Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

Incarcerated, T.Willaim Wallin

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

Inequality In Ethnic Representation In Secondary-School Literature Textbooks And National Examination In Vietnam, Anh Nguyen

Honors Projects

This essay studies the dynamic between ethnic minorities and majority in the Vietnamese education system. By examining the appearance and representation of ethnic minorities in national literature curriculum, textbooks, and examinations, the analysis reflects the government's perspectives regarding the “appropriate” portrait of ethnic minorities' heritage and relationship with the majority. The study finds that Vietnamese education framework and content comply with the national construct of a Vietnamese identity across ethnicities. The state determines educational materials and selectively permits only aesthetic, politically benign, and Kinh-like narratives of ethnic minorities’ cultures, many written and/or chosen by Kinh authority rather than the ethnic …

A Highland Textile Tradition From The Far South Of Peru During The Period Of Inka Domination, Penelope Dransart

PreColumbian Textile Conference VIII / Jornadas de Textiles PreColombinos VIII (2019)

A group of garments and textile fragments is identified in this article as belonging to a particular textile tradition, with characteristics indicating an affiliation to communities in the highlands of the South-Central Andes. Different categories of gender-specific garments are presented. The characteristics include an all-camelid construction, warp-patterned stripes in blocks of alternating colours, the use of a discontinuous warp and transposed-warp weave. Pattern motifs include eight-pointed stars, double-headed serpents and figures based on rhombuses. Distinctive geometric designs are analysed, including ‘butterfly’ motifs and narrow stripes, consisting of paired light- and dark-coloured right-angled triangles joined to make stacks of larger isosceles …

“Well, I’Ve Whispered ‘Racism’ In A Post-Racial World”: Satire And The Absurdity Of “Post-Racial” America, Joseph Gorman

Master’s Theses and Projects

The purpose of this thesis project is to look at the works of contemporary African American satirists as they confront post-racial ideology. In looking at the works of Jordan Peele, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and Boots Riley, thematic threads emerge to form a portrait of dire unrest amongst those non-white identities living in an allegedly post-racial world. Before analyzing the works, I first contextualize the thesis with a brief discussion of satire as a literary genre and African American satire as a literary subgenre, as well as address the emergence of post-racial ideology during the tenure of Barack Obama as …

Commodification Of Black Bodies, Emmanuel Yeboah

Womanist Ethics

No abstract provided.

The New Beginnings Newsletter, May 2020, Shana Harming

Wokini Initiative: The New Beginnings Newsletter

Contents include:
Coronavirus in Indian Country
Tribal Spotlight: Sisseton Wahpeton
Lakota Language Instructor Position Available
The Wizipan Leadership and Sustainability Program
Wokini Spotlight: Amber Morseau
Book of the Month: Real Indians, Identity and the Survival of Native America
Lakota Word of the Month

Self · Ish: Examining And Reshaping Filipino & Filipinx Identities Within The Continental United States And Hawai’I Via Post-Colonial Literature, Kiana Anderson

Senior Theses

This thesis explores a conversation between the “self” and Filipino culture to examine the ways the Filipino diaspora exists in literature amongst colonization and trauma. Through literary texts spanning across time and geographical locations, like Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, I interrogate the cultural and psychic meanings associated with the concept of home within the context of these hybrid histories. By examining the neo-canonical literature of some of these authors, I interrogate their sense of self, voices and visions via the languages, symbols, cultural frameworks and emotions that are prevalent within the literary …

The Black Woman's Burden: A Discussion Of Race, Rape Culture, And Feminism, Rawabi Hamid

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

Current feminist and anti-rape movements in the United States seek to amplify the voices of women regarding sexual assault. Unfortunately, within this amplification, the voices of Black women are often excluded, which is a direct effect of historically ignoring the abuses of Black women and rarely ever bringing their abusers to justice. These injustices, often committed by white men and perpetuated by white women, create a destructive rhetoric in stereotyping Black women while also silencing them throughout modern movements, especially those of feminist and anti-rape causes. This essay will examine the consequences of three problematic aspects of US history and …

All Eyez On Me: The Socialization Experiences Of African Americans At Predominately White Institutions, Tamara Kuykendall

Curriculum and Instruction Undergraduate Honors Theses

The review of literature section is to analyze the socialization experiences of African Americans that attend predominately white institutions (PWIs). African Americans are defined as Americans of African and especially black African descent for this research. The term “African American” and “black” will be used interchangeably. The paper highlights an overview of the social experiences of African American college students, distinguishes external, non-academic factors that contribute to the black college experience, and describes how African Americans experience social collectiveness within a predominately white campus. It also moves to identify how this interaction shapes African Americans’ perception of ‘blackness’ amongst the …

