Abstract not available.

This paper is an investigation into appropriate forms of reparation to compensate survivors and descendants of survivors of Indian Residential Schools for loss of culture. Indian Residential Schools perpetrated serious individual abuses upon pupils; however, Aboriginal peoples as a group also sustained a serious harm -- an injury to their culture. Whereas tort law and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms have provided redress for individual losses, a group-oriented reparations solution is required to compensate for cultural loss. This paper will set out the historical record of the school policy, and investigate the nature of the loss, i.e. culture, and its intergenerational relationships. The methods by which common law courts have dealt with contemporary cultural loss claims will be outlined, as well as the reparations scheme that has been implemented by the Canadian government. After analyzing the legal and non-legal responses to claims for loss of culture, a legislative solution will be offered that aims to protect and promote Aboriginal culture as it stands in Canada today.

No description available.

This study examines the term flight, as both motif and as consciousness in the legend of the flying Africans, and the cosmological differences as represented in four texts: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Paula Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Ralph Ellison's Flying Home, and Octavia Butler's Kindred. Flight is measured in terms of recurring patterns found within the texts and their meanings given by the authors. The problem of this research stems from the issue that the Gullah, direct descendents of the flying Africans (Igbos) along the Coastal Sea Islands of the United States, have upheld an age hierarchy of secrecy such that there is limited research in the area of flight, allowing this group to maintain a unique African identity for over 200 years. This study was based on the premise that the Igbos' concept of flight was not only a survival mechanism but also a way to form community and identity and to keep the memories of their ancestors alive. This idea is called epic memory, that which has to be pieced together in order for the person to be made whole. An intertextual historiography analysis approach was utilized as the methodology to better understand the life and culture of the Gullah and Igbos. Karla F. C. Holloway argues that revision, (re)membrance, and recursion are always present when analyzing "speakerly texts." The researcher found that numerous recurring patterns within the selected texts began to form meaning around beliefs and myth within culture remembered during epic events. The patterns were often obscure with hidden codes that were revealed after the understanding or gist of the plot came to view. The conclusion drawn from the findings suggest that the flying Africans were able to fly home at will because of epic memory, and that all African descended peoples are able to recall the fragmented pieces regardless of geographical location.

This study investigated the productiveness of the legacy of Edward Wilmot Blyden as an educator, Pan-Negro Patriot, politician, and missionary from 1821 to 1912. The study was based on the premise that Blyden contributed to the re-Africanization of freed blacks who emigrated to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Historical analysis was used as a methodology for the investigation of Blyden's effectiveness on the various roles he fulfilled toward helping freed blacks in their struggles to become African. The researcher found that freed blacks who had emigrated to Liberia and Sierra Leone, in West Africa, were able to adapt and to improve their lives intellectually; they were also able to improve their political and social status through the teachings of Edward Wilmot Blyden's philosophy of re-Africanization. The conclusion drawn from the findings reveals that Blyden was successful in each activity undertaken— especially in the re-Africanization of the emigrants.

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No description available.

My dissertation addresses the future of academics, intellectuals, and education itself in terms of the effectiveness of our attempts to carry out one of the few responsibilities we agree on: to teach students the critical skills necessary to negotiate humanely and intelligently the decisions of their culture-soaked everyday lives. Examination of the rhetorics of our criticism, teaching, and omnipresent visual media plays a fundamental role in my assessments of the usefulness and relevance of our work. The first chapter advocates a realignment of critical priorities through a practical and populist approach to intellectual history. I then focus in the second chapter on teaching strategies and styles, identifying the classroom as a crucial arena for philosophical inquiry, personal expression and interpretation, and explorations of the empowering responsibilities of critical thinking and citizenship. My third chapter proposes a common critical and pedagogical grounding in ethics and rhetoric, jettisoning the phantom notion of "disinterestedness" in favor of an honest, solid defense of liberal democratic education. In the fourth chapter I prescribe a Brechtian aesthetic for our time, advancing chapter three's identification of the crucial roles of pleasure and entertainment in the learning process, and articulating my investment in, to use Roland Barthes's superb phrase, "the thrill of meaning." In the final chapter I offer a curricular vision, focusing on postmodern and metafictional texts which surprise, subvert, and entertain, while foregrounding formal disruption and the blurring of identities and serving as models of constructedness, strategy, and co-created meanings. Our students must be given the skills to read, and thus write, the broadest range of cultural texts. This dissertation affirms the need for balance in the profession: to balance the creation of knowledge with a more democratic dissemination of knowledge; to balance a valuing of distinctions and difference with a blurring of borders and categories to produce a more fruitful concept of what we have in common; to balance an aesthetics of affirmation with an aesthetics of disturbance; and to balance the diverse but often incompatible proliferation of epistemologies with a Rortian call for "agreements."

