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Situating Black Death and Grief Within the Context of Ancestral Veneration
Full text linkDeath and grief are an ever-present phenomenon in the Black community. Starting with the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and chattel slavery; then transcending into mortality rates; police brutality; gun violence; and just living while Black. Statistically, Black Americans die at higher rates than white Americans at nearly every age. As a result, the Black community has always had a very intimate and ambiguous relationship with death and grief. In response to this relationship, the Black community has created our own way of mourning through the formation of unique funeral and vigil traditions, the establishment of Black-owned funeral homes, the preservation of obituaries and other memorabilia as relics, and the obtainment of memorializing tattoos.
All of these examples have led me to the belief that Black death and grief have always been within the context of ancestral veneration, the practice of honoring one’s ancestors. This essay will discuss key examples of African American ways of mourning that were transferred from West/Central African conceptions of death. I will then discuss how death and grief have been constructed in the Black community. I will do this by comparing and contrasting the construction of the American cosmology of death with Social Darwinism and racial capitalism. I will bring these ideas together to state how African American ways of mourning were born out of survival and ancestral veneration to make the statement that naming and situating our grief within this context can be very healing and transformative within our community
Homemade Language, Conservative Fro-yo, and Sci-fi Sloths: How speculative migration fiction confronts the ends of worlds by challenging the nation-state
Full text linkThis English literature thesis project explores an emerging, genre-defying body of fiction which I call “speculative migration fiction.” Speculative migration fiction imagines how ongoing global developments like climate change, technological development, and war may shape future migrations. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s conception of national culture, Wendy Brown’s theory of the border, and Caroline Levine’s understanding of literary form, as well as close readings from Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and 2 A.M. in Little America by Ken Kalfus, I argue that transnational migrations move toward becoming postnational migrations as migrants evade border control measures and undermine whether cultures and languages can be mapped along national lines. As future migrations corrode nation-states’ alleged historical antiquity and cultural cohesion, I employ Anna Kornbluh’s comparison of mathematical limits to literary limits, P.B. Guerrero’s discussion of critical nostalgia, and Wai Chee Dimock’s theory of deep time to understand how migration at the end of the nation-state becomes both unending and a tool to reimagine human societies’ structures. In this project’s last section, I invoke Samuel Delany’s “The Star Pit” to highlight how unending migration can perpetuate the capitalistic and imperialistic progress narratives which migrations in Scattered, Exit, and 2 A.M. subvert, ultimately acting as a cautionary tale for imagined, postnational futures
Queering Storytelling: Challenging Normative Storytelling Methodology and Building a Queer Approach to Documentary Filmmaking
Full text linkAs representations of queer people on screen grow, so too has the violence for queer folks at the margins. This project looks at four documentaries that cover key moments in LGBTQ history to see how filmmaking methodologies and choices can further the harms of institutional violence. Key themes include homonormative and assimilationist representations in film, the formation of a reductive cultural memory of queer politics, and the obscuring of the global crises of AIDS. Through an analysis of these films, I argue for the formation of queer documentary methodologies that are grounded in the ideas put forward by queer theorists and activists. My documentary, When You Ask Me About the Memories, seeks to put these theories into practice and discusses the role of grief in queer memories
Infrastructure + Inequality: The Prairie Island Nuclear Plant
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This site is the end result of a semester-long project that asked students to produce new research on the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant. Situated in Red Wing, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River and adjacent to the Prairie Island Indian Community, the plant concretized many themes we explored in course readings, including the uneven exercise of “infrastructural power” (Laleh Khalili) and the challenges of practicing “infrastructural citizenship” (Deb Chachra). Students worked in small groups, each practicing different methodologies (archival research, policy research, environmental research and media analysis), then produced public-facing representations of their findings, embedded in an interactive map.https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/dla_projects/1001/thumbnail.jp
Sequence Learning in a 6-OHDA Mouse Model of Parkinson’s Disease