Do You Wanna Go Dancing?, Anthony Kascak

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The transdisciplinary art work within Do you wanna go dancing? unpacks the experience and perception of my interpersonal relationships, as well as the role that touch and introspection has in my visual arts practice and everyday life. I am interested in pairing the act of looking with the sensation of touching through specific installation and arrangement of intimate imagery, ceramic fragments and frames, and manual or digitally fabricated surfaces. The negotiation of these installations orient the viewer to consider their positionality within space, as well as the extent in which distance, intimacy, and vulnerability fluctuate inside these psychological spaces.

The …

Colonialism And Globalism In Two Contemporary Southern Appalachian Novels - Serena (2008) By Ron Rash, And Flight Behavior (2012) By Barbara Kingsolver, Jasmyn Herrell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this essay, I investigate how the historic and current economic structures operating in Appalachia from the 1920s to the 2010s are represented in two contemporary Southern Appalachian novels – Serena (2008) by Ron Rash and Flight Behavior (2012) by Barbara Kingsolver. Through the lens of postcolonial theory, I show how Serena represents Appalachia as functioning under the colonial model outlined by Robert Blauner and Helen Mathews Lewis in 1978. Then, still under the theory of postcolonialism, I explore how Kingsolver’s work depicts regional identity in response to a post-colonial environment and the ever-expanding global economy.

From Theory To Practice: Establishing The Classroom As The Setting For Race Talk Through The Intentional Analysis And Discussion Of Poems By Authors Of Color, Cree Taylor

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Modern-day racism exists in mostly subtle ways and is often felt most keenly in the classroom. When schools began the legal integration process in 1954, Black teachers were fired, all-Black schools were closed, and Black students were bused to the formerly all-White schools. In this new environment, Black students and all Students of color were forced to accept and adapt to an educational system that favored Whites over all other racial groups. Today, White Supremacy in education affects the establishment of state and national standards, school and district boundaries, and the un-fair disciplinary action taken against Students of Color. In …

Twenty-Seven Questions For Writers & Journalists To Consider When Writing About Covid-19 & Hiv/Aids, Alexandra Juhasz, Pato Hebert, Theodore Kerr, Diana Cage

Publications and Research

The desire to compare COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS is understandable. The response to HIV provides an inspiring road map for how to save lives. For over four decades, starting in the early 1980s, activists, scientists, politicians and cultural producers have been working alongside one another resulting in life saving developments—and goals not yet achieved. Since the late 1990s, HIV has become a manageable chronic illness for those with access to life saving medicine, housing, food, and social support. Meanwhile, stigma, discrimination, and criminalization directed at people living with HIV continue, based on social difference, access to resources and community, and an …

Racial-Spatial Politics: Policing Black Citizens In White Spaces And A 21st-Century Uprising, Andrea S. Boyles

Faculty Scholarship

I had been at the library for hours, going over the last edits on my first book (Boyles 2015), when I received a distressing phone call: a police officer had killed a Black male teenager in the city of Ferguson. The caller said protesters were assembling at the scene and suggested that I go there immediately. Well, I responded accordingly. I went, ultimately embarking on an unanticipated, extraordinary three-year empirical journey. As a sociologist and critical criminologist, I had been researching and writing about conflict between Black citizens and police in the suburbs of the St. Louis region for five …

Black Delilahs: Black Female Sexuality And Resistance In Progressive Era New York City, Kayla J. Smith

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Black Delilahs traces a history of policing and criminalizing of black women’s sexuality in Progressive Era New York City. By analyzing vaudeville posters, joke books, blues music, newspapers, vice committee records, and reformatory records, this project provides a historiography of respectability politics and the sociocultural norms and practices that limited American society’s freedom of sexual expression. It subsequently explores how working-class black women engaged with commercial, public, and private urban spaces normatively associated with vice, deviancy, and disreputability in ways that subverted these expectations of respectability and empowered them. These women used creative ways to express their sexuality within the …

Empire State Interrupted : Seneca Sovereignty And Settler Debates Over Land, 1779-1889, Elana Krischer

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

New York’s western expansion began during the American Revolution. From then on, a variety of American settler groups and individuals attempted to possess and control Seneca land in what is now western New York. These American settler groups, such as missionaries, land speculators, state and federal officials, and land surveyors, carried out individual projects of dispossession and erasure throughout the nineteenth century. In the process, they shaped the space of the Seneca reservations and the trajectory of American expansion. In justifying dispossession, American settlers crafted elaborate sets of laws and rights. These conflicting claims became so entangled that dispossession was …

