration may, but does not always, resist the imposition of culturally dominant aesthetic modes, especially historical and nationalist narratives and multiculturalism. While Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange delegates narrative power to seven characters, it ultimately stages an ambiguous clash of discourses with a multiculturalist historicizing voice that is limited by its own contradictory impulses to control and containment. The novel dialogizes its excessive tendencies by scripting plural-but-discrete identities. In contrast, Jessica …

On Such A Full Sea Of Novels: An Interview With Chang-Rae Lee, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview with author Chang-rae Lee.

Cardiovascular Disease And Type 2 Diabetes In Evolutionary Perspective: A Critical Role For Helminths?, Michael D. Gurven, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Aaron D. Blackwell, David E. Michalik, Caleb E. Finch, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Heart disease and type 2 diabetes are commonly believed to be rare among contemporary subsistencelevel human populations, and by extension prehistoric populations. Although some caveats remain, evidence shows these diseases to be unusual among well-studied hunter-gatherers and other subsistence populations with minimal access to healthcare. Here we expand on a relatively new proposal for why these and other populations may not show major signs of these diseases. Chronic infections, especially helminths, may offer protection against heart disease and diabetes through direct and indirect pathways. As part of a strategy to insure their own survival and reproduction, helminths exert multiple cardio-protective …

Volume 7 Cover, David Burnett

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Volume Seven: Confessing Racial Schizophrenia, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A short meditation on teaching ethnic American literature in 2016, acknowledgments, and a summary of this volume's contents.

49-Cent Commemorative Stamp: National Museum Of African American History And Culture, United States Postal Service. Stamp Division

Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Stamp Collection

National Museum of African American History and Culture Commemorative Stamp – 49-cent Commemorative Stamp, sheet of 20 stamps. First issued September 24, 2016.

Presidential Politics And The Black Vote, Part 2 Of 3, Preston Love Jr.

Black Studies Faculty Publications

From part 1. “No consensus decision was ever formally made (of what black leader would run for President in 1984) but Rev Jackson decided to test the waters and received the blessing of most of the leaders.

RUN, JESSE RUN!
Rev Jackson launched a southern voter registration tour, hired me as his only staff (I took a leave of absence from the City of Atlanta). “ During the summer of 1983 Rev. Jackson and I traveled at first during the weekends and later full time, into the historic southern states Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky. Rev Jackson …

Silhouettes Of A Silent Female’S Authority: A Psychoanalytic And Feminist Perspective On The Art Of Kara Walker, Angelica E. Perez

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998.

In a …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 92, No. 10, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

• Ares, Nicole. Man Airlifted After Fight on Center Street Late Saturday – Cory Johnson
• WKU Pulls Deal with Medical Center, Will Bid Out Project
• Dick, Jacob. WKU Police Report on Racist Letters Shows Possible Motive – Michelle Jones
• Collins, Emma. Alumni Survey Receives Few Minority Responses
• Hinderbrandt, Laryn. Department Receives Community Health Grant – Institute for Rural Health
• Keltner, Bryson. Students Work, Save Lives with Global Brigades
• King, Jennifer. Editorial Cartoon re: Chicken Strips
• Ronkainen, Millie. Mother Teresa’s Work of Hope, Comfort
• Hicks, Sarah. How to Stay Stylish While …

Communities Of Opportunity: Pursuing A Housing Policy Agenda To Achieve Equity And Opportunity In The Face Of Post-Recession Challenges, Kalima Rose, Teddy Kỳ-Nam Miller

Trotter Review

Where we live directly impacts our ability to achieve our full potential. Access to good schools, quality jobs, reliable transportation, and healthy food is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity. Unfortunately, communities of color, and urban black communities in particular, are disproportionately residing in neighborhoods locked out of opportunity, or disproportionately burdened by housing costs —spending over half of their income on housing. In 2015, PolicyLink undertook a research project to understand the changing post-recession housing landscape, to characterize the forces that were undermining housing security for communities of color, and to characterize the policy opportunities that could address the …

Introduction: The Gentrification Game, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

In real estate talk, there are only three things that matter, and they are location, location, location. The same is true in dispossession, which translates into the freeing up of location so that it can be possessed by others. Another term that has cropped up fairly recently, much in use in the crossover between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is gentrification, which has a benign face as well as one that is not so kindly, like the paired tragic and comic masks of classic drama.

In this issue of the Trotter Review, we explore gentrification and its alternate, dispossession, …

The Politics Of Race, Class, And Gentrification In The Atl, Keith Jennings

Trotter Review

Methodologically, the essay uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine gentrification from a race, class, and gender perspective. Within the essay a number of the dynamics directly associated with Atlanta’s political economy and the impact those dynamics are having on issues such as affordable housing, poverty, and Black employment and underemployment are analyzed. While not a central focus of the essay, the changes taking place outside of Atlanta in several counties, as a result of the push and pull effect in the metropolitan region, are briefly discussed.

Uncovering The Buried Truth In Richmond: Former Confederate Capital Tries To Memorialize Its Shameful History Of Slavery, Howard Manly

Trotter Review

Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones had the noblest of intentions.

With Virginia’s capital having a poverty rate of nearly 25 percent, no one blamed Jones, a child of the sixties and preacher by calling, for trying to develop prime riverfront property to generate revenue to create more jobs, better schools, and housing.

But when Jones unveiled a proposal in 2013 that included building a new baseball stadium near one of the city’s historic slave burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom, it was, by all accounts, troubling to historic preservationists and Black community activists. “Shameful” was one of the words most often …

Gentrification As Anti-Local Economic Development: The Case Of Boston, Massachusetts, James Jennings

Trotter Review

Activists and political leaders across the city of Boston are concerned that gentrification in the form of rapidly rising rents in low-income and the poorest areas are contributing to displacement of families and children. Rising home sale prices and an increasing number of development projects are feeding into this concern. There is also a growing wariness about the impact that this scenario can have on small and neighborhood-based businesses and microenterprises whose markets are represented by the kinds of households facing potential displacement. This potential side-effect suggests that gentrification could actually emerge as anti-local economic development in Boston. It can …