Third word subjects: The politics and production of Central American-American culture

Cardenas, Maritza E University of Michigan 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation traces the emergence of an alternative Latino identity formation referred to as Central American-American. Informed by diaspora studies, subaltern studies, and cultural studies, it examines Central American and U.S. Central American texts to highlight how Central American-American identity and culture has been forged by such factors as: inherited ideologies from the isthmus, the socio-cultural landscape of the U.S, specifically the city of Los Angeles, and by its current (dis)location within Latinidad. As such, it reveals how Central American-American identity, emanating as it does from transnational networks composed from geo-political locations like "the isthmus", the U.S., and translocal spaces like Los Angeles, alters what it means to be Central American, as well as reveals the limitation present in Latino discourse which attempts to speak for, but which cannot account for all of its presumptive constituents. My analysis sketches the historical and discursive contours of inclusive- exclusion as it pertains to the Central American nation and subject, as they are traced within literary and cultural practices. In Chapter 1, I examine 19th and 20th century political and historical texts to argue that rather than being read as just an "isthmus," Central America needs to be understood as a national formation known as Patria Grande, which produces a cultural nationalism that influences the way Central American immigrants re-constitute themselves in the diaspora. In Chapter 2 I analyze immigrant testimonials, the urban space known as "Little Central America" and the COFECA parade, in order to illuminate how these cultural expressions have facilitated a Central American pan-ethnic consciousness, and a thriving identity politics in Los Angeles. In Chapter 3 I explore the contentious and constitutive relationship between the Central American-American and Latino subject. In it, I suggest that Central American-American subjectivity is as an effect of power relations whereby the categories of Latino, Latin American and American are maintained through the exclusion of U.S. Central Americans. Subsequently, this dissertation highlights how these third-word subjects, labeled "Central American" in the U.S., often produce in their cultural expressions a notion of Central American-America ness that both rewrites the Central American imaginary and challenges conventional articulations of Latinidad.

"Building houses out of chicken legs": African American women, material culture, and the powers of self-definition

Williams-Forson, Psyche Aletheia University of Maryland College Park 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

Chicken has played prominent roles in the lives of African American women. This African American foodways and material culture dissertation articulates the complexity of black women's legacies with food as a form of cultural work. Black women have employed chicken in myriad ways to provide for their families, shape a distinctive culture, define themselves, and exert agency in the face of racist and hostile environments. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, this study privileges instead the ways black women (and men) have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to “the gospel bird.&rdquo. These associations with chicken suggest the central organizing themes of this study: how black women arrive at varying degrees of self-definition using a material object like chicken, how they defy conventional representations of blackness, and how they exert agency in diverse ways. Understanding these phenomenon clarify how present interpretations of this association are rooted in a racist, denigrating, and yet agency-filled past. This study suggests a model for further studies in African American life and culture, including foodways. Examining various representations of African American interactions with chicken debunks the racist imagery that has helped to shape venerable perceptions about black people and food. Methodologies in foodways, material culture studies, ethnography, literary criticism, and cultural studies are used to reread a broad range of primary and secondary sources—legal statutes, greetings cards, stereoviews, sheet music, photographs, literature, art, and film—from perspectives of black people. Focusing on women discloses traditions and practices of feminism that inhere in and around food—greatly exceeding simply domesticity. Race, class, gender, and power tensions that surround chicken, black women's self-actualization, self-definition, and self-awareness, chicken in African American travel narratives, as a tool for “signifyin'” by church folks, and gender malpractice also emerge in this study. Close readings are given to literature, popular fiction, film, culture, and art, including: BeBe Moore Campbell's <italic>Your Blues Ain't Like Mine</italic> (1992), Ann Allen Shockley's <italic>Say Jesus and Come to Me</italic> (1982), Chris Rock's “Bigger and Blacker” (1999), George Tillman, Jr.'s <italic> Soul Food</italic> (1999), and Kara Walker's “Keys to the Coop” (1997).

