Browsing by Department "Humanities"

The issue that this paper addresses is how the college coach has abandoned the roles of educator and liaison between athletics and academics. The current era of college was examined using academic analysis, interviews with college administrators and academics connected to college athletics, and literature regarding the topic. The conclusion reached is that the college coach is in dire need of reform both professionally and pedagogically and that for the college coach to justify an existence in academics that is not solely for entertainment, college coach must reform their profession with academics values.

This thesis investigates two episodic television shows, Arrested Development and Scrubs, and attempts to establish why one succeeded with audiences and the other failed. Following the work of genre theory, it is asserted that the two shows resonate with opposing narratives framing lived experience. The former presents the institutional (or restrictive) force of language to guide one's thoughts, mark disassociations between the self and others, and determine action. The latter appeals to the creative (or liberating) use of dialogue and narrative to inspire agency. In privileging the concrete situations in which interactions with others enable growth without restricting the will, and in which others are engaged in the same self-investigation, Scrubs calls for an acknowledgement of others. Arrested Development points to the metaphysical language and power systems that make such acknowledgements impossible. It is argued thereafter that both world-pictures have their place. The opposition between Arrested Development and Scrubs develops into a dual affirmation of how ordinary uses of language have the potential to create arbitrary limits between the self and others, but also how ordinary language in a state of emergence from the particular lives of a multiplicity of speakers enables us to meaningfully communicate in the first place and antagonizes the metaphysical pictures that hold us captive. This thesis concludes by exploring the way that fiction, as a series of propositions, occupies the middle space between an epistemological opening up and closing off of the self to others, allowing it to be used for either purpose, or for both at once.

In his five-year-long world literature lecture series, running from 1989 to 1994, the Chinese diasporic writer-painter Mu Xin (1927-2011) provided a puzzling advice for the group of emerging Chinese artists living in New York: “Art is to sacrifice.” Reading this advice in tandem with other comments on “sacrifice” that Mu Xin provided throughout the lecture series, this study uses the concept of “art is to sacrifice one’s death” to examine the intricate relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Mu Xin’s project of art. The question of diasporic positionality is inherent in the relationship between aesthetic and ethical discourses, since the two discourses themselves were born in a Western tradition that was once foreign to Mu Xin. Examining his life together with his works in different medium, I trace the intellectual genealogy of his works to the legacy of Lu Xun and Lin Fengmian’s debate in the late 1920s. Then, I examine how Mu Xin reinvented their aesthetic-cum-ethical project to shape his role as an artist in the world. Finally, through comparing him to a similar Chinese diasporic artist Gao Xingjian, I put the artistic image that Mu Xin established for himself in relation to the political position that he inhabited as a diasporic artist working across cultural boundaries. I argue that Mu Xin not only vigorously forwarded an ethical project in pursuit of humanness with his advice on art but also envisioned such humanness to be a mediative process of social activity instead of any essential state of being or sentimentality in a singular mind. Through such an artistic project, Mu Xin managed to participate in reforming the static boundaries of culture and nation-state, such that he carried out a political project though fictional means, making the world more adaptive to individuals living within it.

This thesis research presents a choreographic enquiry into ways Black Americans, specifically Black femme inhabit their bodies and their entanglements to the surrounding environment. It asks the question of how Black girls in the south navigate their social circumstances, and what inheritances—metaphysical, emotional, cultural—affect their encounters with themselves and each other. To do this the author contemplates concepts of the “undistinguished mass,” Black flesh, and inheritances as offered by Hortense Spillers. The author introduces her embodied practice of Groove as a bourgeoning theoretical framework for exploring self in the context of its larger positioning within society and the land. Groove is propositioned as a way of expanding awareness of self through movement, by paying attention to the sensatory information observed and communicated within our bodies. For this purpose a working group of Black femme was formed to trace their own geographies, histories, and sense of care, through conversations and physical movement strategies, to explore aspects that mold their own Grooves. This research project presents an urgent attempt to reimagine creative and embodied strategies for Black femme as a practice of freedom, tenderness, and connection. Through multimedia experimentations with the practice of Groove, it is proposed, that Black femme move to initiate a collective imagining, and access otherwise ways of being.

