Browsing by Department "Romance Studies"
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Item Open Access A Comparative Sociological Investigation of the Conceptions and Perceptions of Mental Health and Illness in Arica, Chile and Rome, Italy(2013-05-08) Kontchou, Nelly-AngeThis comparative study aimed to discover the principal factors that influence the perceptions of citizens in Arica, Chile and Rome, Italy toward mental illness. Specifically, the study aimed to investigate how these perceptions affect the societal acceptance of mentally ill individuals and to identify potential sources of stigma. In both cities, mental health services exist for free use by citizens, but stigma makes the use of these services and the acceptance of those who use them somewhat taboo. Past studies on the topic of mental health stigma have investigated the barriers to accessing mental health services (Acuña & Bolis 2005), the inception and effects of Basaglia’s Law (Tarabochia 2011), strategies to combat stigma (López et al. 2008) and images of mental illness in the media (Stout, Villeagas & Jennings 2004). To discover Aricans’ opinions on mental health and illness, personal interviews were administered to five mental health professionals, and a 20-question survey was administered to 131 members of the general population. In Rome, 27 subjects answered an 18-question survey as well as an interview, and 12 professionals participated in narrative interviews. From these interviews and surveys, the lack of economic, structural and human resources to effectively manage mental health programs was gleaned. Moreover, many participants identified how stigma infringed upon the human rights of those with mental illnesses and opined that they were barely accepted in society. Conclusions drawn were that stigma stems from multiple concurrent sources, and strategies to reduce it must align with each society’s unique needs. Stigma prevents people from caring for their mental health and from integrating those with mental illness.Item Open Access A Comparative Sociological Investigation of the Conceptions and Perceptions of Mental Health and Illness in Arica, Chile and Rome, Italy(2013-11-12) Kontchou, Nelly-AngeThis comparative study aimed to discover the principal factors that influence the perceptions of citizens in Arica, Chile and Rome, Italy toward mental illness. Specifically, the study aimed to investigate how these perceptions affect the societal acceptance of mentally ill individuals and to identify potential sources of stigma. In both cities, mental health services exist for free use by citizens, but stigma makes the use of these services and the acceptance of those who use them somewhat taboo. Past studies on the topic of mental health stigma have investigated the barriers to accessing mental health services (Acuña & Bolis 2005), the inception and effects of Basaglia’s Law (Tarabochia 2011), strategies to combat stigma (López et al. 2008) and images of mental illness in the media (Stout, Villeagas & Jennings 2004). To discover Aricans’ opinions on mental health and illness, personal interviews were administered to five mental health professionals, and a 20-question survey was administered to 131 members of the general population. In Rome, 27 subjects answered an 18-question survey as well as an interview, and 12 professionals participated in narrative interviews. From these interviews and surveys, the lack of economic, structural and human resources to effectively manage mental health programs was gleaned. Moreover, many participants identified how stigma infringed upon the human rights of those with mental illnesses and opined that they were barely accepted in society. Conclusions drawn were that stigma stems from multiple concurrent sources, and strategies to reduce it must align with each society’s unique needs. Stigma prevents people from caring for their mental health and from integrating those with mental illness.Item Open Access A Música Tropicália: Três Histórias, Um Movimento(2018-04-20) Neuhaus, JoshTropicália é o nome do movimento cultural influenciado pela cultura popular e de massa e pela cultura de vanguarda que se tornou proeminente no Brasil no final da década de 1960. Durante este período, um grupo de músicos, poetas e cineastas, que moravam principalmente em São Paulo, se uniram sob a bandeira tropicalista. Eles lideraram um projeto cultural que, no seu núcleo, encorajou uma reavaliação de o que significa ser