Department: American Culture Studies/English ![[clear]](close-x.png "Remove this limiter")
15 matches in the database.
These are records: 1 - 15.
1.
Adams, Elliot C.
American Feminist Manifestos and the Rhetoric of Whiteness.
Degree: PhD, American Culture Studies/English, 2006, Bowling Green State University
► Using textual analysis, feminist and cultural theories, this study exposed the rhetorical…
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▼ Using textual analysis, feminist and cultural theories, this study exposed the rhetorical reproduction of whiteness in language, examining how whiteness suffuses linguistic choices that appear to be unbiased. Throughout, it identified where and how whiteness operates as the motivating force in the social power structure of the United States by using certain feminist manifestos as an example of the rhetorical reproduction and performativity of whiteness. Feminist manifestos were chosen as the particular genre of study because while they do represent progress toward social justice in gendered power relations, they do not always or necessarily advance social justice in terms of race, class, or sexuality. Manifestos by white women were shown to include discursive choices that reinforce whiteness, whereas manifestos by women of color critiqued those choices, reminding white feminists that multiple identity factors always simultaneously affect women’s lives. Manifestos by white feminists were organized roughly chronologically, within the standard feminist divisions of First, Second, and Third Waves; this study problematized that historical construction by emphasizing the ways in which, as another function of whiteness, the designation of waves as incorporating certain time periods has been a white feminist tool for structuring history. To show how women of color have always been aware of the multiplicity of issues oppressing women, this study grouped those manifestos together, highlighting their common arguments against white feminist’s singular call for gender equality. Finally, the objective of this study was to remind white feminists of their white privilege and to hold them accountable for the ways that such privilege has blinded them to the realities of intersecting oppressions in all women’s lives, not just those of women of color.
Advisors/Committee Members: Berry, Ellen.
Keywords: Manifestos; Whiteness; Declaration of Sentiments; Man-Made World; SCUM Manifesto; Redstockings Manifesto; The Woman-Identified Woman; Third Wave Manifesta; GLAM Manifesto; The Transfeminist Manifesto; Aren't I A Woman?; A Black Feminist Statement
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2.
Amin, Larry.
Harlem Renaissance: Politics, Poetics, and Praxis in the African and African American Contexts.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2007, Bowling Green State University
► The 1920s in American history saw a political movement through the Harlem…
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▼ The 1920s in American history saw a political movement through the Harlem Renaissance. This literary movement gave itself the task of promoting black cultural values that were underestimated in American culture. In search for civil rights for African Americans under the intellectual leadership of W.E.B Du Bois and other N.A.A.C.P members, the Harlem Renaissance succeeded in wresting the black community’s confidence from Booker T. Washington, who thought the solution to black problems should absolutely be integrationist. Because integration meant limited education and discrimination, Du Bois advocated the right of African Americans to higher education for the fulfillment of their political duties that the Constitution has assigned them. Starting from a theoretical approach to racial problems in his early books, Du Bois practically intervened in the concretization of Pan-Africanism. This project remains a political challenge to the black Diaspora to build a stronger cultural entity against imperialism today.
Advisors/Committee Members: Labbie, Erin F.
Keywords: American Culture Studies; African American literature; Harlem Renaissance literary movement of the 1920s; Black struggle against racism and colonialism; The impact of NAACP on Pan-Africanism
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3.
Barbee, Matthew Mace.
Race, Memory, and Communal Belonging in Narrative and Art: Richmond, Virginia's Monument Avenue, 1948-1996.