Reimagining Reentry: A Vision For Transformative Justice Beyond The Carceral State, Kemiya Nutter

Ethnic Studies Senior Capstone Papers

Throughout the past decade, mass incarceration has emerged as a buzzword within academic scholarship and public policy discourse that seeks to examine the unparalleled expansion of the contemporary carceral state. With 2.2 million Americans imprisoned and over 7 million under various forms of penal control, the United States maintains the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The unprecedented inflation in the nation’s incarceration rate is a direct manifestation of the 1970’s War on Drugs, which enabled the legislative transformations that permeate modern sentencing policy and procedure. Institutions of policing, surveillance, and incarceration are constitutive features of the carceral system’s …

Congratulations, Class Of 2020! 1:5, Department Of Ethnic Studies

Ethnic Studies Department Newsletters

Message from the Chair; Senior Recognition; Gabe Fallis Receives Ethnic Studies Community Scholar & Dr. Judy Rauner Social Justice Awards; Elie Nyembo Honored with the L. Reuben Mitchell Award for Campus-wide Impact; ETHN Senior Spotlight Kemiya Jenab-Nutter; ETHN Senior Spotlight King Elie Nyembo; Faculty & Staff Updates, Executive Assistant Esther Aguilar: We Got You!; Dr. Jesse Mills: Being Together; Professor of Practice & Tribal Liaison Perse Lewis: Desert Blooms and Pitbull Love; Congratulations to Our Amazing Class of 2020!.

Reclaiming Images Of Black Women: An Investigation Of Black Womanhood In Visual Communication, Taylor Simone Thomas

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This thesis investigates how Black womanhood has been visually represented in hopes to either recognize Black women as full, nuanced, and legitimate participants of society or to reinforce monolithic representations built from the constructs of social, political, and economic oppression. It also gives an analysis of Black feminism and how Black feminist thought can be applied to the creative process in hopes of challenging visual misrepresentations of Black womanhood. The aim of this thesis is to show that artists and visual communicators do have a responsibility to be conscious of the messages conveyed in their work. In addition, they must …

Empire Rules: Cultures Of U.S. Imperialism In Multi-Ethnic Literature Of The U.S., Luis Paganelli Marin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation concerns contemporary multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. (MELUS) and empire. Namely, contemporary MELUS invites a reckoning with U.S. Empire, an amalgamation of settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, which works through ahistorical and transhistorical cultural narratives. In turn, contemporary multi-ethnic writers uncover our obscured colonial and imperial histories and legacies that racialize, criminalize, and otherize people of color in the U.S within our present moment. This dissertation, then, analyzes recent novels and poetry collections by African American, Native American, Latinx, and African diasporic writers to unmask the efforts of empire-building with the material effects on colonized, marginalized peoples. Reckoning …

'The Once Peaceful Little Town:' Edmondson, Arkansas, And The Decline Of African American Landownership, Samuel Morris Ownbey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the systematic dispossession of African American property by white planters in the Arkansas Delta. It argues white planters, backed by a legal system favorable to their interests, expropriated the black land in the once flourishing community of Edmondson, Arkansas. Founded in 1902 by African American business and political leaders, the Edmondson Home and Improvement Company purchased farmland and town lots and began to sell or rent the land to African Americans coming to the area. Located in Crittenden County, Edmondson represented black defiance in the face of Jim Crow laws and white supremacy. The town consisted of …

An Actor's Process In Bridging The Gap Between First-Generation And Multi-Generational African-American Identities., Mutiyat Ade-Salu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects my process assimilating into the role of Chelle in the production of Detroit '67 at the University of Louisville. Although there have been instances of actors crossing lines of gender, nationality, race, and even sexuality, to perform roles in contemporary theatre, discussion about generational differences is almost non-existent. Through historical research, first-hand interviews, and conventional acting methods, I explore the world of my role, searching for spirituality, authenticity, and identity. Additionally, I explain my use of The WAY Method ®, a process I began creating in 2014 to help actors be clear with who they are before …

Afrosonic Noise: A Transnational Black Feminist Musicological Study Of Global Black Joy In Black North American Rock Music And Afro Argentinian Music Performance., Jerika M Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I have decided that my academic mission, at this juncture at least, is to find common links between 2 groups of people that have come to know themselves through paralleling but colonially different environments. Perhaps it is wise for me to explore the similarities between Afro Argentine Black Music and African North American Music in closer ethnomusicological detail using feminist praxis—after all both communities are part of the African Diaspora and producing Black music. I do this by reconstructing a very limited genealogy of Black Femme’s and their contribution to their respective musical communities. I draw parallels between the global …