brasileiro. Este questionamento sobre a identidade brasileira ocorreu durante um momento politicamente difícil na história do país e marcado por tenções entre tendências tradicionais e autenticamente brasileiras e novas ondas de influências estrangeiras inescapáveis. A música foi uma área em que as tensões entre costumes antigos e novos, locais e estrangeiros, causavam debate e desacordo quanto à melhor direção para o futuro da cultura brasileira. Como resultado dessas tensões, e o desenvolvimento de correntes musicais cada vez mais divergentes, o movimento Tropicália propôs uma nova lente através da qual a identidade e a musicalidade brasileira poderiam ser universalmente compreendidas.Item Open Access A Poetics of Globalism: Fernando Vallejo, the Colombian Urban Novel, and the Generation of `72(2011) Nicholson, Brantley GarrettThis thesis explores the confluence and clashes between local and global cultural flows in Latin America through the multiple literary movements and tendencies for which the Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, acts as a unifying agent. My analysis pulls from Decolonial, Aesthetic and World Literary theories, in order to analyze how cosmopolitanism and globalization resonate in contemporary Latin American letters through a survey of three geocultural categories: the Colombian local, the Latin American regional, and the literary global. My analysis of the local tracks the formal evolution of the Colombian Novela de la Violencia into the contemporary Novela Urbana and the parallel political challenge to the conventional Lettered City in Colombia after the Violencia. In terms of the regional, I critique the idea of a positive and universally stabilizing cosmopolitanism through a collective analysis of a generation of Latin American writers that were forced to travel to the cosmopolitan center through exile rather than as an act of freewill, a generation that I refer to in this project as the Generation of '72. And my evaluation of the global considers how a singular World Literary aesthetics and political economy of prestige weights negatively on contemporary Latin American authors. Through a survey of the roughly fifty novels and short stories that fall under the purview of both the Colombian Urban Novel and the Generation of `72, I conclude that aesthetic borders - the places where multiple forms of perception converge- open up spaces and forums of critique of rigid cultural models and century old aesthetic formulae, a tendency that I refer to as a poetics of globalism.
Item Open Access Agencies of Abjection: Jean Genet and Subaltern Socialities(2009) Amin, KadjiThis dissertation explores the concept of agential abjection through Jean Genet's involvement with and writings about the struggles of disenfranchised and pathologized peoples. Following Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler has argued that modern subjectivity requires the production of a domain of abjected beings denied subjecthood and forced to live "unlivable" lives. "Agencies of Abjection" brings these feminist theories of abjection to bear on the multiple coordinates of social difference by exploring forms of abjection linked to sexuality, criminality, colonialism, and racialization. Situating Genet within an archive that includes the writings of former inmates of penal colonies, Francophone intellectuals, and Black Panther Party members, I analyze both the historical forces that produce abjection and the collective forms of agency that emerge from subaltern social forms. I find that the abjected are often able to elaborate impure, perverse, and contingent forms of agency from within the very institutions and discourses that would deny them subjecthood.
"Agencies of Abjection" carefully situates Genet's writing within the discursive fields in which it intervenes, including that of the memoirs and testimonies of former inmates of the boys' penal colonies, of Francophone decolonizing poets and intellectuals, and of Black Panther prison writings. This method illuminates subaltern genealogies of thought on the problems of abjection, subjection, and subaltern agency so central to Genet's writing. By charting the twists and turns between Genet's writing and that of other subaltern writers of abjection, "Agencies of Abjection" reads Genet as a thinker continually involved in a process of exchange, intervention, borrowing, and revision concerning the specific histories and experiences of social abjection.
