Since its emergence, heavy metal music met with serious opposition. Accused of promoting violence, suicide, drug abuse and distorted images of sex, heavy metal artists were considered a threat to...Show moreSince its emergence, heavy metal music met with serious opposition. Accused of promoting violence, suicide, drug abuse and distorted images of sex, heavy metal artists were considered a threat to the well-being of America’s youth. These accusations were major arguments in the 1980s religious conservatives’ crusade to establish family values. Trying to raise parents’ awareness of the music’s alleged catastrophic effects, these conservatives campaigned to restrain or eliminate heavy metal music. In 1985, the then newly-formed Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) condemned several artists for advocating violence and substance abuse and for their predilection of the occult in their songs’ lyrics. PMRC created an agenda that was later used in court cases against heavy metal artists.Show less
This thesis applies Du Bois's and Fanon's theoretical concepts about the construction of black identity in a white-dominated and postcolonial context to Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven and McKay's Home...Show moreThis thesis applies Du Bois's and Fanon's theoretical concepts about the construction of black identity in a white-dominated and postcolonial context to Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven and McKay's Home to Harlem - two novels of the Harlem Renaissance which have garnered little scholarly attention to date. Thesis statement: "Both Van Vechten and McKay wrote from a context which invested the dominant white culture with more value than its black counterpart. Although Van Vechten was sympathetic to African Americans, his white patriarchal perspective bleeds through the cracks of his narrative and his novel’s characters fail to escape stereotype and allegory. McKay shows himself as aware of black stereotypes as Van Vechten is, but he sometimes challenges them explicitly. The trouble, however, is that McKay’s construct of blackness depends to a far greater degree on an adherence to the dominant white paradigm than the author himself seems aware of: he has internalized the white value system of his Other. Constructing the black Self on the stage of the white Other, as Frantz Fanon would say, proves perpetually problematic."Show less
Racism is one of the main social issues in the United States which manifests itself in widespread unrest such as the LA riots after the acquittal of the officers responsible for savagely beating...Show moreRacism is one of the main social issues in the United States which manifests itself in widespread unrest such as the LA riots after the acquittal of the officers responsible for savagely beating Rodney King in the late 1990s and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the mid 2010s in the United States. Over the course of the last few decades Hollywood has increased its frequency of producing movies which are set in times of slavery. The degree of (relative) agency of the black protagonists in a selection of these movies (Amistad, 12 Years a Slave and The Birth of a Nation (2016)) becomes a method to criticise the persistence of racial injustice in the United States .Show less
This thesis studies two ground-breaking museum exhibitions that took place in New York in 1966 and 1969 respectively that played an important role in the construction of Jewish American and African...Show moreThis thesis studies two ground-breaking museum exhibitions that took place in New York in 1966 and 1969 respectively that played an important role in the construction of Jewish American and African American memory culture and identity construction.Show less
The political, social and ecclesiastical anxiety and fragility of colonial New England was manipulated by two opposing groups‒the Radicals and the Conservatives‒both of whom helped cause, and...Show moreThe political, social and ecclesiastical anxiety and fragility of colonial New England was manipulated by two opposing groups‒the Radicals and the Conservatives‒both of whom helped cause, and exploited, the 1692 witchcraft crisis in Salem, Massachusetts. I identify the “Radicals” as a group of mostly young, female and poor individuals both instigating and reveling in the breakdown of an oppressive community. They were experimenting with a world turned upside-down, a grand social experiment both echoing and inverting the Puritan experiment Salem was built upon. The very society that oppressed them, Puritan New England, had set a precedent for dissent and the formation of a new, radical, society. I will argue the opposing group, the “Conservatives,” consisted of older, mostly male figures trying desperately to maintain the establishment. I will argue that their interpretation of the actions of the possessed was proposed with specific intent and was formative in the continuation of the crisis. The crisis was, therefore, not an inadvertent consequence of their fractured society, but a fulfilment of the desires of each group.Show less
On August 9, 2014, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson shoots down a black teenager by the name of Michael Brown in downtown Ferguson, Missouri. Brown, having been shot six times, was killed on...Show moreOn August 9, 2014, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson shoots down a black teenager by the name of Michael Brown in downtown Ferguson, Missouri. Brown, having been shot six times, was killed on the spot. The shooting sparked two weeks of violence and looting, a civil unrest that became known as 'the Ferguson riots'. In its aftermath, theorists have argued that the riots have ultimately resulted in "The Ferguson Effect": the belief that crime numbers have risen due to police's incompetence to retain authority. However, this belief appears to be false, as crime statistics show that crime had already started to rise in the months prior to the police shooting. Nevertheless, the term still circulates in the media on a regular basis. This thesis will take a more rational approach towards the supposed “Ferguson Effect”. First, I will focus on historical crime data, provided by the Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics (UCR). Furthermore, this thesis will focus on comparable statistics of a similar civil unrest, the 2001 riots of Cincinnati, in order to spot potential similarities and/or disparities. The findings will invalidate the hypothesis of a “Ferguson Effect”, while at the same time prove the existence of a rise in crime in the years following the 2001 riots in Cincinnati -- “the Cincinnati Effect”, if you will. But as opposed to "The Ferguson Effect", the term has never been introduced by the media. In terms of civil unrests, this thesis will focus on the changes in media coverage by comparing the reports of four newspapers (Cincinnati Enquirer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York Times and the Los Angeles Times) on both the Cincinnati riots in 2001 and the Ferguson riots in 2014. Furthermore, a cross-sectional analysis will be conducted to find out the extent to which coverage has transformed, both in the case of regional and national coverage specifically as well as comprehensive coverage. Ultimately, these analyses will confirm the following thesis statement: the term “Ferguson Effect”, introduced by the media in its coverage on the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, is a result of the media’s growing involvement in police brutality against black citizens, as compared to the coverage on the 2001 riots in Cincinnati, Ohio.Show less
