A comparative study was conducted of several variants of the Raven cycle of myths as manifested among the Tlingit Indians of the Northwest Coast. The results of this folkloristic study indicate that the myths serve several didactic functions. In addition to the manifest function of explaining the origin of the present order of the world the myths also serve to provide members of the society with a classificatory system through which they are able to relate to observable phenomena within their environment. The myths also provide institutionalized behavioral alternatives available to the society as manifested by the actions of Raven, the principal character in Tlingit mythology. In the role of Culture Hero, Raven's motives for his actions are altruistic, and in this context are to be emulated, while in the role of Trickster his motives are selfishness and greed and because they are ultimately destructive to society, are not to be condoned.

This work traces the relationship of Jews to African-Americans in the process of Jews attaining whiteness in the 20th century. Specific attention is paid to blackface performance in The Jazz Singer and the process of identification with suffering. Theoretically this work brings together psychoanalytic theories of projection, repression and masochism with afro-pessimist notions of the libidinal economy of white supremacy. Ultimately, I argue that in its enjoyment and its masochism, The Jazz Singer empathizes with blackness both as a way to assimilate into white America and express doubt at this very act.

This study focused on the continued mathematical achievement gap between African American and Latino students in an urban elementary school. An illustrative case study design was used to examine the teachers' perception of factors contributing to this gap in mathematical performance, and what instructional math strategies can narrow the achievement gap. Socioconstructivism and culturally relevant pedagogy were the learning theories used to form the conceptual framework in this study. Qualitative data were obtained from 6 individual interviews with 4th grade math educators, classroom observations, and teacher artifacts. Data analysis in this study included data triangulation and coding, as well as identification of common themes as an important analytical approach to enhance the credibility of this study. Methods for minimizing bias and error included peer debriefing and member-checking, which consisted of obtaining feedback from participants to ensure the trustworthiness of findings. The key results of this study indicated that teachers perceived that 4th grade African American students often lacked basic skills and background knowledge for their school grade. Based upon the findings, the outcome was a plan for professional development training to help teachers gain knowledge on how to incorporate cultural relevant pedagogy, through strategies that include differentiating learning instructions and mastery learning into their classrooms, to narrow the mathematical achievement gap between African American and Latino 4th grade students. Implications for positive social change from this study include providing teachers with research-based strategies targeted toward narrowing the mathematical achievement gap between 4th grade African American and Latino students at the local and district site.

This project honors and recognizes the art and activism of four Black woman--Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni, Elizabeth Catlett, and Ntozake Shange that contributed to the revolutionary movements of the 1960s through the early 1980s. This thesis examines the works and political challenges of Black women by asking what elements in their artistry/activism addressed issues specifically related to Black women's unique position in America during the Black Revolution and feminist movements? Both primary and secondary sources such as literature from advocates of the Black Arts Movements and the lyrics, poetry, and visual art of the four Black women artists were used to gain perspectives to answer the thesis major questions. The creative visions and activism of these Black women expressed the dire need for the issues of Black women to be heard and also to address all forms of oppression that Black women experience with race, gender, social or economic status, and even cultural identity. The works of these Black women were radical and were also cultural reflections of Black women embracing their idiosyncratic position as Black women despite the climate of perpetual deceptions used either by White Western ideologies or Black male chauvinism. This thesis concluded that when the concerns of Black women are attended to by their own strengths of character and merits, they are also able in return to contribute to their own self-empowerment as well as to the development of racial, gender, and community uplift.

I examine Ontario history textbooks to demonstrate how the portrayal of the white settler fantasy of Canada being peacefully colonized and settled is enforced through the temporality and geography of the Canadian settler state, leading to the erasure of connections between indigenous and black communities in the development of the settler state. The temporality of the settler state is enforced through the Indian Act and the Multiculturalism Act, which work together to deny shared time between indigenous peoples, black peoples, and settlers. Settlers are positioned as inhabiting the here and now as reflected in the temporality of the modern settler state, while indigenous peoples are consigned to a status of primitivity, and black peoples are positioned as hailing from a primitive place, yet recently arriving in Canada. The temporality of the Indian Act is represented geographically through the reserve system, which works within the Indian Act to replace indigenous sovereignty and nationhood with Indian Bands, while the temporality of the Multiculturalism Act is represented geographically through the image of Canada as a cultural mosaic, which enforces the divide-and-conquer strategies of the settler state. If indigenous peoples and black peoples are always positioned as temporally and spatially distant, then it follows that their histories developed discretely. However, through analyzing how, what Patrick Wolfe terms, a “logic of elimination” (105) is deployed within the Canadian settler state, it become clear that settler colonialism and transatlantic slavery have always been engaged in an intimate and mutually reinforcing relationship in Canada. By moving beyond the temporality and geography of the settler state, not only does it becomes clear that the connections between indigenous and black peoples are actually foundational to the Canadian settler state’s current formation, but space is also created to develop alliances between indigenous and black peoples. Developing alliances is integral to imagining a reconfiguration of the current settler state that moves beyond divide-and-conquer politics, and towards a more just way of organizing societies that takes seriously the flesh-and-blood of all individual subjects and the human species as whole (Wynter 47). / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-12 15:55:33.498

This thesis is an anthropological and historical exploration of Singapore's emergence as a nation state and determines what it means to have a Singaporean national identity today. As a relatively new country, Singapore and its government has worked to carefully construct its national identity in the past fifty years after independence from the British in 1965. This thesis will show Singapore as a distinctive entity in the study of nationalism and nation building, especially in comparison to the decolonization efforts of other countries in the region and throughout the world in the twentieth century. It is a carefully constructed nation state, and its distinctiveness lies in the authoritarian government's neo-colonial policies, its economic success due to its capitalist system, semi-democratic political environment, and its multiethnic population.