Item Open Access An Analysis of French and English Indo-Caribbean Literary Depictions of Indentured Servitude and Its Associated Neurological Implications(2021-04-23) Raghunandan, AlexThe Indo-Caribbean diaspora is largely unstudied in current scientific literature. However, 300,000 Americans and 2,500,000 people worldwide currently make up this demographic. Indo-Caribbeans are descendants of indentured laborers migrating from India to various English and French colonies, including Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, French Guiana, and Guadeloupe, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, serving as substitutes for slaves when slavery was illegalized in these colonies. The potential connection between the harsh and debilitating lifestyle of these indentured laborers and the disease prevalence in the descendants of this population is largely unexamined. To fully understand the experience of the Indo-Caribbean population, this thesis used numerous Indo-Caribbean novels, including A House for Mr. Biswas, Valmiki’s Daughter, Aurore, and the written history Coolie Woman, to understand the migration process from India to the Caribbean, the daily life as an indentured laborer, and the transition from a laborer to a freed person in the era of decolonization. The characterizations of the protagonists from each of these novels were examined through a social cognitive lens to understand how concepts like dehumanization, intergroup bias, and social defeat manifest in the lived environment. Then, these social cognition concepts were studied through past neuroscientific research to analyze their possible pathological ties to the neurological and/or psychiatric diseases, like substance abuse and depression, to demonstrate the connection between indentured labor and the current prevalence of disease. In addition, this project examines how certain social structures, like race, gender roles, sexuality, and caste, influence the experiences of specific segments of the Indo-Caribbean population, especially in regard to the “marriage plot,” a literary theme or plot structure present in western European early modern and modern literature where marriage is centered around socioeconomic utility. This interdisciplinary study between Indo-Caribbean literature and neuroscience is the first step to attempt to understand how indentured labor may have affected the health of the current generation of Indo-Caribbean people.Item Open Access Arte Abstracto E Ideologías EstéTicas En Cuba(2009) Menendez-Conde, ErnestoThis dissertation deals with Cuban art criticism and other written texts related to Abstract Art. From a critical perspective that relates art to society and political and institutional practices, all of the above texts are interpreted as bearers of aesthetic ideologies, which are expressed in the paradigms from which Art Criticism attempted to validate Abstraction. This study further demonstrates that the dominant discourses in the realm of Art Criticism are strongly related to Ideological State Apparatuses. Art Criticism not only mediates between the artwork and the spectator, but also between artistic acts of provocation and the establishment.
Abstraction in Cuba constituted an important axis in the polemic between autonomous art and socially committed art, but the debates themselves were subsumed in ideological and even political battlefields. Art Criticism oriented these debates, by emphasizing certain problems, and diminishing the importance of other ones.
This dissertation is organized in function of the dominant questions that Cuban Art Criticism addressed. The first chapter accordingly deals with definitions of abstract art that were prevalent in art writing and publications from 1948 to 1957, a period in which Art Criticism is mostly concerned with the autonomy of art. The second chapter follows the debates about the social commitment of abstract art, which became predominant during the first years of a Marxist-oriented Revolution. This polemic is implicit in the emergence of an Anti-Academic movement in the visual arts, and it began to lose its strength once the Cuban Avant-Garde started to gain institutional recognition. After being relegated to a peripheral position, the question concerning the social commitment of Abstract Art became crucial after the triumph of the Revolution. The final chapter deals with the relations between Abstract Art and the diverse documents that embodied and defined the Cultural Policy during the Cuban Revolution.
Throughout, this study strives to establish the place of Abstract Art in the Institutional, and discursive practices from 1959 onwards. This place is defined by its instability, as it is constituted through intermittencies and steps backwards on the path towards the institutional consecration of non-figurative tendencies.