Degree: PhD, American Culture Studies/English, 2007, Bowling Green State University
► Locating public memory as a central site in the contested imagination of…
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▼ Locating public memory as a central site in the contested imagination of communal belonging, this study examines the post-World War II history of Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue as a key symbolic location in the cultural politics and political culture of the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights eras. A New South-era network of memorials to leaders of the Confederacy, Monument Avenue has long stood as the spatial and artistic manifestation of the cultural values espoused through the ideology of the Lost Cause. This ideology enabled the continued cultural and political dominance of a patrician, white elite who ruled Virginia through a politics of paternalism. This paternalism assured white rule and rigid racial segregation but was effected without the overt violence and abuses commonly associated with the post-Reconstruction South. After tracing the history of Monument Avenue from 1890 through 1948— especially in relation to racial segregation and public memory in Virginia—this study provides a detailed analysis of the ways the Civil Rights Movement and anti-integration movements in Richmond used Monument Avenue as a symbol of the larger struggle in which they were engaged. In the post-Civil Rights era, under ideologies of neoliberalism and multiculturalism, the existing Confederate memorials were joined, in 1996, by a new statue of African American tennis champion, writer, and activist Arthur Ashe. This memorial was unveiled only after two years of intense public debate. The second half of this study examines the transformation of Richmond and Virginia’s cultural politics and political culture under neoliberalism and multiculturalism, especially the political career of the conservative Democrat, L. Douglas Wilder who, in 1989, was the first African American to be elected governor of Virginia or any other U.S. State. This history is presented alongside a study of Arthur Ashe’s life as described in his four memoirs, his newspaper columns, and his public appearances. Using the central texts, I foreground the Ashe memorial and its debates by demonstrating that as barriers to racial inclusion were lowered, neoliberalism enabled the reentrenchment of the values associated with white paternalism and the reaffirmation of class hierarchies.
Advisors/Committee Members: Terrie, Philip.
Keywords: Richmond, Virginia, Monument Avenue, Arthur Ashe, Doug Wilder, Civil Rights Movement, Memory, Race
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4.
Brost, Molly.
Mining the Past: Performing Authenticity in the Country Music Biopic.
Degree: PhD, American Culture Studies/English, 2008, Bowling Green State University
► Both country music and the biographical film are genres that are evaluated…
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▼ Both country music and the biographical film are genres that are evaluated by strict (yet constantly changing) standards of authenticity. However, “authenticity” means different things when applied to both genres; in country music, it refers to the artist’s respect for tradition and ability to relate to their audience, while in the biographical film, the term typically denotes factual accuracy and the filmmaker’s ability to emphasize the “correct” aspects of the subject’s life. This dissertation argues that when a biographical film about a country musician is made, it must negotiate standards of authenticity applicable to both country music and the biographical film. Further, it posits that when the subject of the film is female, the standard for living an “authentic” life and having an “authentic” career changes drastically and, for the artist, is a constant negotiation. Via analyses of four films chronicling the lives of female country musicians, this dissertation examines the ways in which the films (and their heroines) negotiate genre- and medium-specific standards of authenticity. Using the 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter as a case study, Chapter I argues that country biopics must successfully negotiate authenticity relative to four models: the country model; the narrative model; the emphasis model; and the “time and space” model. Chapter II, in turn, argues that Sweet Dreams failed to achieve the acclaim of Coal Miner’s Daughter largely because the subject’s death made it impossible to authenticate the film’s emphasis. Chapter III contends that Walk the Line actress Reese Witherspoon was considered authentic due to her ability to negotiate, first, June Carter’s struggle between “home” and “the road,” and, second, her own star persona with that of the character’s. Finally, Chapter IV uses the documentary Shut Up and Sing to examine how standards of authenticity change over time, as well as how authenticity is negotiated in a different film genre. Ultimately, this project seeks to contribute to the fields of film studies, country music studies, and women’s studies, providing an analysis of authenticity in genres in which women’s roles have been largely overlooked by scholars.
Advisors/Committee Members: Labbie, Erin.
Subjects: American studies; Gender; Womens studies
Keywords: country music; biography; biographical film; authenticity; gender in film; genre
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5.
Burger, Alissa Dian.
From 'The Wizard of Oz' to 'Wicked': Trajectory of American Myth.
