DOCSLIB.ORG

UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Irvine UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Decolonial Narrative Techniques in Healing Novels from Shaugawaumikong, Walatowa, Kawaika, Chimputi, and Calotmul Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6w07422s Author Hickerson, Crystal Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Decolonial Narrative Techniques in Healing Novels from Shaugawaumikong, Walatowa, Kawaika, Chimputi, and Calotmul DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Comparative Literature by Crystal Hickerson Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Adriana Campos-Johnson, Chair Associate Professor Horacio Legras Assistant Professor Alicia Cox 2018 © 2018 Crystal Hickerson DEDICATION To my family and friends in recognition of their patience and support as I disappeared for days to write to my wonderful babysitters whom I trusted to be my double with many thanks to my advisor, Adriana, who supported me from beginning to end and to Zina Giannopoulou for inspiring me with her passion for teaching and to all of my professors who changed my ways of thinking and feeling, giving me permission to explore topics that were important to me and whose ways of wording their ideas were always instructive and thank you to all of my students for reading at least some of the literature I assigned them and humoring me in classroom discussions and to all of my friends at UCI who read and talked with me, and especially those who were juggling family life and reading and teaching, too, but were so generous with their time and good humor and shia-shia to Chia-yu, for getting me to the end. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii INTRODUCTION: 1 Modes of Healing in “Native American” Novels 9 Modes of Healing in “Latin American” Novels 22 Aesthetic Education: From The Novel to Everyday Life 27 Techniques of Healing Novels 48 CHAPTER 1: TRICKSTER STORYTELLING TO HEAL SHAME: DECOLONIZING RACE WITH SURPRISE AND JOY 56 Racism, Shame, and Cultural Schizophrenia 57 Trickster Storytelling, Trickster Hermeneutics 76 CHAPTER 2: DAMPENING AFFECT THROUGH LITERARY MOOD: RESTORATIVE BEAUTY IN THE CHANTING OF HOUSE MADE OF DAWN 96 Victimry and Erasure 100 Creating Literary Mood: Quiet Memory Flows and Psychic Play 101 Creating Literary Mood: Quiet Humans to Dampen Affect 116 Creating Literary Mood: Quiet Landscapes to Reconnect 128 Creating Literary Mood: Quiet Chanting 136 Decolonization through an Aesthetics of Beauty 144 Healing Quietude to Bypass Colonial Ideology 155 CODA: DECOLONIAL LITERARY TECHNIQUES IN LESLIE MARMON SILKO'S THE ALMANAC OF THE DEAD AND CEREMONY 160 CHAPTER 3: DEMOCRATIC DISGUST AND AN “ARTISTIC LANGUAGE” OF THE UNCANNY: HEALING COLONIAL IDENTITIES IN EL ZORRO DE ARRIBA Y EL ZORRO DE ABAJO 182 Democratic Disgust 191 A Narrative Language of the Uncanny: Doubling through Confused Reference 207 A Narrative Language of the Uncanny: Doubling through Plot Repetitions 216 Water Metaphors to Erode Boundaries 229 Contradiction and Enjoyment 236 Healing Narrative Language 241 iii CONCLUSION: HEALING AS DESTINY IN THE COSMOLOGICAL FRAMES OF DECOLONIAL NOVELS 251 Cosmological Frames 255 Flat Affect and Pessimistic Destiny in X-Teya, u puksiikal koolel 273 Pscychic Destiny 288 BIBLIOGRAPHY 292 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to my committee chair, Professor Adriana Johnson, who has always been willing to work with me even when my topic or approach was not her own, and when the writing was often very messy. She has always helped me clarify my investments in studying literature and has contributed so much of her time to organizing classes and lectures on campus to connect our critical work with concrete, historical circumstances. I am very thankful to my committee members, Professor Horacio Legras and Professor Alicia Cox, both who have always made me feel very welcome and at ease discussing my work and whose pragmatism and honesty have always been very refreshing. To Jamie Rogers, who was always a wonderful friend, neighbor, and fellow graduate student, thank you for your many mini-lessons in the back yard on race studies and gender theory, for sparking my interest in decolonialism, and for somehow finding the time to know everyone in our department, organize labor union meetings, protest, write, be a mom, and drop by my back door. And warm thanks to Rei Terada for the reading group she organized one term, in which not many conclusions were reached but an atmosphere of respect and camaraderie arose that inspired everyone in the room to work really hard to translate our ways of thinking to each other. Thank you for your ongoing investment in experimenting. v CURRICULUM VITAE Crystal Hickerson 2004 B.A. in English Abilene Christian University, Abilene 2004-06 Peace Corp, Namibia 2007 Graduate Assistant, Humanities Institue, State University of New York, Buffalo 2008 M.A. in Comparative Literature State University of New York, Buffalo 2011 Nanterre Exchange Fellow, Université Paris X, Nanterre, France 2018 Ph.D. in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY American literatures and critical theory PUBLICATIONS “Crises in Quotidian Experience: Poetic Narration and the Refuge of La casa de cartón,” Exit 9, n. 11 (2011) Review of Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation, eds. J. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo (Albany: SUNY UP, 2008), in theory@buffalo, n. 12., (2008), 30-34. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Decolonial Narrative Techniques in Healing Novels from Shaugawaumikong, Walatowa, Kawaika, Chimputi, and Calotmul By Crystal Hickerson Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine, 2018 Professor Adriana Michelle Campos-Johnson, Chair Several indigenous writers across the Americas have claimed that their novels can heal people, and their novels thematize indigenous characters becoming healed from symptoms of shame and contempt they experience within the aesthetic field of colonial culture in which bodies emerge in a racialized and gendered hierarchy of more or less legitimate lifestyles. To investigate ways in which these novels attempt to operate decolonially to heal readers from the colonial social aesthetics defining them as more or less worthy of dignity, freedom, or land, this study draws upon work done in affect theory as well as Native American studies to explore the literary techniques the novels deploy to affect readers largely unconsciously, changing their associations of some of the primary affects identified by Silvan Tomkins in relation to landscapes and racialized human bodies. Lauren Berlant’s notion of “the good life” as a fundamental fantasy motivating everyday action becomes useful for tracking how the novels’ portrayals of indigenous characters as successful and Westernized characters as pathological work to redefine the good life for readers, affecting the ways in which readers relate to indigenous values and lifestyle so that a decolonial activist politics can emerge. vii INTRODUCTION “In our colonized, racially gendered, oppressed existences we are also other than what the hegemon makes us be. That is an infra-political achievement.” -María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 1 The possibility for infra-political achievement, the allure of a micropolitical success that might unfold as an activism organized at the site of the psyche's negotiation of subjectivity and subjectivation—this formulation of a battlefield in the domain of an everyday aesthetic field, on the fronts of lifestyle, discourse, and art—keeps alive a flicker of hope that individual subjects might experience some satisfaction in their resistances to the rhizomatic monster that is global capitalism. This hope is possible because the decolonial battle is so accessible, already happening within the subject at the points where her lifestyle exceeds colonial norms. In the face of a world economic system birthed in the colonization of lands demarcated as “America,” an administrative system that codified our present racial hierarchies to establish ethnic and geographic divisions of labor and wealth while imposing Judeo-Christian gender and sexual norms and ways of relating to non-human earth beings,—in the face of this coloniality of power entrenched throughout the human social world, scholars previously associated with the Latin American Subaltern Studies group have been calling for specific praxes for decolonization that can unfold at the level of style. To name only a few, Walter Mignolo calls for an epistemic decolonization that puts subaltern languages, cosmologies, and geographical mappings into greater circulation such that nonhegemonic forms of thinking can exercise more social power, 1 María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia, 25.4 (2010), 746. 1 particularly in government and education.2 Ramon Grosfoguel insists on academics taking the time to develop a rich canon of thinking from the South to address “the need to imagine anti- capitalist global decolonial utopian alternatives beyond colonialist and nationalist, Eurocentric fundamentalist and Third World fundamentalist binary ways of thinking.” And María Lugones promotes developing local communities based upon “the production of the everyday,” which involves a continual “affirmation of life over profit, communalism over individualism, 'estar' over enterprise, beings in relation
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Dangerously Free: Outlaws and Nation-Making in Literature of the Indian Territory
    DANGEROUSLY FREE: OUTLAWS AND NATION-MAKING IN LITERATURE OF THE INDIAN TERRITORY by Jenna Hunnef A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Jenna Hunnef 2016 Dangerously Free: Outlaws and Nation-Making in Literature of the Indian Territory Jenna Hunnef Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2016 Abstract In this dissertation, I examine how literary representations of outlaws and outlawry have contributed to the shaping of national identity in the United States. I analyze a series of texts set in the former Indian Territory (now part of the state of Oklahoma) for traces of what I call “outlaw rhetorics,” that is, the political expression in literature of marginalized realities and competing visions of nationhood. Outlaw rhetorics elicit new ways to think the nation differently—to imagine the nation otherwise; as such, I demonstrate that outlaw narratives are as capable of challenging the nation’s claims to territorial or imaginative title as they are of asserting them. Borrowing from Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’s definition of “nation” as “the multifaceted, lived experience of families who gather in particular places,” this dissertation draws an analogous relationship between outlaws and domestic spaces wherein they are both considered simultaneously exempt from and constitutive of civic life. In the same way that the outlaw’s alternately celebrated and marginal status endows him or her with the power to support and eschew the stories a nation tells about itself, so the liminality and centrality of domestic life have proven effective as a means of consolidating and dissenting from the status quo of the nation-state.