This dissertation imagines certain contemporary literary oeuvres as perpetually shifting multi-layered palimpsests, their thematic and formal interconnections enacting both the repetitions of trauma and the necessary revisions of historiography, identity, and recovery. Across ethnicity, gender, and genre, my intratextual analyses reveal a cyclical dynamic that destabilizes plotting and the presumption of linear progress between past and future. Chapter One advocates for undisciplined humanities scholarship, drawing upon Jeffrey Williams's "posttheory generation," Shu-mei Shih's "technologies of recognition," and Theodor Adorno's "The Essay as Form." Chapter 2 considers form and reception via theories of intertextuality, intratextuality, and short story cycles. Linking politics and poetics, I suggest that these oeuvres invite consideration of gender, sexuality, and narrative, as well as the "spacetime" of genre. Chapter 3 explores the "serial unpredictability" of "trauma's palimpsests" as analogous to the disordered temporality of geomorphological relicts after impact to the earth. After discussing how these oeuvres mediate between realist and postmodern theories of language, I distinguish between personal and cultural as well as "event-based" and discursive theories of trauma. I emphasize the social nature of recovery, viewing intratextual reading as analogous to a witnessing relationship. Chapter 4 reads Louise Erdrich's "long story cycle," focusing on Tracks (1988) and Four Souls (2004), as emblematic of both traditional Native American forms of storytelling and postmodern witnessing. Drawing upon theories of tricksters, the roman-fleuve, and hypertext, I show that Erdrich's "story" is not a plot, but a performance of storytelling, historiography, and community formation. Chapter 5 argues that Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1982) is an essay cycle "impersonating an autobiography." Showing that the text's repetitions point to the discursive trauma of gay sexuality inextricable from ethnic loss, I illustrate how Rodriguez's narrative resists the plot of the coming out story. Chapter 6 posits Rodriguez's Brown (2002) as a "return story" that reprises his "long essay cycle." A close reading of the cubist self-portrait in "Peter's Avocado" reveals a metaphor for Rodriguez's multi-faceted identity and the structure of his writing. The dissertation concludes with "A Palinode on the Scholarly Real," where I reflect upon the structural relationship between autobiography and scholarship.

What is the Self-Portrait of Thomas Smith about? In this dissertation I ask that question about a key work in the American art canon. In search of an answer I look for meaning in five outstanding details of the portrait: the subject's powerful blue eyes, the skull beneath his hand, the battle scene on the wall, the poem on the table, and his elegant lace cravat. I find that the painting presents a vivid description of seventeenth-century conflict and emotional as well as spiritual malaise. The artist emerges as an individual philosophically at odds with his peers and disdainful of their of values. Smith's Self Portrait, dated circa 1680, is generally acclaimed as the first known self-portrait painted in the colony and is recognized for its stylistic innovations: Baroque modeling and composition at a time and place when an earlier, linear style prevailed. The painting is also regarded as the first signed canvas in America. These assertions tend to brush aside some troublesome problems: (1) identity of the artist cannot be confirmed; (2) it is not entirely certain the portrait is, indeed, a self -portrait; (3) the signature may not belong to the artist; (4) it may not, in fact, have been painted by a man named Smith; (5) the date assigned to the portrait is conjectural; and (6) its provenance is almost entirely anecdotal. External documentation of this work is clearly unstable, but in spite of, or perhaps because of such uncertainties, when asked to speak for itself the painting is far more remarkable than canonical convention leads us to believe. Research for this painting inspires me to reconsider the question of intention, not in terms of what may have been in the artist's mind, but rather with regard to the intention of the work itself as it interacts with the intention of its observer. The concept of intentionality in this discussion is freed from the onus of intentional fallacy and offers instead a resilient, reflective way of thinking about meaning, especially with reference to the genre of self-portraiture.