Degree: PhD, American Culture Studies/English, 2009, Bowling Green State University
► The 'Wizard of Oz' story has been omnipresent in American popular culture…
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▼ The 'Wizard of Oz' story has been omnipresent in American popular culture since the first publication of L. Frank Baum's children's book 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' at the dawn of the twentieth century. Ever since, filmmakers, authors, and theatre producers have continued to return to Oz over and over again. However, while literally hundreds of adaptations of the 'Wizard of Oz' story about, a handful of transformations are particularly significant in exploring discourses of American myth and culture: L. Frank Baum's 'The Wondeful Wizard of Oz' (1900); MGM's classic film 'The Wizard of Oz' (1939); Sidney Lumet's film 'The Wiz' (1978); Gregory Maguire's novel 'Wicked: The Life and Time of the Wicked Witch of the West' (1995); and Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman's Broadway musical 'Wicked' (2003). This project critiques theories of fixed or prescriptive American myth, instead developing a theory of American myth as active, performative and even, at times, participatory, achieved through discussion of the fluidity of text and prformance, built on Diana Taylor's theory of the archive and the repertoire. By approaching text and performance as fluid rather than fixed, this dissertation facilitates an interdisciplinary consideration of these works, bringing children's literature, film, popular fiction, theatre, and music together in a theoretically multifaceted approach to the 'Wizard of Oz' narrative, its many transformations, and its lasting significance within American culture. In the process of addressing these myths, this dissertation explores themes consistent within these five versions of the 'Wizard of Oz' narrative, looking at the shifting significance and representations of gender, race, home, and magic in these works. These themes have been central to establishing the national identity of the citizen throughout American history; as such, their popular representations tend to reflect the values espoused by the surrounding culture at the time of creation. Therefore, a close examination of the recurring themes in these five versions of the 'Wizard of Oz' story provides significant insight into the negotiation of these issues, their representations, and their corresponding moments in American culture.
Advisors/Committee Members: Berry, Ellen.
Subjects: American literature; American studies; Animals; Comparative literature; Gender; Mass media; Motion Pictures; Music; Theater
Keywords: myth; text; performance; gender; race; home; magic
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6.
Crook, Nathan C.
Foods That Matter: Constructing Place and Community at Food Festivals in Northwest Ohio.
Degree: PhD, American Culture Studies/English, 2009, Bowling Green State University
► Festivals featuring food as a central organizing device are a popular form…
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▼ Festivals featuring food as a central organizing device are a popular form of cultural expression in Northwest Ohio that consciously celebrate food, its production, and consumption as representative of community, local identity, heritage, and place. At these events, local foods are elevated to a “mascot” status and these food icons come to stand in for the host community and are used as a marker of community differentiation. This dissertation argues that food festivals in Northwest Ohio are nostalgic enactments of community identity that illustrate the host community's notions of place, of local food, and of heritage. Furthermore, it examines the multiple ways in which food is used as an organizing device that suggests these events simultaneously resist modernity and globalization.Via ethnographies conducted with cultural producers, thick description of these events, and analysis of four food festivals, this dissertation examines the ways in which local communities engage with food to construct and maintain public identities and festive events. Using the Milan Melon Festival as a case study, Chapter One focuses on the concept of terroir to explore place-based Midwestern food traditions and the connections of these locally-produced foods to the landscape. Chapter Two considers how place is informed by notions of tradition and heritage presented at the Seneca County Maple Festival in Republic, Ohio. In this chapter, I argue that recognizing the linkages between present and past informs notions of place. By examining the connections between locally-produced food and the local population, Chapter Three explores the connection of bratwurst sausage and ethnic identity presented in the Bucyrus Bratwurst Festival. Chapter Four asks how the availability of mass-produced food shapes notions of place, heritage, and ethnicity. This chapter examines the ways in which the McComb Cookie Festival presents mass-produced foods as local, place-based food. Ultimately, this project seeks to contribute to the fields of American Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Folklore, and Foodways providing evidence collected from original ethnographic research of four models of food festivals and four different notions of place at events largely overlooked by scholars.