    [Show full text]
  • Native American and Indigenous Studies
    UNIVERSITY OF NEW & NEBRASKA SELECTED BACKLIST PRESS 2016 NATIVE AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES CONTRIBUTING TO THE WORLD’S LIBRARY FOR 75 YEARS FOR BOOK MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION INQUIRIES, CONTACT: MATT BOKOVOY Senior Acquisitions Editor Native Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Borderlands History [email protected] HEATHER STAUFFER Acquiring Editorial Assistant [email protected] Cover image from War Paintings of the Tsuu T’ina Song of Dewey Beard Nation by Arni Brownstone (see p. 11). Illustration Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn of the AMNH 1 tipi liner, made from two cowhides PHILIP BURNHAM sewn together and measuring 235cm x 173 cm. The exploits on the left are primarily those of 2015 spur award in best western biography Eagle Rib, painted by Fire Long Ago, and those This is the biography of Dewey Beard, a Min- on the right are of Bull Head, painted by Two neconjou Lakota who witnessed the Battle of Guns. Based on a tracing of the original. Cat. No. Little Bighorn, survived Wounded Knee, traveled 50/5916, American Museum of Natural History. with William Cody, experienced the continued exploitation of the government during World War II, and felt the effects of Black Hills tourism and Hollywood Indians. “The remarkable Dewey Beard was a man who seemed to live forever—old enough to have 30% fought at the Little Bighorn in 1876 and its last SAVE survivor when he finally died in 1955. What the old-time Lakota were like, and what they lived ON ALL BOOKS IN THIS through in those seventy years, is the subject of Philip Burnham’s original, bracing, touching, CATALOG BY USING surprising, and vigorously written book.
    [Show full text]
  • Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850
    0/-*/&4637&: *ODPMMBCPSBUJPOXJUI6OHMVFJU XFIBWFTFUVQBTVSWFZ POMZUFORVFTUJPOT UP MFBSONPSFBCPVUIPXPQFOBDDFTTFCPPLTBSFEJTDPWFSFEBOEVTFE 8FSFBMMZWBMVFZPVSQBSUJDJQBUJPOQMFBTFUBLFQBSU $-*$,)&3& "OFMFDUSPOJDWFSTJPOPGUIJTCPPLJTGSFFMZBWBJMBCMF UIBOLTUP UIFTVQQPSUPGMJCSBSJFTXPSLJOHXJUI,OPXMFEHF6OMBUDIFE ,6JTBDPMMBCPSBUJWFJOJUJBUJWFEFTJHOFEUPNBLFIJHIRVBMJUZ CPPLT0QFO"DDFTTGPSUIFQVCMJDHPPE publishing blackness publishing blackness Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850 George Hutchinson and John K. Young, editors The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2013 All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2016 2015 2014 2013 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Publishing blackness : textual constructions of race since 1850 / George Hutchinson and John Young, editiors. pages cm — (Editorial theory and literary criticism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 472- 11863- 2 (hardback) — ISBN (invalid) 978- 0- 472- 02892- 4 (e- book) 1. American literature— African American authors— History and criticism— Theory, etc. 2. Criticism, Textual. 3. American literature— African American authors— Publishing— History. 4. Literature publishing— Political aspects— United States— History. 5. African Americans— Intellectual life. 6. African Americans in literature. I. Hutchinson, George, 1953– editor of compilation. II. Young, John K. (John Kevin), 1968– editor of compilation PS153.N5P83 2012 810.9'896073— dc23 2012042607 acknowledgments Publishing Blackness has passed through several potential versions before settling in its current form.