Item Open Access Assessing the Evaluation Methods of the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s Latin American Compact Projects(2020-11-20) Norman, SavannahPor décadas, agencias de desarrollo internacional se han esforzado para remediar los desafíos globales del desarrollo. Una de estas agencias es el Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Este trabajo explora la programación del Millennium Challenge Coporation a través de sus evaluaciones. Específicamente, este trabajo evalúa la solidez técnica de las evaluaciones de los proyectos hondureñas, nicaragüenses, y salvadoreños del MCC, y también lo que los hallazgos y la solidez de estas evaluaciones significan para futuros proyectos en la región. A través de un análisis de documentos, este trabajo encontró que la evaluación promedia fue sólida técnicamente, como uso métricas consistentes, apropiadas, y objetivas. Sin embargo, la estructura de las evaluaciones varió según el autor y la agencia propietaria. Evaluaciones externas no directamente contradijeron los hallazgos de las evaluaciones financiadas por el MCC. Las evaluaciones no fueron inclusivas a los destinatarios originarios de la programación del MCC, los grupos beneficiarios. Entrevistas con los autores de las evaluaciones confirmaron estas conclusiones. Las implicaciones de estos hallazgos incluyen la importancia de procesos de desarrollo que son culturalmente competentes, inclusivos, multifacéticos, y que asimilan el aprendizaje de proyectos ya-completados. Los hallazgos de este trabajo se aplican al proceso de desarrollo y evaluación de Latinoamérica.Item Open Access Au Revoir Paris, Bonjour Pékin en Afrique Francophone ?(2022-04-23) Coopersmith, JoshuaLa géopolitique de l’Afrique francophone est en processus de changement rapide. La France a longtemps été un pouvoir sans compétition dans la région pendant des décennies mais doit maintenant prendre en compte une nouvelle force en place : bienvenue la Chine, un pays qui peut changer totalement la structure de la région. Bien que beaucoup d’universitaires et de journalistes se concentrent sur le renforcement du pouvoir chinois sur la scène internationale, peu d’entre eux explorent néanmoins ce phénomène en contraste avec les intérêts français en Afrique. La possibilité d’un nouveau pouvoir qui rivalise avec Paris et favorise Pékin, où une coexistence en paix dans le continent sont d’une grande importance aujourd’hui. En ce moment, l'instabilité politique se propage à travers l’Afrique comme un virus. Les coups d'État militaires ont touché plus de pays cette décennie. Cette thèse cherche à répondre à la question suivante : De quelles manières la récente et grandissante influence chinoise en Afrique Francophone de l’Ouest se distingue-t-elle de l’influence historiquement ancrée de la France ?Item Open Access Baudelaire's Responses to Death: (In)articulation, Mourning and Suicide(2012) Wu, JoyceAlthough Charles Baudelaire's poetry was censored in part for his graphic representations of death, for Baudelaire himself, death was the ultimate censorship. He grappled with its limitations of the possibility of articulation in Les Fleurs du mal, Le Spleen de Paris, "Le Poème du hachisch," and other works. The first chapter of this dissertation, "Dead Silent," explores Baudelaire's use of apophasis as a rhetorical tactic to thwart the censoring force of death as what prevents the speaking subject from responding. Chapter two, "Voices Beyond the Grave," then investigates the opposite poetics of articulation and inarticulation, in the form of post-mortem voice from within the cemetery, and particularly as didactic speech that contradicts the living. "Baudelaire's Widows" argues that the widow is for Baudelaire a figure of modernity par excellence, auguring the anticipation of mourning and the problem of remembering the dead as a lifelong cognitive dilemma. Chapter four, "Lethal Illusions," combines analysis of suicide in "La Corde" and "Le Poème du hachisch" with interrogation of mimesis. If the intoxicant serves as suicide and mirror, the production of illusion is the possibility and the fatal pathology of art. Yet art simultaneously channels a truth understood as the revelation of illusions--not least the illusion of a life without death.
Item Open Access Beautiful Annoyance: Reading the Subject(2011) Ozierski, Margaret AliceThis dissertation examines the pair subject-subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art, as it is figured in exemplary fashion by film and literature. The analysis examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with selected filmic and literary texts: Jacques Rivette's La belle noiseuse and Samuel Beckett's Film, The Unnamable and The Lost Ones. These texts are analyzed on an equal footing with the thought of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who have written on both subjectivity and art. The study thus proposes a real movement - in terms and through art - that treats the metaphor of anamorphosis on the level of praxis: the image of subjectivity appears on the screen that is the filmic or literary text as the result of a passage in terms. The subject that emerges at the end of the analysis puts in perspective a certain practice of metonymic reading as renewed political potential of subjectivity.