Out of place: Asian North America in transnational borderlands

Day, Iyko University of California, Berkeley 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

Out of Place explores Asian American and Asian Canadian cultural responses to the racial, gender, and sexual ideologies embedded in icons of white settler nationalism in Canada and the US. The transnational icons I examine include the transcontinental railroad, the North American landscape, and the national museum. My analysis of these "transnational nationalisms" is mediated through a multimedia archive that features work by Richard Fung, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jin-me Yoon, Tseng Kwong Chi, Paul Wong, and Maya Lin. I argue that these works expose and undermine the transnational logics embedded in iconic sites of nationalism through strategies of disidentification. By setting Asian North American cultural forms in dialogue with iconic nationalisms, my dissertation attempts to reconfigure the symbolic terrains of white settler nationalism by calling attention to the historically repressed "borderlands" embedded in them, generative places of meaning shaped by Asian North Americans. I situate this project at the interdisciplinary crossroads of American studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies. By drawing attention to parallel social and cultural patterns in Canada and the US, my project attempts to upset the discourse of American exceptionalism by pointing to the interdependence of Canadian and US settler nationalisms. I employ an Asian North American critical framework to expose the transnational features of white settler nationalism, and suggest that the historical similarity of Asian labor recruitment and exploitation, anti-Asian immigration policy, and widespread anti-Asian sentiment in Canada and the US are constitutive rather than derivative features of white settler nationalism. This focus on transnational intersections is influenced in particular by Latina/o border scholars' attempts to decenter the US by emphasizing hemispheric convergences and intersections that impact and shape US culture and society. In addition, my project's attention to Asian Canadian social contexts and cultural formations is an attempt to make specific interventions in the field of Asian American studies, whose long-time emphasis on transnationalism I argue is structurally constrained by an east-west migratory orientation that occludes a north-south analytic axis. Granted that recent Asian American scholarship has begun to expand the field's scope to include the examination of Asian diasporas elsewhere in the Americas, this work has mostly constituted "the Americas" as south of the US-Mexico border and in the Caribbean, which similarly obstructs a view of the large Asian population in Canada. Finally, in keeping with the comparative focus of ethnic studies, my project emphasizes connections between Asian American and Asian Canadians as well as across racial groups in order to highlight the intersecting dynamics of race, gender, and sexual oppression.

Unpacking the "AAPI" Label: Exploring the Heterogeneity of Mental Health Outcomes and Experiences among Asian-American and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander College Students

Sucaldito, Ana Dominique The Ohio State University ProQuest Dissertations & 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

Asian-Americans and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islanders (NHOPIs) experience health and healthcare disparities compared to their white counterparts. In both communities, which are often jointly described as Asian-American Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), college students represent a vulnerable subpopulation in regard to mental health outcomes and healthcare. Unfortunately, relatively little is known about the mental health outcomes and experiences of Asian-American and NHOPI undergraduate students. This dissertation sought to evaluate how race, gender, and the intersection of the two affect the mental health outcomes and lived experiences of Asian-American and NHOPI undergraduate students.Three separate, but interconnected, studies using both qualitative and quantitative methods were completed. First, a secondary data analysis of the Healthy Minds dataset (2018-2019) provided a characterization of depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being outcomes for Asian-American and NHOPI undergraduate students across the United States. Second, a qualitative semi-structured interview study was conducted among Asian-American undergraduate students; this allowed me to explore and analyze their lived experiences of filial piety and how it intersected with mental health, race, gender, and other macro-level factors. Finally, a cross-sectional quantitative survey of Asian-American and white undergraduate students was launched. This survey was developed using survey input from research experts in public health, survey methodology, and/or Asian-American health and input from focus groups with Asian-American undergraduates. The survey collected information on filial piety and mental health to determine how race, gender, and the intersection of the two impacted filial piety, depression, anxiety, and psychological well-being. This research had three main conclusions. First, the mental health outcomes of AAPI undergraduate students are heterogenous. Differences between Asian-American and NHOPI students were found for depression-related outcomes; additionally, differences across gender and ethnicity were documented for Asian-American college students in both qualitative and quantitative studies. Second, the lived experience of filial piety influences the mental health outcomes and experiences of Asian-American college students. Lastly, intersectionality theory and principles, such as the use of non-additive assumptions, incorporation of reflexivity, and focus on macro- and multi-level analyses, strengthened this research. The results of these studies suggest that increased attention to the heterogeneity of ?AAPI? college students in mental health research would improve our understanding of their health outcomes, particularly for vulnerable subpopulations such as NHOPIs and Asian-American cisgender women. Additionally, the results from the filial piety studies have the potential to contribute to culturally humble and targeted care for Asian-Americans, or care that is cognizant, respectful, and created specifically for Asian-American populations and their cultures. As such, this research is a small, but important, contribution to understanding and mitigating mental health inequities for marginalized communities.