Objectification theory, as delineated by Barbara L. Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts, posits that women are trained to view themselves as visual objects for consumption. The related term, self-objectification, describes the altered psychological state where an individual begins to view themselves as a body or sum of body parts. Ballet dancers exhibit higher levels of self-objectification and eating disorders than the general public and high levels of self-objectification are correlated to eating and body image disturbances. This thesis gathers, applies, and expands pedagogical tools for discouraging self-objectification in the ballet classroom in university, private studio, and open online settings. It also proposes the facilitation of flow states as the “next frontier” of addressing one of ballet’s infamous problems and details a choreographic process dedicated to understanding and cultivating amenable conditions for flow and yu. Flow is an embodied experience where an individual is performing at optimum level while fully engaged in an activity. The related concept, yu, is associated with the spiritual release and ease that comes after an individual has disciplined their habits toward living an ethical life. The final choreographic work investigates various aspects of flow and yu including intention, curiosity, bliss, distraction, collective engagement, joy, space, and suspension of time. The resulting performance reflects the individual and collective experience of flow and yu of the dancers who performed the piece. The thesis concludes with a reflection on insights that can be gleaned from intersecting paths of pedagogical research and choreographic inquiry.

What is a hot pot? As a Chinese cooking method, prepared with a simmering pot of soup stock at the dining table, containing a variety of East Asian foodstuffs and ingredients, hot pot is not just one dish. This thesis is aimed at using the booming hot pot catering industry in over the last three decades as an entry point to examine the shift from the socialist asceticism to the capitalist abundance in contemporary urbanities in PRC and attempt to address the following questions: first, in which ways does a hot pot express the post-socialist Chinese society? Second, how does the transformation and increasing popularity of hot pot represent the modern middle-class lifestyle? Third, what can hot pot tell us about the spread of a food trend via mass media and popular culture? Combining the ethnographical engagement with the physical restaurant space exemplified by Dong Lai Shun and Hai Di Lao, and an anthropological approach towards the cultural and historical representations of hot pot, this thesis argues that hot pot represents the postmodern feature in the post-socialist China.

Cyclical Navigations: In the In Between is a creative process-based interdisciplinaryinstallation and paper that conceptualizes storytelling as a practice of embodied memory recollection. This work focuses on viewing storytelling and land acknowledgement as necessary tools in the navigation of cyclical temporalities in the present, or what I have termed the In Between. Through the employment of ethnography, dance-based somatic practice Lettering, and oral interviews, I posit that first-person narratives work to combat the violence(s) of erasure and racial ventriloquism that occur when archiving Black life. By using a methodology of care, this project considers what is possible if Black history and thus, Black quotidian stories are treated and shared with care.

“Guangchangwu,” or what is literally translated as “square-dancing,” is a form of public dance that has been exceedingly popular, albeit controversial, in China over recent years. Most of the participants are elderly women in their late-50s or above, who roughly fall in the category called “dama” (“big-mother”). Usually, a dancing group assembles in the evening and dances on a daily basis to the music played through a portable loudspeaker. Yet, because many dancing sites are in or close to residential compounds, the music played, or, the alleged “noise pollution,” have caused numerous conflicts nationwide. During the summer 2014, I conducted a three-months fieldwork on the dance in China. In this thesis, I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama. I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerges from a series of long existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulates China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.

In the United States children spend anywhere from nine to thirteen years in school. During this time, children experience some of their most developmentally formative years of their life, which is often characterized as adolescence. For many Black girls in school, this period of adolescence is often where they learn about how their racial and gender identity can affect their everyday life. From teachers who refuse to pronounce their Black girl students’ names correctly to statewide legislation that specifically prohibit the teaching on race and slavery, schools become a space where Black girls begin to receive negative messages about their race. This study constitutes a practice-based mode of inquiry, called Embodied Resonance, into Black girl hood and offers an artistic research project to address the negative impact that the process of racialization has on Black girls. The outward facing outcome of this process was a Marade, the combination of a March and a Parade, that shared the Embodied Resonance practice publicly on the Abele Quad on Duke University’s west campus. During this process, I, along with three first-year Black girl Duke students, explore our past experiences as high schoolers and start to uncover the ways in which we have became who we are today.