    [Show full text]
  • 8 Redefining Zorro: Hispanicising the Swashbuckling Hero
    Redefining Zorro: Hispanicising the Swashbuckling Hero Victoria Kearley Introduction Such did the theatrical trailer for The Mask of Zorro (Campbell, 1998) proclaim of Antonio Banderas’s performance as the masked adventurer, promising the viewer a sexier and more daring vision of Zorro than they had ever seen before. This paper considers this new image of Zorro and the way in which an iconic figure of modern popular culture was redefined through the performance of Banderas, and the influence of his contemporary star persona, as he became the first Hispanic actor ever to play Zorro in a major Hollywood production. It is my argument that Banderas’s Zorro, transformed from bandit Alejandro Murrieta into the masked hero over the course of the film’s narrative, is necessarily altered from previous incarnations in line with existing Hollywood images of Hispanic masculinity when he is played by a Hispanic actor. I will begin with a short introduction to the screen history of Zorro as a character and outline the action- adventure hero archetype of which he is a prime example. The main body of my argument is organised around a discussion of the employment of three of Hollywood’s most prevalent and enduring Hispanic male types, as defined by Latino film scholar, Charles Ramirez Berg, before concluding with a consideration of how these ultimately serve to redefine the character. Who is Zorro? Zorro was originally created by pulp fiction writer, Johnston McCulley, in 1919 and first immortalised on screen by Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro (Niblo, 1920) just a year later.
    [Show full text]
  • ALS-MLA American Literature Section of the Modern Language
    ALS-MLA American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association ANNUAL REPORT, 2011 Compiled by Joycelyn Moody and Emily Broadwater, University of Texas at San Antonio CONTENTS Officers............................................................................................................................................2 The Hubbell Medal 2011…………...…………………................………………….…………....3 The Foerster Prize 2011………………………………..................……………….……………..5 Report from American Literature………………………………………………........…………....7 2012 MLA Convention Session......................................................................................................8 Lists from the Hubbell Center Chairs of the Section…………………………………………………………….…………...8 Executive Coordinators of the Section……………………………………...…...……...…...9 Winners of the Hubbell Medal…………………………………………….....……………...9 Winners of the Foerster Prize……………………………..……………........…………...…….....9 Upcoming MLA Conventions…………………………………………………………..……….11 1 American Literature Section Officers 2011 The executive coordinator and editor of American Literature are also members of the Advisory Council. Chair: Michael Moon, Emory U ALS-MLA Standing Committees Ex Officio:Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern U Executive Coordinator: Joycelyn Moody, Nominating Committee: U of Texas, San Antonio Nancy Bentley, U of Pennsylvania, Chair Advisory Council Tina Chen, Pennsylvania State U Elected Members of the Council: Sheila Contreras, Michigan State U Priscilla Wald, Editor of American Literature Hubbell
    [Show full text]
  • John P. Harrington Papers 1907-1959
    THE PAPERS OF John Peabody Harringtan IN THE Smithsonian Institution 1907-1957 VOLUME SEVEN A GUIDE TO THE FIELD NOTES: NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE OF MEXICO/CENTRAL AMERICA/ SOUTH AMERICA I:DITRD Br Elaine L. Mills KRAUS INTER AJ 10 L Pl BLIC 110 Di ision of Kraus-Thom Jl )r 1lI1.allon LUl11tcd THE PAPERS OF John Peabody Harringtan IN THE Smithsonian Institution 1907-1957 VOLUME SEVEN A GUIDE TO THE FIELD NOTES: Native American History, Language, and Culture of Mexico/Central America/South America Prepared in the National Anthropological Archives Department ofAnthropology National Museum ofNatural History Washington, D.C. THE PAPERS OF John Peabody Harringtan IN THE Smithsonian Institution 1907-1957 VOLUME SEVEN A GUIDE TO THE FIELD NOTES: Native American History, Language, and Culture of Mexico/Central America/South America EDITED BY Elaine L. Mills KRAUS INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS A Division of Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited White Plains, N.Y. © Copyright The Smithsonian Institution 1988 All rights reserved. No part ofthis work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means-graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or taping, information storage and retrieval systems-without written permission ofthe publisher. First Printing Printed in the United States of America §TM The paper in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science- Permanence of Papers for Contents Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data INTRODUCTION VII / V1/l Harrington, John Peabody. Scope and Content ofthis Publication VII / vu The papers ofJohn Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian Institution, 1907 -1957.