Advisors/Committee Members: Long, Lucy M.
Subjects: American studies; Cultural anthropology; Folklore; Sociology
Keywords: food festival; celebration; food; Northwest Ohio; Midwestern food traditions; place; terroir; community; heritage; ethnicity
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7.
Eugene, Nicole Christina.
POTENT SLEEP: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF SLEEP.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2006, Bowling Green State University
► Why is sleep, a moment that is physiologically full and mentally boundless,…
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▼ Why is sleep, a moment that is physiologically full and mentally boundless, thought to be a moment of absence and powerlessness? Where did this devalued notion of sleep come from and how can we situate sleep studies within a continuation of a historical processes and economic infuences? In other words, how does sleep effect and exist within systems of power? To answer these questions I turn to a range of scholarship and theoretical studies to examine the complexities and dynamics at work within the cultural discources on sleep. By creating a genealogy of sleep I am able to track the way notions of sleep have changed and evolved over time. I develope a theoretical framework to examine how the Enlightenment effected notions of sleep by strengthening a cultural disposition for logical, rational and phonomenological modes of knowledge. I find that the advent of modernity is signified by the moment in which sleep, darkness and unkowing become negative while being awake, light and knowledge become positive. To understand how sleep (and sleep studies) operates in contemporary situations I examine them within the economy of time in which clock time is conflated with money. Here I also visit the way sleep functions in relation to work in a neo-Taylorist management era. I offer an account of sleep's connections to passivity in the within patriarchal systems of thought. I determine that the cultural politics of sleep and sleep disorders point to a rift in the Western Self because of a presumed simultaneity of thinking, acting and being. I have engaged in a range of disciplines and use theory, historical studies, textual analysis , and autoethnography as methodologies to outline some of the major cultural discussions that surround sleep.
Advisors/Committee Members: Labbie, Erin.
Keywords: sleep; cultural politics; history of sleep; sleeping; theory; historical studies; textual analysis; narcolepsy; autoethnography; sleep science; sleep medicine; sleep studies; time; enlightenment; night; darkness; alertness; passivity
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8.
Frendo, Molly Elizabeth.
GENERATIONAL FEMINISM AND ACTIVISM: USING BGSU AS A CASE STUDY.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2006, Bowling Green State University
► This study seeks to understand how the institutionalization of feminism through Women's…
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▼ This study seeks to understand how the institutionalization of feminism through Women's Studies (WS) programs has affected the education and development of new feminists. The generational debate must be understood when forming/revising a curriculum in WS programs in order to promote feminist activism in the third wave. The first section focuses on how definitions of activism and perceptions of what counts as activism differ at both a generational and local level. The second section looks at how Women’s Studies students are educated to be activists. It focuses specifically on service learning as the primary method of engaging students in activist projects. The third and final section seeks to move beyond service learning as our primary method of educating young feminists to become activists. Through further developing existing activities already put into place by many WS instructors, I have created an alternative to service learning that I call “solution-based reading.”
Advisors/Committee Members: Berry, Ellen E.
Keywords: generational conflict; third wave feminism; activism; service learning; ethnography
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9.
Hill, Adrienne C.