Political organizing—the work of building relationships and capacity to execute collective action and bring about social change—is an embodied practice. It is learned by doing as people meet, in person or virtually, to hone skills, grow in relationship, develop leadership, and engage in intentional action to shift power. The long hours and commitment that organizers dedicate to building and executing campaigns requires intense bodily engagement. The exhaustion, concern, hope, and elation involved all fall on the body. Race, class, gender, and nationality differences also mark bodies, impacting who organizes, from what standpoint, and with what stakes, as well as the issues and urgencies evoked. While somatic and contemplative practices, which foreground the internal experience of the body and the information it holds, are being taught as organizing competencies by groups such as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity and generative somatics, the relevance of embodiment to organizing is not widely accepted or known. Paying close attention to the body can strengthen and deepen organizing work by providing insight into how to ground in presence in order to build relationships and earn trust, to expand political education through embodied proposals, to better assess the balance of power within and beyond campaigns by considering who is moving and how, and to provide resources to counter burnout and increase care. Transformative experiences as a movement artist and organizer in Brazil and in the United States serve as the basis for this MFA thesis project, which applies embodied lessons I learned in Brazil about how to disorient from U.S. hegemony and white supremacy in my home context in the United States. It is a proposal for movement-based relational organizing in response to the call from leaders of the Black freedom movements from the 1960s through to the present for white people to “organize your own.”

The coffeehouse emerged as an unprecedented popular leisure spot in Shanghai during the 1920s, which always conjured up an aura of western exoticism. Accordingly, drinking coffee became prevalent among elite men and women who advocated a modern lifestyle, especially cultural intellectuals, and coffeehouses were soon favored by many writers and artists for social gatherings. Such a kind of gathering resembled the phenomenon of “salon” indigenous to the seventeenth century France that Habermas regarded as the most typical form of civil culture cultivated by public spheres such as cafés and restaurants. Meanwhile, the teahouse (茶館 chaguan), which had long

functioned as a popular place for social gatherings in China that intellectuals sat together and communicated on literary topics or political issues, although despised by some Republican reformists as backward ill tradition, had experienced some self- transformation to cope with the rapidly developing urban environment. The traditional habit of drinking tea of Chinese people was refreshed with a modern connotation, and the stimulated “tea talk meeting” (茶話會 chahua hui) phenomenon then prevailed among Republican cultural elites, which was the combination of the tradition of the genteel gathering (雅集 yaji) among Chinese literati and the introduced European salon culture, and was vital to inspiring literary and cultural productions. In the meantime, “tea” and “coffee” became important cultural symbols, with the actual gatherings that happened in teahouses and coffeehouses extended to the print media. Two best examples are the “Coffee Seats” (咖啡座 kafeizuo) column appeared on Shenbao 申報 in the late 1920s and the journal entitled Literature and Art Tea Talk (文藝茶話 Wenyi chahua) first produced in the early 1930s, where articles on literary and artistic topics were solicited and cultural elites could participate another form of gathering in an imagined public cultural space. The physical and virtual gatherings shared some highly similar essences, and both are crucial to the formation of collectivity and identification among cultural intellectuals. Referring to such notions as “public sphere” coined by Jürgen Habermas, “structure of feeling” proposed by Raymond Williams, and “imagined communities” by Benedict Anderson, this thesis is going to investigate how the teahouse and coffeehouse as both physical and imagined social spaces activated significant cultural implications and were closely related to the identity politics of cultural intellectuals in Republican Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. I regard the teahouse/coffeehouse as important public sites that accommodated multilayered elements of cultural modernity and “tea/coffee” as conspicuous cultural symbols manifested in literature and popular culture.

This paper examines the social question: is 19th century women's identity socially determined or do 19th century women have the liberty to forge their own identities as they see fit? In order to answer this question, this paper treats Henry James as ethnographer and "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady as ethnographies of American women in Victorian Europe. The primary focus of this paper is Isabel Archer and how she is constructed from Henry James's Daisy Miller and George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth, in order to demonstrate that while 19th century women were victimized by the tyranny of Victorian patriarchy, 19th century women were also capable of resisting and subverting normative Victorian social expectations for women.

