This self-study explores the question of "What factors in my life shaped my journey in earning an American college degree and becoming a successful educator in the U.S.?" This question is explored in the context of my own lived experiences. Results contribute to the field of immigrant studies and may encourage others who wish to transition from first generation immigrant to successful professional educator in the U.S. This study employed hermeneutic phenomenology to answer the research question. It used in-depth narrative interviews to elicit my responses to lived experiences from growing up in Mexico to my current teaching position. Thematic analysis was used to summarize and interpret the data. Data analysis yielded six themes that describe my journey to becoming a teacher in the U.S.: family influence, vision of life, role models, challenges, sources of support, and inner strength. Findings reaffirm the belief that it is possible for an individual who has recently immigrated to the United States and who may have experienced aspects of structural inequality to surmount difficult circumstances and achieve important life goals.

No description available.

With a focus on multiracial perspectives on race, region, and sexuality, Quest for Blackness interrogates the efforts of diverse black subjects to transcend the objectifying limits of the white gaze and the effects of internalized hatred and destructiveness. To clarify the tenuous shift from object to subject, the first two chapters of this dissertation examine the formation of African American subjectivity within the prism of the white gaze, as it takes shape in novels by Eudora Welty, Lewis Nordan, Toni Morrison, and Bebe Moore Campbell. The following chapters probe the pernicious effects on black psyches that develop when African Americans unwittingly internalize any part of the white gaze. Tackling the controversial discourse that comedian Bill Cosby re-ignited with his comments in 2004 on the responsibilities of the black poor in improving their own lives, Quest for Blackness engages fully in the debate that erupted after Cosby's speech. Taking a stand, alongside other African American voices in literature, politics, and social activism, this study not only recognizes the interrelated issue of white racism and economic inequality but also calls for greater black accountability in addressing the pathologies that affect black communities. In airing dirty laundry, African Americans only strengthen their pursuit of equality and lasting, meaningful agency, a point that Z Z Packer, Alice Walker, and others powerfully demonstrate in their fiction. / acase@tulane.edu

In this dissertation, "An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture," I use the affect of shame in its multiple forms and manifestations as a category of analysis in order to examine complex relationships between gender, sexuality, the body, and citizenship. Through chapters on incest, gender normalization, and disease, I build an "archive" of the feeling of shame that consists of literary texts such as Sapphire's Push: A Novel, Jeffrey Eugenides?s Middlesex, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and Katherine Dunn?s Geek Love, as well as materials from popular culture, films such as Philadelphia, court cases, and other ephemera such as pamphlets and news coverage. In order to construct this archive, I bring together seemingly disparate materials and create readings of American culture that illustrate how the category of citizen is produced by the shaming of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased. Using feminist theoretical models, I critique previous discussions of citizenship, the state, and the body in queer theory, which have reified the privilege of whiteness and maleness by evacuating the bodies of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased of their radical potential to undermine oppressive state institutions. The texts I analyze in this project interrogate normalized processes of documentation and archiving, and through their subject matter as well as their form, these texts participate in the archival process?theorizing and exploring alternative methods of documentation, collecting, and historicizing and so illustrate how the discourses produced by mainstream history are built upon the maintenance of social hierarchies. By bringing these texts together, I am developing a theory of the archive and its processes, its bodies, and its feelings. Archiving as a practice collects and documents, and in that collection, develops a coherent narrative about a particular event or history. Critical theory is also a process of making meaning through the collection of events, documents, and texts into a cohesive set of terms in order to make particular abstract claims. This process is often obscured both in archiving and in theorizing by naturalizing the selection of the materials that matter. The alternative archives in this dissertation make that process explicit in order to foreground its erasures and elisions; they register material difference and the ways in which the archive is reproductive of social relations. The transient and unstable nature of the archives produced within the texts of this project makes them difficult to pin down and make coherent, but that is what makes them powerful and transformative. I read these materials as sites where questions about the official histories of the nation, which are constructed through race, gender, and sex, might be played out. The archive of shame I compile in this project, therefore, can be read as a collection of partial sites of struggle against oppressive power relationships.

In recent years, film, art, new media, and music video works created by black makers have demonstrated an increasingly “post-black” impulse. The term “post-black” was originally coined in response to innovative practices and works created by a generation of black artists who were shaped by hip-hop culture and Afro-modernist thinking. I use the term as a theoretical tool to discuss what lies beyond the racial character of a work, image, or body. Using a post-black theoretical methodology I examine a range of works by black filmmakers Kathleen Collins Prettyman and Lee Daniels, visual artists Wangechi Mutu and Jean-Michel Basquiat, new media artist Nettrice Gaskins, and music video works of hip-hop artists and performer Erykah Badu. I discuss how black artists and filmmakers have moved through Darby English’s notion of “black representational space” as a sphere where bodies and works are beholden to specific historical and aesthetic expectations and limitations. I posit that black representational space has been challenged by what I describe as “metaphysical space” where bodies produce a new set of possibilities as procreative, fluid, liberated, and otherworldly forces. These bodies are neither positive nor negative; instead they occupy the in-between spaces between life and death, time and space, digital and analog, interiority and exteriority, vulnerability and empowerment. Post-black visual culture displays the capacities of black bodies as creative forces that shape how we see and experience visual culture. My methodology employs textual analysis of visual objects that articulate a post-black impulse, paying close attention to how these works compel viewers to see other dimensions of experience. In three chapters I draw from theoretical work in race and visuality, affect theory, phenomenology, and interiority from the likes of Charles Johnson, Frantz Fanon, Elena del Río, Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, and Elizabeth Alexander. This study aims to create an interdisciplinary analysis that charts new directions for exploring and re-imaging black bodies as subjects and objects of endless knowledge and creative potential.