Spatial Awarishness: Queer Women and the Politics of Fat Embodiment.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2009, Bowling Green State University
► Queer-identified women have played a prominent role in fat activism since the…
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▼ Queer-identified women have played a prominent role in fat activism since the inception of the fat liberation movement in the 1970s, and continue to do so today. While the presence and work of queer women in the fat acceptance movement is widely noted, recent scholarship in the emerging field of fat studies appears to accept the prominence of such women within the movement as axiomatic. Few fat scholars attempt to identify what precisely the connections between queer and fat activism are, or why queer women may be particularly empowered to participate in the fat activist movement.The following project aims to map queer women’s influences in the fat activist movement by examining the recent work of queer fat women activists. Focusing in particular on two recent case studies—the work of San Francisco Bay Area-based performance troupe Big Burlesque, and FemmeCast, a New York-based Podcast billing itself as “the queer fat femme guide to life”—I examine the mixture of camp aesthetics, lesbian identity politics, and postmodern theories of the body that queer fat women have transported from their communities to fat activism. Queer fat women bring the language, performance media, and identity politics of their communities into their engagements with fat activism, in order to resignify fatness as the basis for a new, empowering, and potentially subversive identity position. This process of resignification, however, is partial, incomplete, and carries ambiguous consequences. Queer fat women activists bring decentralized, postmodern, campy techniques to the movement that enable a critique of narrow health and beauty standards, without installing new standards in their place, and that recognize the necessity of self-acceptance as a prerequisite for greater collective action. At the same time, the transgressive potential of these tactics are often bounded by an appeal to a narrow identity politics, and by an overreliance on self-determination that forecloses the possibility of collective, coalitional politics. Unless queer fat women activists learn to adequately historicize, and open the boundaries of, their identity politics, they may never be able to make the transition from a politics of self-empowerment to a strategy of confronting and transforming the fatphobic mainstream.
Advisors/Committee Members: Berry, Ellen.
Subjects: American studies; Gender; Womens studies
Keywords: fat; queer; lesbian; femme
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10.
Milbrodt, Teresa.
BEWARE THE BEARDED WOMAN: FREAKS, THE FEMALE BODY, AND NON-RECOGNITION.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2006, Bowling Green State University
► This thesis explores the concept of recognizable and non-recognizable bodies through examining…
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▼ This thesis explores the concept of recognizable and non-recognizable bodies through examining representations of female freaks in literature. Bodies must be recognizable in order to be considered human, yet the non-recognizable body or freakish body offers alternate possibilities of embodiment that are usually overlooked. This thesis focuses on what happens when the non-recognizable female freak is in the public gaze and the gaze among intimates. Both of these spaces are ambivalent spaces for the female freak in which she finds simultaneous danger and power, identification and manipulation.
Advisors/Committee Members: Albertini, William.
Keywords: Freaks; Freak Show; Female Body; Gaze
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11.
Miller, Perry Dal-nim.
The Military Camptown in Retrospect: Multiracial Korean American Subject Formation Along the Black-White Binary.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2007, Bowling Green State University
► This thesis applies theoretical approaches from the sociology of literature and Asian…
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▼ This thesis applies theoretical approaches from the sociology of literature and Asian Americanist critique to a study of two novels by multiracial Korean American authors. I investigate themes of multiracial identity and consumption in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, both set in the 1960’s and 1970’s gijichon or military camptown geography, recreational institutions established around U.S. military installations in the Republic of Korea. I trace the literary production of Korean American subjectivity along a socially constructed dichotomy of blackness and whiteness, examining the novels’ representations of cross-racial interactions in a camptown economy based on the militarized sexual labor of working-class Korean women. I conclude that Black-White binarisms are reproduced in the gijichon through the consumption practices of both American military personnel and Korean gijichon workers, and that retrospective fictional accounts of gijichon multiraciality signal a shift in artistic, scholarly, and popular conceptualizations of Korean American and Asian American group identities.
Advisors/Committee Members: Begum, Khani.
Keywords: Asian American; Korean American; Multiraciality; Mixed Race; Consumption; Sociology of Literature; Republic of Korea; U.S. Imperialism; U.S. Military; Gijichon; Sex Work; Prostitution; Women of Colors Feminism
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12.
Vayo, Lloyd Isaac.