Geographic Imaginaries Of Urban Spatial Segregation: A Case Study Of The West End Neighborhoods In Louisville, Kentucky., Amber Dock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this thesis is to translate the framework of geographic imaginaries into an urban context in order to capture a narrative of how residents conceptualize and experience segregation. This framework is rooted in an investigation of local discourses as they exist within a specific social, political, and historical context. Institutionalized segregation and structural racism are the foundations on which the American urban context studied here was built upon. This study employs multiple methods, including contextualizing the study area, analyzing discursive content, and visualizing the results. The results of these analyses included empirically connecting concentrations of protected classes to …

Contemporary Francophone West African Social Movements In The Rise Of Neo Pan-Africanism: A Case Study Of Y En A Marre In Senegal., Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba Ndiaye

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of the Y en a marre movement in 2011 has reshaped the face of social activism in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. In less than a decade of its existence, Y’en a marre has become iconic in Senegalese civil society and beyond. Their effective opposition to the Wade regime between 2011 and 2012 reverberated beyond the Senegalese border through their slogan “touche pas à ma constitution” (Do not touch my constitution), a rallying cry that young people in Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo later appropriated, thus giving the movement a Pan-African platform. The birth of Y’en …

Importance Of Grief And Loss Support, Omar I. Cortez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The capstone was implemented at the Safety Nest, a wellness center that provides socio-emotional and mental health services to all students within Everett Alvarez High School through the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports multi-tiered system. The school serves 2,664 students; 90.2% of Hispanic/Latino ethnicity, and it is part of the Salinas Union High School District. The social problem addressed by the project is that “There are too many high school students in California experiencing emotional distress, which can result in academic failure, substance use, or suicide”. The project consisted of collaborating with the NEST’s Behavioral Intervention Specialist to implement an …

My Family, Their History: Using Exploratory Inquiry & Pragmatic Methods To Learn History, Lowellen Sucgang

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

History education is at a crossroads. The availability of information at our fingertips has the potential to change how the non-historian sees history and the other social sciences. This capstone researched ways the non-historian can utilize the changing face of history education by implementing the pragmatic methods of John Dewey’s education philosophy called instrumentalism. Principal issues discussed include the pros and cons of out-of-classroom history education, utilization of exploratory inquiry for research and the usefulness of primary sources for a historiography. To apply instrumentalism ideals and methods, I created a historiography about my ancestors and how their lives intertwined with …

Curating Digital Pedagogy In The Humanities, Katherine Harris, Matthew Gold, Rebecca Frost Davis

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This is the published introduction to the born-digital, open-access, peer-reviewed *Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities*. More a rationale and scholarly study of both Digital Pedagogy and DPiH in general, this introduces articulates the uses, theory, rationale about digital pedagogy as it has been shaped in U.S. institutions since the explosion of Digital Humanities in 2009. As a separate field now, Digital Pedagogy is built on the generosity of its practitioners, but saving the *stuff* of teaching and pedagogy is difficult. The introduction historicizes this now-published project, its open peer review process, and its development in the early years (starting in …

Latinos In Massachusetts: Salvadorans, Phillip Granberry, Krizia Valentino

Gastón Institute Publications

A civil war in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s created a need for the United States to accept refugees, but the U.S. Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) seldom granted petitions for political asylum by Salvadorans. In response, the Cambridge City Council in1985 passed a resolution that gave sanctuary to Salvadoran and other refugees. This helped facilitate Salvadoran migration to Massachusetts. Now after several decades, the Salvadoran population mostly resides in several cities and towns in the Greater Boston area, and over 40% of their population is native born. The social and economic analysis that follows paints …

Perceptions Of Help-Seeking Likelihood For Depression: Examining The Relative Predictive Value Of Ethnicity And Barriers To Care, Linda Esperanza Guzman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Latinx and non-Latinx White adults 18 years of age and older experience depression at proportional rates. However, Latinxs seek specialized care for depression at lower rates than non-Latinx Whites, suggesting these groups experience barriers in accessing care differently. This study sought to test the theoretical steps of help-seeking as informed by the Gaining Access and Treatment Equity model (GATE model; Bridges, 2018). According to the GATE model, successful help-seeking means navigating a series of barriers: sequentially, these are perceived need, attitudinal barriers, and structural barriers. Participants (N = 987) were either Latinx (n = 437) or non-Latinx White (n = …