Everything you wanted to know about American Indian Studies, but were afraid to ask: Assessing Indian Studies as an academic discipline

Harrison, Spintz Stiles The University of Arizona 2006 해외박사(DDOD)

One impact of the Civil Rights Era was the development of American Indian Studies as an academic discipline. Native American college students were tired of the mundane courses regarding Indians and protested by demanding courses relevant to them as Indian people. As a result, the discipline was literally developed overnight with no structure regarding the discipline. Nearly forty years later, what has American Indian Studies accomplished? The purpose of this research was to explore pertinent issues regarding the discipline and to offer potential reasons why the discipline has yet to develop a working hypothesis, definition, and research methodology. Research methods were gathered via email survey and face-to-face interviews. Participants for the email survey were identified through individual AIS department web pages. Two-hundred and forty AIS Professors were sent a short five question survey with instructions requesting a reply within five weeks. The interview criterion was based upon their contributions to the literature regarding the discipline, role of AIS Departmental Chairperson, and role as Professor of American Indian Studies. The results from the research revealed information that both agrees and differs from the four hypotheses. The significant factor concerning the research was the low number of email survey replies. In addition, nearly one-third of the respondents wrote of their inability to provide answers suitable for the research design. After the deadline of the email survey, respondents informed me of their reluctance to reply citing they generally do not reply to email surveys, did not have the time to reply, they could not provide sufficient answers, and they lack of interest in replying. This data provided newfound information concerning the discipline and the instructors teaching AIS courses. In direct contrast to the data, some spiring information was found from the instruments. 11 Additional AIS venues for publication were identified as was a reason explaining why AIS does not have a paradigm. This research was designed to assist in the dialogue between AIS professors and AIS departments/programs and to point out the need for maintaining collaborations for the further develop of American Indian Studies.

Sociophonetic Perception of African American English in Minnesota

Abdurrahman, Muhammad Ibn Abdullah University of Minnesota 2014 해외박사(DDOD)

Although it can be authentically spoken by people who don't share their lineage, African American English, a variety of American English, is primarily spoken by the descendants of forced immigrants from Africa to North America. An assumption underlying most work on African American English (AAE) is that the variety is not subject to regional variation. Despite this assumption, some studies have found regional variation in AAE (Hinton and Pollock, 2000; Thomas, 2007). This variation is typically explained as assimilation toward or away from local varieties spoken by European Americans. Some studies have suggested that it assimilates with other dialects in less segregated areas or where blacks have greater access to educational opportunity (Hinton and Pollock, 2000). Other studies show that AAE speakers are less likely to produce mainstream regional variants and even less likely in cases of greater racial segregation (Labov and Harris 1986; Bailey, 2001). This dissertation studies listeners' associations between regional variation and ethnicity. The study focuses on the influence of the regional features of Minnesota English on the perception of talker ethnicity. Hinton and Pollock (2000) begin their study of regional AAE phonology with the understanding that that the Midwest is less segregated than the south, and consider that this may imply that AAE in the Midwest is more likely to assimilate with regional European American varieties. Hence, we would predict that listeners in Minnesota would expect some tendency on the part of African Americans to use Minnesotan English (MNE) features, and hence said listeners would have little hesitation labeling speech containing Minnesotan variants as having been produced by European Americans even if it were produced by an African American. This study examined this topic with a perception experiment. Previous research has shown that listeners can ascertain a speaker's race from audio-only samples of content-neutral speech (Buck, 1968; Roberts, 1966; Walton and Orlikoff, 1994; Plichta, 2001; Thomas and Reaser, 2004). We examined listeners' judgments of the likelihood of particular speaker-listener comparisons. We paired the speech of African Americans and European Americans from Minnesota with pictures of African Americans and European Americans. We were particularly interested in whether listeners would be less likely to judge the speaker-picture pairs to be a match when the tokens contained variants that were characteristic of the 'mainstream' regional variety spoken in Minnesota, and the pictures were of African Americans. Listeners were more likely to rate actual matches between voice and face ethnicity as matches than they were to rate them as mismatches for male voices, but not for female ones. The unwillingness to rate voices produced by European Americans with local Minnesotan features as matches to African American faces suggests that listeners do not believe the local variant of AAE to incorporate Minnesota English features, at least for male speakers. Implications for models of sociophonetic perception and for studies of variation in AAE are discussed.