Fathers and Sons: The Generations of 9/11.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2006, Bowling Green State University
► “Fathers and Sons: The Generations of 9/11” intervenes in analyses of 9/11,…
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▼ “Fathers and Sons: The Generations of 9/11” intervenes in analyses of 9/11, globalization, and the Oedipus complex to assert the necessity of the new Oedipus complex manifested in the event. The thesis consists of five sections. Fundamentalism stands as a frame for the internal logic of Oedipal revision. As fundamentalist entities, al Qaeda and the U.S. operate with a preference for tribal organization, election, the sacred text, and a megalomaniacal insistence on singularity and repetition. The maternal homeland acts as the locus for Oedipal performance, where the military son attacks the Founding Father and permeates the maternal. Within globalization, many homelands disappear, necessitating adoption by the denationalized. When globalization does not go as planned, the U.S. solicits a victimizing event to facilitate a reformatting in a phenomenon I call aggressive victimhood. Once the maternal homeland is compromised and inhabited by the victimizing agent (al Qaeda), the maternal homeland must be reconstituted through the use of memorial iconography. However, this iconography too is inhabited, as evidenced by the Islamic motifs in the World Trade Center, making architectural efforts the inscription of al Qaeda inhabitation. To operate in the globalized world, actors must apply a cellular methodology. This allows for extreme mobility and for death without harm to the cellular community. While soliciting the victimizing event, the U.S. acts in a flawed cellular fashion, compromising objectivity by implicating itself in the tactics used by al Qaeda and revealing itself as a similarly pseudo-“terrorist” state. The Oedipus complex is insufficient to describe the events of September 11th. Though the maternal homeland remains stable, both the U.S. military son and the al Qaeda military son are sons and fathers. Consequently, the U.S. military son is unable to kill the father and permeate the maternal homeland, as the al Qaeda military son has invalidated the Founding Father and assumed his place. Since the al Qaeda military son-as-father is already internal to the maternal homeland in its globalized form, it is impervious to the Oedipal event, making any attempts to kill the al Qaeda military father futile. These are the terms of the new Oedipus complex.
Advisors/Committee Members: Labbie, Erin.
Keywords: fundamentalism; homeland; architecture; cellular; Oedipus complex; psychoanalysis
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13.
Walter, Scott M.
White Is and White Ain’t: Representations and Analyses of Whiteness in the Novels of Chester Himes.
Degree: PhD, American Culture Studies/English, 2005, Bowling Green State University
► This dissertation borrows and paraphrases for its title from the marijuana-dream sermon…
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▼ This dissertation borrows and paraphrases for its title from the marijuana-dream sermon in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. As Ellison avers that "Black is, an’ black ain’t," so too, I contend, "White is, and white ain’t." Racial constructions are irrevocably embedded in each other. I trace this through selected novels of Chester Himes, who offers a specific way of reading whiteness, through his deployment and ultimate disruption of hard-boiled conventions, a style that other scholars have convincingly argued is a literary epitome of white male perspective. Chapter One is a biographical sketch, focusing upon those points in Himes’s life which best inform his representations and analysis of whiteness. Chapter Two engages Himes’s first published novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go in order to locate those tropes and figures of whiteness in both narrative and style which will later manifest themselves in his Harlem Cycle. Chapter Three moves to the Harlem Cycle itself. A Rage in Harlem is a transitional text of sorts, from the "social protest" conventions to the more absurdist aspects of the later novels. These stylistic departures are discussed alongside the later Harlem novels, in order to demonstrate how they result in texts more fully able to address the trope of whiteness. Chapter Four examines the last novel of the Cycle, Blind Man With A Pistol. Here Himes unleashes his most unsparing critique and unmasking of the effects of whiteness, moving effectively past the mere personification of white mannerisms into a clear assault on structural aspects. In doing so, he effectively deconstructs the hardboiled and detective genres, as there is no resolution available to the "crime" he narrates. The text itself devolves from the epistemological nature of the detective narrative into a more encompassing (and despairing) meditation on the ontologic character of the construction of race, particularly the construction and maintenance of whiteness. Some attention is given to the "last" of the Harlem novels, Plan B. This text, unfinished and unpublished in Himes’s lifetime, is the fictive rendering of his observation that "the only way the black man can solve [the "race problem]" is through organized violence.
Advisors/Committee Members: Berry, Ellen.
Keywords: Chester Himes; African American Literature; Race relations; Whiteness
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14.