Item Open Access Boccaccio's Women Philosophers: Defining Philosophy, Debating Gender in the Decameron and Beyond(2020) Granacki, Alyssa MadelineThis dissertation investigates the ‘woman philosopher’ in the works of fourteenth-century Italian author, Giovanni Boccaccio. Across his literature, Latin and Italian alike, Boccaccio demonstrated an ongoing interest in both philosophy and women, concepts that were at the center of various intellectual debates in fourteenth-century Europe. I use variations and commentaries found in the manuscript tradition to historically ground my literary analysis, showing how scribes, translators, and early readers drew attention to the relationship between gender and knowledge in Boccaccio’s works. While women have not been absent from critical studies of Boccaccio, existing interpretations often limit their discussion to the feminism or misogyny of his works. Drawing on thinkers who problematize the relationship between women and knowledge, I shift the scholarly discourse away from feminism/misogyny. Each chapter situates one or more Boccaccian figures within textual and material networks and shows how they employ “philosophy,” exploring distinct but related definitions of the term as outlined by Boccaccio. I contend that Boccaccio, in his vernacular masterpiece the Decameron and other works, presents not just one model of a woman philosopher but several, a plurality that challenges our inherited notion of what constitutes philosophy, to whom it belongs, and how we encounter it in our lives.
Item Open Access Cajun, Créole, et CODOFIL : La politique et la planification linguistique en Louisiane(2023-04-08) Costley, AudreyToday, linguists consider there to be two varieties of French in Louisiana: Louisiana French (Cajun) and Louisiana Creole. Both of these languages are classified as endangered, with a continually declining population of speakers. Language change occurs naturally, however, there are policies that impact the nature and rate of change. Through the lens of Critical Language Policy (CLP), the research examines how the decline of the French language in Louisiana has been impacted by policy decisions, while considering the structural and ideological factors that influenced these policies. Further, the project examines more recent policies, institutions, and grassroots movements aimed at revitalizing and maintaining the role of French in Louisiana. The project takes a critical lens in analyzing the successes and shortcomings of current language policy in Louisiana with a focus on education.Item Open Access Caribbean Iconographies of Cultural Nationalism: Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico(2020) Dulceany, Roger DavidCaribbean Iconographies of Cultural Nationalism: Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico traces a chronological evolution of images circulating between the Caribbean and the United States demonstrating the intersection of religion and politics. I argue that these representations constitute prime examples of the Caribbean struggle for decolonization and self-determination. I focus my investigation on select examples from three Antillian nations to theorize the iconophilic and affective dimensions of their corresponding cultural nationalisms, especially in relation to resisting colonialism and imperialism. From the Haitian Revolution to the first US occupation of Cuba to the current aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, I examine the mechanisms of power relations at play in the region as understood through the lens of iconography and Caribbean thought. I accomplish this through an analysis of particular images and related texts, a foundational novel, a painting, a series of photographs and postcards, and contemporary public murals with the use of methodologies related to cultural and visual studies, Caribbean and decolonial thought, theories of affect and iconography, historical and archival analysis, and theologies of Afro-Caribbean religions.