Back to the classroom: Afrocentricity and teacher-research in first-year writing

Perryman-Clark, Staci M Michigan State University 2010 해외박사(DDOD)

My dissertation, "Back to the Classroom: Afrocentricity and Teacher-Research in First-Year Writing," is a qualitative empirically-based teacher-research study that examines the ways in which African American students and all students perform expository writing tasks using an Ebonics-based Rhetoric and Composition focused first-year writing curriculum (WRA 125). I begin unpacking how Afrocentric pedagogy is understood and situated in this project. While Afrocentric scholarship targets multiple disciplines, including education and sociolinguistics, the primary audience for this project is teachers and researchers in Composition Studies. I further address how the concept of Afrocentricity is understood by 1) clarifying the relationship between Afrocentric pedagogy and the African and African American worldview, since many definitions of Afrocentricity suggest a focus on, or discussion of, African and African American worldviews; and 2) explaining the relationship between Afrocentric pedagogy and Ebonics since many Afrocentric courses focus on Ebonics as both communicative and cultural practices. In subsequent chapters of the dissertation I situate my own work with teacher-research within the context of four previous classroom and teacher-research studies on African American students. Based on these four studies I have found a limited focus on the uses of Ebonics phonological and syntactical patterns strategically and rhetorically, in addition to the focus being only on African American students. I extend these composition teacher and classroom-research studies by 1) also including a discussion of phonology and African and African American students' uses of Ebonies phonology and syntax purposefully, and 2) including data from non-Black students that point to how they might benefit also from Afrocentric pedagogy. After laying the groundwork for Afrocentricity and teacher-research, I discuss the findings from my own teacher-research study, with one chapter focusing on African American students' expository writing patterns, and another chapter focusing on all students' work produced in the Afrocentric curriculum. Data results from African American students reflect the ways in which African American students employ AAR and Ebonics phonology and syntax rhetorically across major writing assignments. When looking at all students' work, my findings illustrate that students' essays reveal tensions and conflicts reflected in students' writing, reading, and research practices. Improvement is still needed in argument construction that moves beyond summary, the use of evidence, and citation practices. In the conclusion, I discuss the methodological implications, surprises and limitations of the work done with my WRA 125 course. I also acknowledge methodological challenges that emerge both from the study itself in addition to how my institution's human subjects review board chose to interpret the study design.

Technically American: How American Jewry Received and Responded to Technology, 1880-1965

Rabinowitz, Tamar Susan The George Washington University 2016 해외박사(DDOD)