Warren, Beckett.
Dawn of a New Apocalypse: Engagements with the Apocalyptic Imagination in 2012 and Primitvist Discourse.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2008, Bowling Green State University
► Apocalypse is often viewed entirely as a politically conservative phenomenon, conjuring images…
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▼ Apocalypse is often viewed entirely as a politically conservative phenomenon, conjuring images of evangelical Christians anxiously awaiting the return of Christ. However, such a reading oversimplifies competing tensions within apocalyptic discourse. This study examines interpretations of ancient apocalypses, both Jewish and Christian, paying particular attention to the workings of what has been termed the apocalyptic imagination in order to establish a basic framework to consider contemporary instances. The apocalyptic imagination may be characterized as a "revolution of the imagination" and is largely concerned with the status of truth, and what ways of knowing may constitute truth. Additionally, apocalypse may be calibrated either towards a focus on destruction and purification or creation and redemption. The condition of postmodernity and "postmodernists" have been characterized as apocalyptic in and of themselves. This study argues that contemporary engagements with the apocalyptic imagination are largely informed by a perceived failure of the Enlightenment project, both in terms of politics and ways of knowing. Speculations about a nearing "end" of the Mayan calendar identify a coming apocalypse in the year 2012. Debates within this discourse, specifically between Daniel Pinchbeck and Whitley Strieber, illustrate the tension between purification and redemption. Furthermore, there is a concern with reexamining what constitutes knowledge, particularly that feelings about the world are worth knowing. Primitivist discourse cites civilization itself as the source and agent of domination and exploitation. The apocalyptic implications of overthrowing civilization are examined paying particular attention to the epistemological claims made within primitivist discourse. Apocalypse exhibits many conflicting tendencies within its discourse and cannot be characterized monolithically. Just as it is an oversimplification to view it in conservative or reactionary terms, casting it as necessarily concerned with liberation likewise misses important nuances. However a particular apocalypse is calibrated, it does challenge accepted conceptions of truth that may be arrived at through non-rational thought including emotion.
Advisors/Committee Members: Baron, Cynthia.
Subjects: American studies; Philosophy
Keywords: apocalypse; ways of knowing; primitivism; 2012; anarchism; Daniel Pinchbeck; John Zerzan; psychedelic drugs; apocalyptic imagination
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15.
Watson, Kelly L.
Encountering Cannibalism: A Cultural History.
Degree: MA, American Culture Studies/English, 2006, Bowling Green State University
► "Encountering Cannibalism: A Cultural History" explores the relationship between the trope of…
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▼ "Encountering Cannibalism: A Cultural History" explores the relationship between the trope of cannibalism and the notions of civilization and savagery. This thesis intervenes in scholarship on cannibalism by analyzing the surrounding discourses from a cultural studies position. Despite the advancements in scholarship in the past fifty years that have seen the breakdown of many binary systems, criticism that addresses cannibalism continues to perpetuate the civilization/savagery binary. Working from a meta-discursive position in American Culture Studies, this thesis interrogates the history of cannibalism in order to understand this stubborn persistence of the civilization/savagery binary in studies of cannibalism across other disciplines. Tracing the development of cannibal discourse, we discover the place of the cannibal within a fantasy of wholeness of American identity. The cannibal is both a disruption of civilization and a foundational element as neither civilization nor savagery can exist independently. The trope of cannibalism allows the scholar to make connections and draw conclusions across disciplines, time periods, and theoretical positionings, and provides a unique entry point for discussions of race and gender. The cannibal becomes the ultimate Other for the European Subject and is therefore simultaneously rejected and fetishized. The notion of the cannibal Other persists and plays an important role in modern discourse which still insists on the clear separation of civilization and savagery. This thesis seeks to assert the first cultural history of cannibalism so that other disciplinary work on the subject may be illuminated and altered.
Advisors/Committee Members: Labbie, Erin.
Keywords: cannibalism; savagery; civilization; postcolonial
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