A intellectual history research. How did the ideas on philanthropy and doing good in America evolve from 1650-1830? Increased individualism and secularism influenced the way in which philanthropy...Show moreA intellectual history research. How did the ideas on philanthropy and doing good in America evolve from 1650-1830? Increased individualism and secularism influenced the way in which philanthropy and doing good were viewed.Show less
Due to an increasing public push for multiculturalism in mainstream media, films have (at least since the 1990s) been attempting to give a more positive representation of what is deemed to be a...Show moreDue to an increasing public push for multiculturalism in mainstream media, films have (at least since the 1990s) been attempting to give a more positive representation of what is deemed to be a racial and cultural Other from the target audience’s perspective, and animation films are no exception. Case in point, while the two animated films discussed in this study, The Book of Life (2014) and Coco (2017), are made by different studios, they share a general goal of trying to give such a representation of a racial and cultural Other for a Western target audience. This goal makes these films some of the latest examples in a long trend of American animation aiming to broaden their representation of minority cultures and ethnicities, in response to pressure from various social movements in the 1990s (Palmer 2, 4). Consequently, such animation has increasingly received academic reading, with scholars studying the medium’s role in the representation of racial and cultural Others and multiculturalism in general. This study will add to this budding field by analyzing two contemporary iterations of this representational trend.Show less
In my analysis of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), I will look...Show moreIn my analysis of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), I will look at the ways in which writers employ various literary techniques (fragmentation, syntax disruption, ellipses, text/image layout, repetitions, symbols, photograph insertion, intertexts, framing of panels, and so on) in order to represent the unspeakable and evasive nature of traumatic experiences. The use and interplay of these techniques in the image-text setting of the two novels and Spiegelman’s graphic narrative leads to the construction of discursive events that help the reader understand and feel emotionally engaged with the narrator’s story, thus encouraging empathetic reading and contributing to secondary witnessing of the narrator’s trauma on the part of the reader.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
The claim to female slave agency is compared in the narratives of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs, in which the claim that slavery is immoral, is presented as the main argument.
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
The genre of the captivity narrative is closely connected both historically and ideologically with the colonization of the Americas. The genre emerged in the 1550s, when Hans Staden published an...Show moreThe genre of the captivity narrative is closely connected both historically and ideologically with the colonization of the Americas. The genre emerged in the 1550s, when Hans Staden published an account of his Brazilian captivity in True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America in 1557 (Michaela Schmolz-Haberlein 745). In 1575, Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda published Memoir on the Country and Ancient Indian Tribes of Florida, in which he describes his captivity with the Calusa Indians. The first example of a captivity narrative in colonial North America is Mary Rowlandson’s The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), which became the prototype of the genre in American literature. These three early autobiographical narratives and the fictional captivity narratives that were produced in their wake offer the colonizer’s perspective on the often violent conflicts and cultural encounters between European colonizers and the indigenous population that are a central theme in the genre. In this thesis I will focus on the ideological and cultural work that the captivity narrative performs, both in Mary Rowlandson’s prototypical narrative and Kevin Costner’s 1990 film Dances with Wolves, which presents itself as a kind of counter-captivity narrative. I will do so by providing a comparative close reading of the text and the film in their cultural context.Show less
At the end of the nineteenth century, department stores formed a new type of shops with new selling methods, lavish shop design and an innovative business model. Literary naturalism provided a way...Show moreAt the end of the nineteenth century, department stores formed a new type of shops with new selling methods, lavish shop design and an innovative business model. Literary naturalism provided a way of understanding these changes in society and consumption. Based on Herbert Spencer’s concept of the survival of the fittest, characters in novels by authors such as Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser are fiercely competing individuals who are determined to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Their behaviour is often described in terms of brutal nature, uncontrollable temperaments, and animal instincts. This comparison of human beings to animals - which in the case of naturalism is not merely metaphorical - is also at the core of what retail theory nowadays labels as impulse buying, a type of shopping behaviour without overt rational consideration and deliberation. According to retailers, lavish shop design was expected to provoke this new type of shopping behaviour, and, around the turn of the twentieth century, the naturalist novel tended to describe and explain this combination of manipulation and shopping behaviour.Show less
The Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) started with a hashtag: in 2012 Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created the slogan “Black Lives Matter” after a case of police brutality that...Show moreThe Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) started with a hashtag: in 2012 Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created the slogan “Black Lives Matter” after a case of police brutality that led to the death of seventeen-year old Trayvon Martin. From the guiding principles of BLM it becomes obvious, that the original idea behind the movement mainly focused on the inclusion of minority groups within Black communities, rather than only on racialized police violence. The movement gained great popularity not only with hashtag-users and participants in protests, but it was also immediately picked up by the media and in public debates, while numerous variations of the slogan emerged to either mock or hijack the movement. The media attention can be divided into three different kinds: reports about the movement in connection to the police shootings, reports about protests and current incidents, and a wider field in which BLM was connected to the cultural scene in the US from 2012 to the present: the cultural discourse. Part of this cultural discourse are Steve McQueen's movie 12 Years A Slave (2013), Ava DuVernay's movie Selma (2014) and Nate Parker's movie The Birth of a Nation (2016), all three historical dramas, as well as Kendrick Lamar's album To Pimp A Butterfly (2015). All four cultural productions were directly connected to BLM by the media. They were brought up in discussions about and within the movement, and, even though BLM was initially created in response to racially motivated police brutality, the three movies also triggered debates about other cultural and societal issues, such as the acknowledgment and representation of Black directors and actors in US cinema. The protagonists of all three films are black heterosexual men. Although Lamar's album provided the anthem of the movement, “Alright”, and addresses police brutality in the other songs as well, it also uses a number of common rap themes, treating women, for instance, from a male-centered and at first glance misogynist perspective. Especially when we look at other Hip Hop artists connected to BLM as well, it becomes clear that the pop-cultural narrative that is associated with BLM is actually about black heterosexual men. Considering that the three founders of BLM are, in their own words, “queer Black women,” this contextualization of the movement is surprising. This thesis investigates the incongruity between the original principles of BLM and its public appearance in (pop)cultural contexts that put a black male heterosexual narrative in the foreground.Show less
One might argue that the Christian themes in Flannery O'Connor's fiction were prevalent not because she wished to produce religious texts about redemption, but rather because Christianity and the...Show moreOne might argue that the Christian themes in Flannery O'Connor's fiction were prevalent not because she wished to produce religious texts about redemption, but rather because Christianity and the church played a great role in her life and in the South in general. In fact, she claimed that “the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ- haunted” (861). This thesis argues that Wise Blood is not a religious novel nor does it have a religious message. Instead, O’Connor deploys the gothic, or more specifically its southern variety of the grotesque, to criticise Evangelical Protestantism for obscuring and sustaining the social injustices in the South.Show less