Item Open Access “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”: A Comparison of French and U.S. Health Research on the Neurodevelopmental and Epigenetic Effects of Tobacco Exposure on Vulnerable Populations(2016-04-25) Hwang, LaurieThis thesis explores how cultural beliefs and practices influence biomedical research landscapes in two high resource cultural contexts, the US and the Euro-American francophone world. First, I examine how cultural mores have differently shaped the pace of research engagement in the two economically advanced societies with advanced “Western” health research infrastructure and shared scientific goals. Through examining historical and global discourses of ADHD and perceptions of the disorder, I argue that the diagnosis we call “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)” is not a novel phenomenon of modern times, nor is its epidemic limited to the US. I then propose that different conceptions of liberty, approaches to public health, and realities of social and political systems all contribute to the divergence of social movements, regulations, and research. Finally, I suggest a cross-cultural approach to the science of tobacco’s effect on the developing brain as an essential conceptual change to advance the current understanding of the disorder and reducing global health disparities.Item Open Access ‘Christ the Redeemer Turns His Back on Us:’ Urban Black Struggle in Rio’s Baixada Fluminense(2018) Reist, Stephanie V“Even Christ the Redeemer has turned his back to us” a young, Black female resident of the Baixada Fluminense told me. The 13 municipalities that make up this suburban periphery of Rio de Janeiro have suffered for decades from stigmatizing media narratives that cast the region as pathologically violent and culturally devoid due to its Blacker, poorer inhabitants. This has helped perpetuate government neglect, exacerbated by Rio’s hosting of the 2016 Olympic Games, through clientelist politics that thrive off the lack of jobs and basic public services in the region. My dissertation is an auto-ethnographic analysis of my three years of participatory action research with Black and brown youth in Rio de Janeiro’s stigmatized Baixada Fluminense. I argue that the music, films, social media driven journalism, and scholarly production of these youth contest the ways in which race, class, and place of origin often overlap through segregationist practices that attempt to maintain racial, socio-geographic hierarchies by relegating Black, brown, and poor bodies to the social and geographic periphery of a country than once proclaimed itself a “racial democracy.” Through transnational partnerships, these youth employ diasporic cultural forms and digital media to re-configure the Baixada and its 13 municipalities as a “Black place” that is inherently intersectional in its claims to collective access to urban and social mobility within this urban periphery.
Item Open Access Clément Marot : traduction, religion, et musique(2012-05-14) Morgan, JenniferClément Marot était poète, éditeur, traducteur, et musicien du seizième siècle. Dans son travail, il a essayé de rendre la traduction un art égal à la création littéraire, une quête démontrée par son réécriture de François Villon, sa traduction poétique des Psaumes, et son rôle dans la création du Psautier Huguenot. En s’inscrivant dans les œuvres de François Villon, Marot se rend éditeur-créateur ; ses décisions ont changé la forme des œuvres en conservant leur esprit. Ses traductions des Psaumes soulignaient les valeurs nouvelles du calvinisme et éclairaient la beauté et la signifiance de ces vers anciens. Finalement, la création du Psautier Huguenot a donné à Marot l’opportunité de créer des Psaumes musicaux, un acte que je voulait explorer en présentant une nouvelle composition de Kristina Warren, classe de 2011.Item Open Access Come be my guest (or not): National Identity, Hospitality, and Construction of a Literary Genealogy of Haitian-Dominican Bordering Ideologies in Three Dominican Foundational Fictions(2017-05-09) Ma, VaniaFollowing its 1844 independence from Haiti, the Dominican Republic was faced with two questions: national identity and establishment of a border with its neighbor. These two questions fueled among the nation’s political and intellectual elite an immense nationalistic project, which many scholars connect to Trujillo’s 1937 massacre of 20,000 Haitians along the Haitian-Dominican border. This thesis closely analyzes three Dominican national allegories—Manuel de Jesús-Galván’s Enriquillo (1879), César-Nicolás Pensón’s “Las vírgenes de Galindó” (1891), and Tomás Hernández-Franco’s “Yelidá” (1941) in an attempt to construct a literary genealogy of the Haitian-Dominican border. Using theoretical contributions from primarily Doris Sommer, Jacques Derrida, Henk von Houtum, and Julia Kristeva, I explore themes such as identity and hospitality (who is/isn’t allowed in the nation’s space) and how such themes ground ideologies of Haitian-Dominican bordering. I argue firstly that Galván’s Enriquillo lays a cornerstone for Dominican-Haitian bordering ideologies by presenting the archetypal Dominican as a Hispanicized taino. This revisionism effectively welcomes Spanishness and aspirations to whiteness as elements of Dominican identity while simultaneously erasing the Dominican nation’s black elements. Such erasure imposes upon blacks and blackness a burden of unwelcomeness in Dominican national space, identity, and memory. As the post-Independence Dominican elite associated blackness exclusively with Haiti, this burden of unwelcomeness inherently includes Haitians. Cesar-Nicolas Pensón’s “Las vírgenes de