"Technically American: How American Jewry Received and Responded to Technology, 1880-1965," explores the entanglement of American technological culture, Jewish ethnic identity, and religious practice in the twentieth century. Through a series of case studies, it tracks the impact of the telephone, acoustic technologies, kitchen appliances and food sciences, as well as the automobile, on the American Jewish experience over the course of several generations. A chapter on the telephone zeroes in on the vexing issue of foreign accent, while another on acoustics and the microphone looks at the transformation of the sounds of the synagogue and the nature of religious worship. A third chapter on mechanized food production closely considers the kitchen as a contested site of cultural authenticity while a fourth, focusing on transportation, pinpoints the conflict between Jewish ritual and the momentum of modern life. These case studies showcase the ways in which American Jewry consciously and actively grappled with the tools of American modernity. The American Jewish community welcomed these technologies into their daily lives but was also quick to address their costs to community, tradition, and religious observance. For American Jewry, technology was more than a product of scientific advancement; it was integral to the reshaping of modern Jewish life and its major institutions-- the home, the synagogue, and notions of community. "Technically American" employs the categories of efficiency, speed, and sound to make sense of American Jewry's response to technology. By studying the ways in which American Jews adopted the devices that made efficiency, speed, and the transmission of sound possible, as well as the cultural ideals they embodied, this project probes the social implications of technology. It harnesses a range of sources, including the Yiddish press and immigrant memoirs, advertisements, vaudeville skits, cookbooks, synagogue records and architectural acoustic plans, as well as rabbinical debates and decrees about the uses of technology in modern religious observance. Taken together, these materials bring to bear the fundamental role of technology in defining Jewish culture in twentieth century America.

Violating maternity: Servitude, sexual abuse, lynching and the (un)making of the black maternal subject

Frank, Michele Sharon University of Pennsylvania 2015 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation argues that African American women writers have identified the black maternal figure as a primary symbol of black cultural trauma. Through an examination of selected texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, I isolate writers' and dramatists' explorations of servitude, sexual abuse and lynching as systemic, historical violations of blackness and womanhood that have shaped black women's maternal experiences. African American women writers' depictions of black women's experience of and resistance to such systemic violations of themselves, their children, and their communities reveal how their traumatized subjectivities defy facile understandings of maternal connection, love and protection. This dissertation argues that the writers' construction of this maternal aesthetic signals an enduring concern with the intergenerational effects of compounded trauma and of black people's sometimes self-wounding efforts simultaneously to contest their violation and affirm their humanity. My dissertation explicates the texts' meanings within the socio-historical contexts of their creation and publication as well as on emphasizing attention to the periods of their representations. From its beginnings, African American literature has engaged both dominant and resistant ideologies of being in, first, the American Colonies and, later, the United States. Authors who have grown out of a markedly marginalized population have negotiated and participated in an artistically expressive tradition---literature---to which they routinely had been denied access and to which it was assumed they had little to contribute. African American literary and cultural criticism and Feminist Studies inform my methodology. While conversing with the theoretical constructs of Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction and New Historicism, Feminist and African American critical studies have insisted on modes of inquiry which foreground analyses of class, gender, race and, increasingly, sexuality as interconnected, systemic structures of identity that shape African American lives. These tropes of traumatic violation recur in other African American-authored texts, thereby corroborating my premise that a sustained explication of their representational significance contributes to the scholarly examination of the ways in which the symbolic work of cultural producers shapes our understanding of the formation of black subjectivities.

Postcolonial Theory and Native American Literature

Sun, Xiaochen The University of Arizona ProQuest Dissertations & 2023 해외박사(DDOD)

Studying Native American literature through the lens of postcolonial theory has been controversial both in the field of Native American studies and postcolonial studies. However, this historical study of the evolution of thought among of scholars of Native American literature regarding the main research question of whether postcolonial theory can be meaningfully applied to Native American literature leads to the discovery that literary nationalists and cosmopolitans-supporters and opponents of postcolonial theory in the field of Native American studies-are actually working toward the same direction, revealing the impact of colonial discourses upon Native American people and striving to deconstruct such colonial influences.Eight postcolonial terms, including Antonio Gramsci's hegemony, Bill Ashcroft's appropriation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's strategic essentialism, Homi Bhabha's mimicry, liminality and vernacular cosmopolitanism, Frantz Fanon's critical nationalism and the idea of center and margin in Bill Ashcroft, Careth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back, are systematically selected and applied to four Native American texts-D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded (1986), James Welch's Fools Crow (1936), Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988), and Frances Washburn's The Sacred White Turkey (2010)-both to examine if they can illuminate the influences of colonization upon Native American people, and to address the concerns of postcolonial scholars and scholars in the field of Native American literature.