    [Show full text]
  • Woman As a Category / New Woman Hybridity
    WiN: The EAAS Women’s Network Journal Issue 1 (2018) The Affective Aesthetics of Transnational Feminism Silvia Schultermandl, Katharina Gerund, and Anja Mrak ABSTRACT: This review essay offers a consideration of affect and aesthetics in transnational feminism writing. We first discuss the general marginalization of aesthetics in selected canonical texts of transnational feminist theory, seen mostly as the exclusion of texts that do not adhere to the established tenets of academic writing, as well as the lack of interest in the closer examination of the features of transnational feminist aesthetic and its political dimensions. In proposing a more comprehensive alternative, we draw on the current “re-turn towards aesthetics” and especially on Rita Felski’s work in this context. This approach works against a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in literary analyses and re-directs scholarly attention from the hidden messages and political contexts of a literary work to its aesthetic qualities and distinctly literary properties. While proponents of these movements are not necessarily interested in the political potential of their theories, scholars in transnational feminism like Samantha Pinto have shown the congruency of aesthetic and political interests in the study of literary texts. Extending Felski’s and Pinto’s respective projects into an approach to literary aesthetics more oriented toward transnational feminism on the one hand and less exclusively interested in formalist experimentation on the other, we propose the concept of affective aesthetics. It productively complicates recent theories of literary aesthetics and makes them applicable to a diverse range of texts. We exemplarily consider the affective dimensions of aesthetic strategies in works by Christina Sharpe, Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who promote the idea of feminism as an everyday practice through aesthetically rendered texts that foster a personal and intimate link between the writer, text, and the reader.
    [Show full text]
  • New Orleans Nostalgia "Zorro Rides Again" Ned Hémard Copyright 2007
    N EW ORLEANS NOSTALGIA Remembering New Orleans History, Culture and Traditions By Ned Hémard Zorro Rides Again In 1937, New Orleans became the first city in the United States to be provided funding under the Wagner Act. Contracts for the St. Thomas and Magnolia housing projects were the first signed by FDR under Senator Robert Wagner’s legislation, and with it the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) was created. A young LBJ was one of the principal authors of the Housing Act of 1937, and he saw to it that the first three grants were announced in alphabetical order (with Austin being mentioned before New Orleans and New York). Also that year, New Orleans saw the founding of a new carnival organization, the Knights of Hermes (which continues to charm the city with its annual parade). Hermes, HANO and housing were the talk of the town, and Hitler was the talk of the nation. For those who wanted some form of escapism, there was always the local movie house. Among numerous neighborhood theatres, there was the Bell, the Cortez, the Casino and the Carrollton (which had been rebuilt the year before). Or perhaps one visited the Imperial on Hagan Avenue (Jefferson Davis Parkway today) followed by a stop at the Parkway Bakery (also on Hagan … then as today). 1937 produced great films like Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon”, the Marx Brothers in “A Day at the Races”, “Stella Dallas”, “Topper” and “The Awful Truth”. In addition to these classics were the serial Westerns from Republic, and 1937’s “Zorro Rides Again” was one of these twelve-chapter runs.
    [Show full text]
  • American Book Awards 2004
    BEFORE COLUMBUS FOUNDATION PRESENTS THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS 2004 America was intended to be a place where freedom from discrimination was the means by which equality was achieved. Today, American culture THE is the most diverse ever on the face of this earth. Recognizing literary excel- lence demands a panoramic perspective. A narrow view strictly to the mainstream ignores all the tributaries that feed it. American literature is AMERICAN not one tradition but all traditions. From those who have been here for thousands of years to the most recent immigrants, we are all contributing to American culture. We are all being translated into a new language. BOOK Everyone should know by now that Columbus did not “discover” America. Rather, we are all still discovering America—and we must continue to do AWARDS so. The Before Columbus Foundation was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature. The goals of BCF are to provide recognition and a wider audience for the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity that constitutes American writing. BCF has always employed the term “multicultural” not as a description of an aspect of American literature, but as a definition of all American litera- ture. BCF believes that the ingredients of America’s so-called “melting pot” are not only distinct, but integral to the unique constitution of American Culture—the whole comprises the parts. In 1978, the Board of Directors of BCF (authors, editors, and publishers representing the multicultural diversity of American Literature) decided that one of its programs should be a book award that would, for the first time, respect and honor excellence in American literature without restric- tion or bias with regard to race, sex, creed, cultural origin, size of press or ad budget, or even genre.