This cultural research explores the relation between racial representation and emotions/affects as part of the struggle for racial minorities’ visibility. It is informed by conjunctural theory in cultural studies, with the use of textual narrative and affective analysis. It focuses on Hong Kong’s television culture as a site for context configuration, or conjuncture, for constructing the inter- and intra-ethnic relations between the dominant ethnic Chinese and ethnic minorities (EMs), via the production of emotions. Chapter One introduces a conjunctural understanding of the construction of EMs in Hong Kong through revisiting some of the most prominent theoretical works that explore the transformation of Hong Kong identity, in order to point out an underlying Hong Kong-Chineseness as a cultural center, and to argue that the demand of the present conjuncture is to respond to the necessity of generating an alternative “EM-context” suitable for reimagining Hong Kong identity. Chapter Two attempts to map out this “EM-context” by reviewing the major popular non-Chinese figures on TV, namely Louie Castro, Gregory Rivers (known as “Ho Kwok-wing”) and Gill Mohinderpaul Singh (known as “QBoBo”) in order to study how their particular cultural visibility can open up ways to rethink the problems surrounding visibility. The narrative affective approach to study racial relations is applied to the reading of No Good Either Way (TVB) in Chapter Three and Rooms To Let (RTHK) in Chapter Four. Together, these two core chapters explore the affective configuration of “anxieties” and “shame” in the two TV programmes. It is suggested that these affective landscapes help position EMs as either a “sweetened trouble-maker” (in the work place) or “assimilating neighbor” (in the domestic sphere), both of which fall short of being able to construct a new context/conjuncture for understanding the cultural presence of EMs. This research rejects the study of race/ethnicity through content analysis of stereotype, and opts for an approach that reads affects and narratives in the search not for representational visibility, but for what is termed “conjunctural visibility.” Ultimately, Chapter Five concludes with a discussion of the dynamics of “soft” and “hard” representations of the ethnic other: the former in the mode of “sugarcoated racism” which involves the figure of EM as the sweetened troublemaker appealing for audience’s sympathy, and the latter in the form of public pedagogy aimed at educating the audience (through shaming) to treat their EM neighbor as the assimilated other. This research study aims at making a small contribution to the understanding of the struggle for conjunctural visibility among EMs in Hong Kong.

This thesis traces the mechanisms and sources responsible for the generation of civic social capital (a set of shared norms and values that promote cooperation between groups, enabling them to participate in the political process) by black churches in West Perrine, Florida. Data for this thesis includes over fifty interviews and participant observations, archival records, newspaper articles, and scholarly journals. Despite the institutional racism of the first half of the twentieth century, many blacks and whites in Perrine developed levels of trust significant enough to form an integrated local governing body, evidence of high levels of csc. At mid-century, when black and white interactions ceased, Perrine's csc decreased, leading to the deterioration of Perrine's social and physical conditions. Perrine's csc increased in the1980s by way of broad-based coalitions as Perrine's churches invested their csc in an effort to eradicate crime, clean up its neighborhood, and win back its youth.

The Farming of Bones is Edwidge Danticat’s novel about Amabelle Desir, a Haitian migrant in the Dominican Republic during the 1937 Haitian massacre. The Massacre is a historical fact presented through a fictional text that acts as a testimonial. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate how Danticat, in her role as an activist, urges readers to become social justice seekers and enter the discourse of race. Through an examination of Carl Jung’s and Vodou’s shadow theories in regards to the construction of a racial identity by Haitians and Dominicans, I uncover the racial narratives in place from Haiti’s colonization and independence to our current time. Danticat, through the novel, moves the reigning racial paradigm out of the shadow and thus allows readers to reflect on its effects. Thus it is not only the characters in the novel that must confront the shadow, but the readers themselves.

Avec sa brillante civilisation et son paganisme, la Chine a bousculé le XVIIIe siècle, bouleversé les Lumières et inspiré les auteurs de romans. Au XIXe siècle, tandis que l'Europe se passionne pour l'Asie et que les études chinoises se développent, la France, contrariée dans ses projets coloniaux, met le racisme scientifique au service de sa politique impérialiste. A partir de 1840, le discours sur les « Jaunes » se cristallise. À la fin du XIXe siècle, il représente un danger incarné dans la notion de Péril jaune. Ce propos diabolisateur, oublié de la critique postcoloniale, fait aujourd'hui partie des représentations communes. Pour le comprendre, nous nous proposons d'extraire les spécificités chinoises du discours générique sur l'Asie et l'Orient, pour examiner qui l'énonce et dans quelles conditions en terme d'histoire sociale et culturelle. / With its brilliant civilisation and its paganism, China disturbed the eighteenth century, troubled the Enlightenments and inspired novelists. In the nineteenth century, while Europe had a passion for Asia, Chinese studies developped, France, obstructed in its colonial projects in China, used scientific racism in the service of its imperialist policy. From 1840 on, the discourse on the "Yellow" freezed. At the end of the nineteenth century, it embodied a danger known as the ‘Yellow Peril'. This discursive demonisation, put aside by postcolonial studies, is now part of the common representations. In order to understand it, we propose to take the Chinese characteristics out of the generic speech on Asia and the East in order to examine who formulates it and under what conditions, from a social and cultural history point of view.