This dissertation is the first historical-cultural exploration of the ways tribal customs made their way into mainstream America. Throughout his career, Cherokee entertainer and political pundit Will Rogers (1879-1935) drew on Cherokee traditions to ameliorate Americans' anxieties over the increase of mass media, the rise of urbanism, and the threatened loss of individuality that came with these changes. This study complicates overly-simplistic assumptions that popular culture uniformly misrepresented and victimized Native peoples during the Progressive Era and Interwar Years. By analyzing the early twentieth century through the work of one of its most influential American Indian participants, this project broadens notions of both American popular political cultures and American Indian identities. Although Rogers and other publicly known Natives like him did not always fit into the public's perception of "the Indian," they did fit into their tribe's artistic and cultural traditions. In this way, Rogers's overlooked work--his live performances on vaudeville and radio, his syndicated journalistic commentary, and his astounding film career--challenges scholarly understandings of the representation and misrepresentation of Native Americans. This study does not merely illuminate the intimate connections between Will Rogers and the Cherokee Nation. It further elucidates the ways American and specific American Indian tribal histories interact with one another. Scholars so often focus on the colonization and usurpation of Indian nations that we overlook the many times indigenous individuals and nations impact the United States in both positive and negative ways. This dissertation, in short, shows that scholars must reconsider essentialized notions of Indianness, turning instead to specific tribal histories and the ways these traditions intermingle with others to affect the whole. / text

In Dharma Bums (1958), by Jack Kerouac, and Americana (1971), by Don DeLillo, the authors explore the complexity of selfhood as pertaining to individual identity and subjectivity in mid-twentieth century American culture and consciousness, paying specific attention to the relation that these concepts have with media, spatiality, and Buddhism. Although numerous critics provide extensive analyses of these texts, authors, and themes, no critic has paired these texts and authors, and investigated these particular themes in relation to selfhood. I argue that in Dharma Bums and Americana, Kerouac and DeLillo each investigate the influence of media, spatiality, and Buddhism on selfhood, as well as provide competing models of selfhood that offer either self-transformation or self-limitation.

Around the world, religion takes many forms that vary greatly in practices, beliefs, and doctrine. In fact, defining the term "religion" is a difficult task in encompassing a multitude of faiths. In America, various cultural practices emulate the religious nature of various classic religions. Sport is a peculiar example that hold the interests of millions. However, the way sport is experienced as a fan differs greatly from the way sport is experienced as an athlete. I argue that to an athlete, sport functions as a placeholder for religion in modern-day America. By exploring various functions of religion, as defined by Winston King in the Encyclopedia of Religion (1959), it is clear that sport offers the same components as religion. However, as scholars such as Price and Chidester have found, sport does not function completely as a religion for fans. I finish with a discussion of why sport in the eyes of a fan fails to meet the requirements for sport acting as religion; using King's definition, it becomes clear that sport, for fans, fails to offer the same type of traditionalism and sacred experiences as found in religion, as well as the experience of sport for an athlete.

This research will study cultural appropriation that is presentable in 2010th music videos by famous artists/bands like Coldplay, Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey, No Doubt and Iggy Azalea. The term cultural appropriation is about the taking over of practices, artistic forms or themes from usually a minority culture. The focus will lay on two different cultures, Indian culture and Native American culture. I will with the help of researchers like Erich Hatala Matthes and James. O Young argue the harms of cultural appropriation, where I will include bell hooks to supports my arguments. My task will also be to enlighten the common behavior traits that show occurring cultural appropriation in music videos. Deeply analysis of these music videos will help me reach my concluded arguments about the harms of cultural appropriation. Every music video will focus on three concepts and they are, romanticization, sexualization and exotification. With tracing these concepts, I will argue the differences of the cultural appropriation Indian culture and Native American culture experiences.

The problem with which this investigation was concerned was that of determining the relationship between the variables of acculturation, imagery, self-concept, anxiety, stress, and seriousness of disease in Mexican-Americans. The purposes of this study were 1) to determine the statistical predictive efficiency of stress and its relation to disease, 2) to determine if a combination of anxiety, acculturation, self-concept, imagery, along with stress, would increase the statistical predictive efficiency concerning seriousness of disease, and 3) to provide information that may help to develope a theoretical base concerning the above variables and disease in Mexican-Americans.