    [Show full text]
  • Building in Toni Morrison's Paradise1
    THE RELIGIOUS OVERTONES OF ETHNIC IDENTITY- BUILDING IN TONI MORRISON'S PARADISE1 Ana Mª Fraile Marcos Universidad de Salamanca This article approaches the study of Toni Morrison's latest novel, Paradise (1998), as an illustration of the process of (African) American identity-formation. The two communities that Morrison contraposes in the novel may be seen as representative of two different trends in America's construction of national identity: assimilation and homogenization, on the one hand, or interactive difference, on the other. Whereas Ruby emerges as a proud and paradisiacal African American town which gradually falls prey to its Manichean view of the world, the Convent is eventually presented as an alternative open community. Thus, Ruby functions as a mirror to American history. By adopting the American creeds and religious typology present in the Puritan origins of the United States, the community of Ruby reproduces the exclusionist, discriminatory, isolationist, hegemonic and violent character of American society as well as the tensions within it. The Convent, on the other hand, evolves towards the creation of a spiritual paradise based on the fluid hybridization of opposites. The issues of race and gender appear to be central to the construction of both communities, although it is religion, and particularly the adoption of the American jeremiad and the myth of the City upon a Hill, what provides the structural and thematic pattern for the novel. The following article attempts a close reading of Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) based on the assumption that the novel offers a critique of the traditional American paradigm of nationhood and identity formation with roots in Puritanism.
    [Show full text]
  • Amanda J. Lucia, Ph.D
    Amanda J. Lucia, Ph.D. Associate Professor University of California-Riverside Riverside, California 92521 Email: [email protected] Phone: (773) 412-8436 Website: www.amandajeanlucia.com EMPLOYMENT 2015-present Associate Professor, Religious Studies, University of California-Riverside 2011-15 Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, University of California-Riverside 2010-11 Visiting Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, Austin College 2005-06 Visiting Lecturer, Hindi/Urdu, University of Illinois at Chicago 2004-05 Lecturer, Hindi, University of Chicago EDUCATION 2010 Ph.D., History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School Thesis: “Darshan in a Hotel Ballroom: Amritanandamayi Ma’s (Amma’s) Communities of Devotees in the United States” Committee: Wendy Doniger (Chair, History of Religions), Steven Collins (South Asian Languages and Civilizations), Omar McRoberts (Sociology) 2004 M.A., History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School 1998 B.A., Religious Studies, India Studies, Indiana University PUBLICATIONS (Prior to 4/2013, Amanda J. Huffer) Books Lucia, Amanda and Maya Warrier, co-editors. A Cultural History of Hinduism in the Age of Independence (1947 – 2017). Vol. VI of A Cultural History of Hinduism. London: Bloomsbury Press, in press. Lucia, Amanda. 2020. White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals, Berkeley: University of California Press. Reviewed in: High Country News Featured in: Sacred Matters Magazine, Canopy Forum, UC Press blog, The Yogic Studies podcast, New Books in Indian Religions podcast, New Books in Religion podcast Dr. Amanda J. Lucia 1 Lucia, Amanda. Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, in press. Lucia, Amanda. 2014. Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace.
    [Show full text]
  • Teaching Spanish Through Hispanic Art by Maria Tucker Telelearning
    IUPUI/IMA Community Project > Activities > Instructional Units > Teaching spanish through hi... Page 1 of 4 Teaching Spanish Through Hispanic Art By Maria Tucker Telelearning Louisiana School Natchitoches, Louisiana Instructional Plan Title: Teaching Spanish Through Hispanic Art Keywords: Maps. Art, music, language, food, and culture Curriculum Area: Spanish Grade Level: Nine to twelve Size group: Whole class (8 to 12 students) Time to Complete Instructional Plan: Four weeks culminating project over a thee-month period This plan will lead to these Instructional Objectives: 1. Students will learn about the importance of Spanish language in U.S.A. 2. Students will learn the geography of Hispanic world. 3. Students will create a picture of their favorite artist and write about him/her. 4. Students will be able to communicate in Spanish what they have learned. 5. Students will learn to recognize and respect cultural differences. 6. Students will learn to sing Spanish songs and able to translate them. 7. Students will learn about the differences of Hispanic art of Hispanic countries 8. Students will learn about the connection between art and language. Indiana State Proficiencies: 1.4.2 Students demonstrate an understanding of the concept of culture though comparisons of the culture's studies and their own. 2. Students will acquire information and recognize the different Hispanic countries of the world. Materials and resources Maps nationalgeographic.com Art calendar Smithsonian American Art Museum http://nrnaa-rvther.si.edu/1001/index.html Hoosier Artist http://www.ulib.iuyui.edu/imls/hoosierar.html Books file://C:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Administrator\My%20Documents\OliveTree\IMLS\site\ac..
    [Show full text]