Graduate

“The People We Found There Are Tall and Well-Built”

Visions of Native Americans by a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Conquistador

By Carmen Gomez-Galisteo | 0 comments |

The grandson of a conquistador, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca surely wanted to emulate his forebearer’s success when he was appointed treasurer to the Pánfilo de Narváez’s expedition to Florida in 1527. However, much as he wanted to be a conquistador, the failure of the expedition prevented him from fulfilling such aspirations. Instead, he became a captive of the Native Americans, totally dependent upon their protection to survive. Finding himself in the role of slave, merchant, physician, and almost a god to the Native Americans, he soon abandoned his prejudices about Native Americans and got a first-hand experience. With this, he grasped a better understanding of American reality and the manners of the Native Americans that he communicated to others in his Account. From being a man who knew nothing of either America or its inhabitants prior to the expedition, he subsequently became the best source of first hand information for generations of authors and expeditions to the area. Also, different from other analyses of Cabeza de Vaca’s treatment of Native Americans that are limited to his experiences in Florida, this essay also explores Cabeza de Vaca’s attitude towards Native Americans as governor of Argentina later on.

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Disputably a Woman

Recovering Incoherence in Sarah Piatt’s Poetry

By Ben Bagocius | 0 comments |

Within the past twenty years, many scholars have begun to “recover” nineteenth-century American women’s “sentimental” poetry that New Critics and their aesthetics have overlooked.  Sarah Piatt’s poetry in particular has garnered contemporary critical attention as a result of the important “recovery” efforts of scholars such as Paula Bernat Bennett, who celebrate Piatt as a proto-modern feminist who is thus, according to Bennett, “indisputably a woman.”  My article, however, brings Piatt’s “womanhood” and recent criticism’s affirmation of it into dispute.  After charting out the ambivalent rather than coherent discourses surrounding literary “recovery,” sentimentality, modernism, and gender, the lenses usually used through which to read Piatt’s work, I offer a reading of Piatt’s most anthologized poem, “The Palace-Burner.”  My reading aligns Piatt not with a completely legible proto-feminist politics, but with a politics of the ambiguity of identity itself.  Ultimately, my study hopes to encourage a “recovery” method that reads a poet’s political and social identities as propitiously mysterious and open to conjecture rather than subsumes a writer into contemporary discursive allegiances.

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Adolescence, Literature and Censorship:

Unpacking the Controversy Surrounding Judy Blume

By Mallory Szymanski | 0 comments |

While discussing the history of “book banning” and more recent debates on the idea of censorship, the author argues that Judy Blume’s work stands as a point of familiarity, comfort and understanding amongst adolescents. The paper finds its primary focus in Blume’s exploration of the idea of sexual normativity and acceptance amongst peers, but also speaks to broader issues that Blume explores in her texts – diseases, abnormalities, parental association and peer-pressure. Overall, the author asks that both readers and critics re-examine the social, environmental and literary value of Blume’s work within, what the author argues, is an unaccepting, often sceptical social milieu. Blume’s work has been pivotal as a tool for social affirmation and growth among adolescents by citing letters, opinions and critiques who responses reaffirm their love for Blume’s work.

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Jack Kerouac´s and Brenda Frazer´s Shared ‘Romantic Primitivism’:

A Comparative Study of On the Road and For Love of Ray

By Heike Mlakar | 0 comments |

This paper traces the problematic role of racial mythologizing from the hierarchical stance of the romanticizing the Beats. In Jack Kerouac´s On the Road (1957) and Brenda Frazer´s For Love of Ray (1971),the story of her tragic relationship with Beat poet Ray Bremser, the narrators of both works are presented as ‘romantic racialists’ following the steps of Oswald Spengler´s controversial theories of the apocalypse of Western civilization. Living with the suppressed Mexican fellahin population, both authors completely deny the harsh reality of living a life of poverty and social degradation. Instead, the Native Mexican population is depicted as uncorrupted, truly happy, and authentic, while the U.S. represents failing humanity. By juxtaposing Frazer´s female experience of Mexican life against the experiences of Kerouac, this paper argues for a gendered reading of Beat literature as both an anti-American escape and the tendency of Western Orientalizing and fetishizing.

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Dissenting Americans or Disloyal Deviants?:

New Left "Anti-Americanism" in America (1962-1975)

By Lindsey Churchill | 0 comments |

The impartial jury has remained an important goal of the American judicial system throughout the republic’s history.  That ideal has shared its staying power with ancient procedures still used in the jury selection process, the most important example being voir dire.  Originally a guarantee that defendants would face juries devoid of prejudiced individuals, voir dire allows the parties—i.e. the lawyers—of a trail to inspect the pool of jurors, lobbying for and selecting individuals they hope will give a fair hearing.  Many modern observers doubt that the end results are impartial juries.  Rather, the history of voir dire often includes lawyers systematically excluding racial and ideological minority groups, and women.  This paper explores the problems encountered in the voir dire process, and the solutions that have been proposed and implemented over the past century.  Further, the question is raised whether voir dire can possibly live alongside the modern desire for juries that are both impartial and fairly representative of the community’s population.