Galindó”, read as both a national Edenic creation myth and a foundational allegory of bordering, partially elaborates on Galván’s ideas, casting the Dominican nation as a fundamentally white, Hispanic nation. However, Pensón delves further into the idea of Haitian unwelcomeness. I argue that Penson creates an alternative national history where the Dominican nation’s ideal, pre-fallen state is premised on closed doors (zero hospitality) towards the Haitian other. The nation’s fall thus occurs the moment it accidentally opens its doors, extending hospitality to the undesirable, dangerous Haitian other. This hospitality = Fall equation implies that in order to redeem itself, the Dominican nation must reverse its Fall by effectively re-closing its doors and “uninviting”—or revoking hospitality from—its unwelcome Haitian guests. Such uninviting is done through closing the national door, known also as the border. In the final chapter I use a Kristevian framework to analyze “Yelidá” as a counter-ideological text, a text of anti-bordering that challenges both Trujillo’s ideas of Dominican identity and his imagined “color border” between the white Dominican Republic and the black Haiti. By presenting the Dominican subject as a mulata—an inherently abject, black-white border-transgressing subject, he resuscitates the element of blackness in Dominican identity, nullifying the Haitian-Dominican “color border”. He also criticizes the Dominican nation’s aspirations to whiteness by portraying the white subject as anti-Dominican, for he possesses a fear of border transgression and debordering—the very elements that underlie Dominican mulato identity. Finally, I argue that Hernandez-Franco presents the mulato as a symbol of Dominican liberation from white colonialist systems of order, or as an emblem of freedom from what decolonial theorist Anibal Quijano calls the “colonization of the imagination of the dominated”. This text thus ultimately suggests that the imagined white-black color border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti must be torn down in order to fully embrace the decolonial freedom and autonomy found in a mulato Dominican identity. This study is among the first in the field of Dominican literary critiscism and border studies to propose a literary examination of the border. It thus contributes methodologically, providing an innovative, multifaceted theoretical framework from which future literary studies of the border can be performed. It also deepens the connection between nation and bordering in the Dominican Republic by incorporating a dimension of hospitality to discourses on national identity.Item Open Access Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables(2016) Patterson, Reginald DewightIn my thesis, “Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables,” I ask and answer the ‘Who? What? Where? When? Why?” of Creole Literature using the 19th century production of Aesopian fables as clues to resolve a set of linguistic, historical, literary, and geographical enigmas pertaining the ‘birth-place(s)’ of Creolophone Literatures in the Caribbean Sea, North and South America, as well as the Indian Ocean. Focusing on the fables in Martinique (1846), Reunion Island (1826), and Mauritius (1822), my thesis should read be as an attempt capture the links between these islands through the creation of a particular archive defined as a cartulary-chronicle, a diplomatic codex, or simply a map in which I chart and trace the flight of the founding documents relating to the lives of the individual authors, editors, and printers in order to illustrate the articulation of a formal and informal confederation that enabled the global and local institutional promotion of Creole Literature. While I integrate various genres and multi-polar networks between the authors of this 19th century canon comprised of sacred and secular texts such as proclamations, catechisms, and proverbs, the principle literary genre charted in my thesis are collections of fables inspired by French 17th century French Classical fabulist, Jean de la Fontaine. Often described as the ‘matrix’ of Creolophone Literature, these blues and fables constitute the base of the canon, and are usually described as either ‘translated,’ ‘adapted,’ and even ‘cross-dressed’ into Creole in all of the French Creolophone spaces. My documentation of their transnational sprouting offers proof of an opaque canonical formation of Creole popular literature. By constituting this archive, I emphasize the fact that despite 200 years of critical reception and major developments and discoveries on behalf of Creole language pedagogues, literary scholars, linguists, historians, librarians, archivist, and museum curators, up until now not only have none have curated this literature as a formal canon. I also offer new empirical evidence in order to try and solve the enigma of “How?” the fables materially circulated between the islands, and seek to come to terms with the anonymous nature of the texts, some of which were published under pseudonyms. I argue that part of the confusion on the part of scholars has been the result of being willfully taken by surprise or defrauded by the authors, or ‘bamboozled’ as I put it. The major paradigmatic shift in my thesis is that while I acknowledge La Fontaine as the base of this literary canon, I ultimately bypass him to trace the ancient literary genealogy of fables to the infamous Aesop the Phrygian, whose biography – the first of a slave in the history of the world – and subsequent use of fables reflects a ‘hidden transcript’ of ‘masked political critique’ between ‘master and slave classes’ in the 4th Century B.C.E. Greece.