This project explores the intersection between diasporic identity negotiation, gender, sexuality, and multi-cultural experiences portrayed in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004). It features two main chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. Chapter One focuses on the intimacy aspect in The Wedding Banquet, examining how it intersects with gender and sexuality in promoting cross-cultural identity formation. Through analyzing intimacy as the site of contestation between alienation, ambivalence, and sacrificial narratives, both of which contribute to the formation of a nuanced, multi-layered Asian American identity. I argue that Lee’s portrayal of familial intimacy challenges stereotypical depictions of Asian American family units and proffers a nuanced yet intricate understanding of cross-cultural identity formation, uncovering the dilemma and hypocrisy inherent in the Gao family narrative that is manifested as social critique under the disguise of a romantic comedy. Chapter Two analyzes Saving Face focusing on the intersection between the discourses of indebtedness, guilt, and female liberation. I argue that by paralleling the dilemma and different forms of oppression and alienation faced by Hwei-Lan and Wil, Wu provides insight into the elastic relationship between the liberation discourse and indebtedness, guilt, and filial responsibilities of ‘Chinese daughters’. Through the constant negotiations of these elements, self-narrativity is achieved through the construction of flexible identities that strive to attend to both filial responsibilities and the search for individual narratives and autonomy.

The relationship between metropolitan cities around the world and tales of murder has encompassed the complicated nature of modern life, and such is also the case of Shanghai in the Republican era. The prosperity of the print industry in Shanghai, in the first few decades of the 20th century, has intertwined profoundly with Shanghai’s reform culture that denotes different literary currents, ideological transformations and changes of everyday life, all of which pertain to cultural exchanges with the West. Such a socio-cultural context not only determines the material basis and the agencies of the production, circulation and reception of murder narratives, but also influences the cognitive and conceptual apparatuses that position murderous violence in different spectacles of political movements, social conventions and knowledge production. In this thesis, I examine tales of murders in various literary texts in Republican Shanghai before 1937, the first metropolis in Republican China and also one of the most famous cosmopolitan cities in a semicolonial society in the first half of the 20th century. I mainly focus on murder narratives in three different forms of texts: the newspaper coverage of murder cases and their aftermath represented by reports on Shen Bao 申報，the detective stories in the Huo Sang and Lu Ping series written by two illustrious Shanghainese authors, Cheng Xiaoqing and Sun Liaohong, and depictions of murder and murderous violence in the works of authors that are commonly grouped as Neo-sensationalist School. Besides the issue of genre, what also matter in this categorization are the narrative techniques they deploy and the different lenses they choose in approaching murders. Informed by Thomas de Quincey’s method of examining murder as a cultural phenomenon, instead of limiting it to the field of psychiatric analyses or legal practices, this thesis also deploys theories of nationalism, sexuality, flâneurie, surrealism and psychoanalysis to unpack how the tales of murder in Shanghai project discourses of Chinese modernity as a site of contestations multilayered with different forces. I therefore argue that the tales of murder have conjured up a domain of imagination that serves as an undercurrent of Chinese cultural history. The complexity of the cultural production concerning murder encounters the complex nature of the issue of Shanghai modern ranging from female rights, national formation, the role of intellectuals and leftist turn in reform culture, and linking to this, the ambiguity of the position of literature in a modernizing society.

In the past two decades there has been a significant interest in the ethical and legal concerns surrounding the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS). These arguments are principally based on a killer robot conception of future autonomy - that is that futuristic LAWS are capable of near-human like moral reasoning and judgement. My argument is twofold – first, I argue that this conception of future weapon autonomy might be flawed, and future LAWS technology might be better understood as existing on a continuum of weapons autonomy. Machine guns, precision guided missiles, remote piloted drones, and the Aegis Combat System, among others, represent this continuum. While successive technological development might introduce greater levels of autonomy to the battlefield, critical human functions of moral reasoning and judgement are still a necessary and critical component of their design. In this framework, LAWS can be reduced to just another weapon ultimately put to use by human soldiers and commanders. Understood in this way it becomes difficult for critical arguments to hold much force as they must define at what point on this continuum that autonomy meaningfully represents a paradigm shift in warfare to the point that it violates just war norms and international law. Second, I will argue that even if we do assume a killer robot level of autonomy, the utilitarian arguments against LAWS might still be flawed. The arguments rely on the notion that a LAWS could potentially make a mistake and cause unnecessary harm on the battlefield. This notion is flawed because it fails to articulate how that is meaningfully different than a battlefield characterized by human warfare. Humans are also subject to mistakes and error in judgement that could result in unnecessary harm. With that in mind, I will specifically address four of the most prominent utilitarian arguments against LAWS – responsibility gap, proportionality, distinction, and the idea of ‘riskless warfare’.