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Identity and Ideology:

Press One for American English

By Elizabeth J. Vincelette | 0 comments |

In the American imagination, the myth of the mainstream projects an ideal of English as the legal, official national language, a belief that conflates socio-historical attitudes about language with nationalistic ideology.  A music video on YouTube, entitled “Press One for English,” debuts at a time of increasingly vocal protests about nationwide English-only laws.  The video represents a piece of pop-propaganda dependent on both its lyrics and its visual icons to advance its ideological stance on language. Regarding English as an earned right identifies it as symbolic capital, a political symbol used to identify what it means to be American, as well as to control that identity.  The social order expressed in the song suggests a collective ideal of an America in which today’s immigrants are expected to assimilate by learning English, just as was “always done” by immigrants in the past.  The song uses entertainment as a vehicle for nationalism—and ultimately for a type of propagandist pedagogy to promote the American dream, a linguistic self-reliance that expresses national identity and becomes part of a civic story dependent on assimilation. 

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Watchdog on a Leash

Colin Powell’s UN-presentation on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and the coverage of The Washington Post and The New York Times in February, 2003. [1]

 

By Marianne Ingleby | 0 comments |

Media coverage of alleged security threats in the run-up to the US-led Iraq war has recently come under scrutiny: some suggest that journalists failed to critically assess and independently evaluate claims made by the Bush government in attempts to legitimize the invasion. By looking specifically at the print media’s handling of Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council in February of 2003, in which he offered ‘evidence’ of weapons of mass destruction and other possible breaches of disarmament obligations, the author argues that major newspapers were hesitant to publish articles that called into question the legitimacy of the presentation. In relegating skepticism and critique to less prominent articles and sections than those communicating official government opinions, the newspapers acted as a ‘mouthpiece’ for the Bush government, a sentiment echoed in their own public apology, issued months later. In this article, Marianne Ingleby explores the idea that the unquestioning presentation of Powell’s report was due to more than simply a structural bias arguably built into the institution of journalism—she suggests that, upon closer inspection, newspapers were generally reluctant to voice criticism in prominent places, such as the front page, headlines, streamers, and sub-headings. As a result, she argues, the American public may have been misinformed, and more inclined to accept government claims at face value.

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A Cross Across 42nd Street

Processional Performance as Peaceful Protest

By Jamie Coffey ReynoldsTara Marie Good | 0 comments |

Every year on Good Friday, Pax Christi International, a Catholic lay organization dedicated to peace and social justice, performs a radically modern interpretation of the traditional procession, the Stations of the Cross. Unlike conventional re-enactments of the Gospel, Pax Christi’s Stations of the Cross maps the narrative of Christ’s passion onto the New York City landscape, using the modern cultural significance of the city’s landmarks to illustrate to universal relevance of the ancient morality story. Using three modes a performance, witnessing, processing, and speaking, the procession reinterprets both traditional meanings of the Gospel, and the significance of popular landmarks. This paper will evaluate how Pax Christi utilized this traditional ritual to address conflicts and concerns facing the world in 2006, specifically, torture, discrimination, and war. By blending traditional forms of ritual with the hyper-modern landmarks of New York City, Pax Christi blurs boundaries of time and space, politics and spirituality, self and other, whereby challenging participants to reconsider and subsequently transform norms in their faith and in society at large.

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Punk Will Never Diet

Beth Ditto and the (Queer) Revaluation of Fat

By Curran Nault | 0 comments |

This essay examines the songs, performances, videos, public comments and magazine cover appearances of Beth Ditto, the lesbian lead singer of dance-punk band the Gossip.  Drawing from queer theory and fat studies scholarship I argue that Ditto has challenged dominant conceptualizations of beauty, gender and sexuality and, in the process, constructed an alternative to conventional standards of attractiveness. Through a variety of recuperative strategies, Ditto has staged a critique of normative iterations of the body and rescued fatness from its representation as revolting and worthless. She has done this, first of all, by embracing her body in its current form, thus serving as an example of what I term “embodied corpulence.”  Embodied corpulence is about taking pride in the fat body in its existing state and refusing to change, shrink or disappear. Second, Ditto has been a major figure in the struggle to reclaim “fat” as a term of positive self-identification, taking away its power to injure. Third and finally, by foregrounding her various identities as a fat lesbian femme, Ditto has brought attention to the commonalities between these identities, including the fact that they can all be contested via performative acts that disrupt their fixity and recast them as sites of strength, complexity and renewal.

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A review of The Secret (DVD) by Drew Hariot (director)

By Brandon Righi | 0 comments |

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