This archive draws on, connects and critiques the methodologies of several disciplinary fields. I use post-colonial literary studies to map the literary genealogies Aesop; use a comparative historical approach to the abolitions of slavery in both the 19th century Caribbean and the Indian Ocean; and chart the early appearance of folk music in early colonial societies through Musicology and Performance Studies. Through the use of Sociolinguistics and theories of language revival, ecology, and change, I develop an approach of ‘reflexive Creolistics’ that I ultimately hope will offer new educational opportunities to Creole speakers. While it is my desire that this archive serves linguists, book collectors, and historians for further scientific inquiry into the innate international nature of Creole language, I also hope that this innovative material defense and illustration of Creole Literature will transform the consciousness of Creolophones (native and non-native) who too remain ‘bamboozled’ by the archive. My goal is to erase the ‘unthinkability’ of the existence of this ancient maritime creole literary canon from the collective cultural imaginary of readers around the globe.
Item Open Access Comunicación y confianza: La influencia cultural en la comunicación entre doctores y pacientes latinos en Durham(2017-04-30) Aarons, EmilyLos latinos en Durham, Carolina del Norte, constituyen un componente significativo de la comunidad en términos de tamaño y aportación social y económica. Sin embargo, experimentan barreras al acceso y una peor calidad de cuidado médico, que se deriva en parte de la calidad de comunicación entre doctores y pacientes. Debido a la escasez de estudios cualitativos de la salud latina localizados en Durham, se exige una investigación que explore la comunicación entre los médicos y sus pacientes latinos. Basándose en una revisión de literatura sobre la diabetes entre latinos, esta investigación examina la influencia de los siguientes factores culturales en la comunicación entre pacientes latinos y médicos: el idioma, la prisa, el entorno social, el familismo, el género y la medicina alternativa. La metodología de investigación consistía en un grupo de enfoque de ocho personas que duró una hora en una iglesia local. También se entrevistó a una trabajadora comunitaria que se especializa en la salud latina. El tema dominante del análisis es la asociación conceptual entre la confianza en el médico y la comunicación, como si fueran sinónimos. Casi todos los factores culturales explorados influyeron tanto en la comunicación como en la confianza de formas variadas, así demostrando su interrelación multidireccional. Es más, la prisa exhibida de los médicos emergió como un factor que inhibe la comunicación y la confianza quizás más que cualquier otro factor cultural. Se sugirió que al evitar la prisa, el doctor podrá dirigirse a otros factores culturales, así estableciendo la confianza. Además de identificar la inseparabilidad de la comunicación y la confianza, la investigación exploró las barreras de acceso al cuidado médico, destacando la falta de información acerca de los recursos disponibles como una barrera principal. En cuanto a las fuentes de información sobre la salud más utilizadas por los latinos, parece que, además de los médicos, los lazos sociales son una fuente valiosa.