This thesis surveys the aesthetics mobilized by Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life and Where Reasons End as well as Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay to accommodate and navigate the negative, non-cathartic, and untelegenic feelings that arise in Asian American and diasporic realities. This thesis adopts the theoretical framework of minor literature, minor feelings, and minor aesthetics, which prefigures a formal-affective-aesthetic approach. Pertaining to the specificities of Asian American and Asian diasporic affectivity, this thesis focuses on unfeeling as an example of minor feeling and examines the aesthetics of flatness and inscrutability. Li’s two works and Wang’s work are chosen for they exhibit different ways of representing and negotiating affective flatness and inscrutability. With two main body chapters respectively devoted to Li’s writing and Wang’s writing, this thesis theorizes the critical productivity, aesthetic sensibility, and political potential of unfeeling and inscrutability. With regard to the general field of Asian American literary studies, this thesis contributes to the pertinent questions of how to read superficiality and inscrutability as well as how to theorize negativity and ambivalence.

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975 many Southern Vietnamese were displaced and forced to relocate. Many of those refugees settled into an area located in Orange County, California and for the past fifty years have worked together to establish the community and space that is now recognized as Little Saigon. This thesis is a study of Little Saigon in particular, how Vietnamese immigrants have deterritorialized, or rejected the dominant notion of having to assimilate and adopt American culture to fulfill the American dream. Instead, community members have made purposeful interconnections to reterritorialize to construct a space meaningful to them where they, through their own minor strategies can productively and successfully live their own version of the Vietnamese American dream, thus allowing them to climb the ladder of upward mobility and attaining opportunities to physical mobility. I first trace the ways in which the first and generation physically alter the space in Orange County to a space that is accessible and makes sense to them by analyzing historical and present maps. Next, I examine the ways Vietnamese culture is produced and maintained in the United States for this community by examining the content and distribution of entertainment shows such as Paris By Night. Lastly I trace the impact of Vietnamese contribution to the nail salon industry and how the expansion of manicuring services has allowed for Vietnamese women to successfully become independent entrepreneurs and breadwinners in their family.

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This thesis examines cats and cat lovers in the intersection between the humananimal relationship and the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth century China and beyond. I argue that the presentation and representation of cats and cat lovers in the media space partake in the process of subjectivity formation and complicate the understanding of the human-nonhuman boundaries and the intersubjective space where humans and animals co-exist. Drawing evidence from cat anthologies in late Qing, newspapers, film magazines, pictorials in Republican Shanghai, manga, animation, and TV shows circulated in contemporary East Asian cyberspace, my project suggests three major realms of change associated with cats that have influenced the subjectivity formation in the human-animal interaction and imagination. My inquiry contributes to a deeper understanding of the agency of both cats and cat lovers actively embodies in the socio-cultural construction and the re-thinking of an alternative and non-anthropocentric way of reading and interpreting the practices and discourses related to animal-human relationships.

This thesis is a study of the possibility and boundaries of narrating contemporary China, a country in which nationalism is one of the dominant ideologies. It revolves around the dichotomy—the hypervisibility and invisibility of nationalism—which normalizes the omnipresence of nationalist sentiments in the everyday Chinese experience. The thesis first offers a general discussion about the discourse of contemporary Chinese nationalism. Then, it closely examines two case studies, the Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi whose videos have gained global popularity, and Chinese author Fangfang whose online diary documenting Wuhan’s COVID-19 outbreak received challenged reception on Chinese social media. The two seemingly apolitical projects eventually raised nationalist sentiments of Chinese Internet users, who praised Li Ziqi for promoting traditional Chinese culture to the world and attacked Fangfang for undermining global views of China during the pandemic. The two media representations generate two different national identities of the present-day China: an anti-modern, neo-traditional civilization and a modern, impeccable global leader. I conclude with the argument that the contradictory opinions on modernity in Chinese national identity construction is a confusion generated in modernization. They are essentially the legacy of the confrontation between historical Sino-centrism and western modernity.