Full text linkParkinson’s disease (PD), a neurodegenerative disorder originating in the dopaminergic cells of the basal ganglia, is characterized by severe motor impairments such as tremors, bradykinesia, and postural instability. However, non-motor symptoms impacting sensory systems and cognition are consistently pointed to as more greatly affecting quality of life for PD patients. Cognitive impairments in PD can include changes in reward processing, depression, apathy, and increases in risk-taking behavior. Additionally, learning and memory deficits are seen in PD, specifically in motor sequence learning. Often, the neural correlates of sequence learning impairments are traced to the substantia nigra. However, there is some evidence in the literature that the ventral tegmental area (VTA) could also play a role in sequence learning deficits. In the present study we investigate the potential role of the VTA in sequence learning using a unilateral 6-OHDA lesion model of PD in mice. In comparison to control animals (n=3), some lesion animals (2 out of n=3) experienced an impairment in performance and rate of learning on a sequence task post-lesion surgery. This impairment also occurred without significant changes in motor skill measured by gait analysis and a cylinder test of forelimb laterality. This indicates that a lesion to the VTA may impact sequence learning without causing motor impairment- pointing to a more direct role of the VTA in sequence learning. This result contributes to our understanding of the neural correlates of cognitive impairments in PD, and could provide a basis for more targeted treatment of PD
A Veneer of Democracy: How el-Zu’ama Dominate Lebanon’s Political System
Full text linkAs Lebanon has endured a never-ending cycle of crises for decades, scholars have sought explanations via the country’s intense sectarian system, and have investigated its origins extensively. However, this search has neglected the question of sectarianism’s permeance and maintenance. This paper will focus on the latter, and argues that the sectarian system is sustained by a sectarian elite class, known as el-zu’ama, via their own cults of personality enabling them to maintain control of their sects. This paper will examine pre-statehood history, the civil war, post-war reconstruction, and finally, modern failed challenges to the system to illustrate this thesis
American Evangelicals’ New Testament: How Trump Gained Support From The Nation’s Most “Moral” Voters
Full text linkFor nearly four decades, white Evangelical Christians in the United States rallied around politicians who all fit a similar mold. This consistency was flipped on its head in 2016 when Evangelicals poured out in unprecedented levels to support Donald Trump. Despite being inconsistent with the type of candidate they have traditionally voted for, Evangelicals flocked to the polls with 81% of this group supporting Trump for the presidency. Evangelical support for Trump remained over 75% for the duration of his presidency and his reelection campaign in 2020. This shift begs the following research question: How was Donald Trump able to garner such unprecedented levels of support from Evangelical Christians despite at face value being inconsistent with the type of candidates they have favored for the better part of four decades? In this paper I use a combination of polling data and rhetorical analysis to argue that Trump garnered such high levels of support by leveraging three key themes: (1) “us versus them” framing of immigration issues, (2) fear of Christianity slipping from national prominence, and (3) belief that American society was rapidly degrading, each of which capitalized on Evangelicals’ main fear that their way of life was becoming obsolete in the US
“Eating the Other”: Invisibilities and Inequalities Within Culinary Cosmopolitanism
Full text linkIn this study, I interrogate culinary cosmopolitanism, or food consumption practices reflecting an appreciation for cultural diversity, tolerance, and exploration. Culinary cosmopolitanism has grown increasingly popular amongst consumers, alongside the implicit assumption that society is genuinely moving towards acceptance of all cultures and people. However, I argue for a more critical perspective on the consumption practices of culinary cosmopolitanism. Using interviews and survey data with students at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I also extend current theory on culinary cosmopolitanism, which has focused on older professionals, to an understudied age group. At Macalester, a small Midwestern liberal arts college that invests in a reputation as multicultural, diverse, and inclusive, cosmopolitan capital and authenticity negotiation emerged as strategies students took to align their experiences as emerging cosmopolitans with core tenets of cosmopolitanism: worldliness, exploration, and authenticity. Through these strategies, however, class inequality was reinforced and kept invisible, despite the importance of resources in how individuals explore food. Furthermore, a White American and European center of food culture was reproduced as a standard marker by which all Other cuisines and cultures are measured. Furthermore, ideals of culinary tourism espoused by students justified the exoticization and commodification of racial Otherness. Thus, despite assumptions that multiculturality and egalitarianism are norms of today’s food consumption, culinary cosmopolitanism in practice obscures the role of class privilege in our food consumption and serves the racial project of colorblindness by reinforcing whiteness as central yet invisible
The Trial of Abraham and the Trembling of the Audience: Rereading the Aqedah
Full text linkThis thesis reexamines the Aqedah narrative from Genesis 22:1–19, focusing on the conveyance of emotions and the portrayal of characters in a story that lacks explicit descriptions of thoughts and feelings. Approaching the text through a literary and narratological lens, I propose that through phraseological techniques like diction and parataxis and compositional strategies such as allusion and juxtaposition, the text captures the psychological depth of biblical characters, thereby enhancing its emotional impact on the audience. I dissect the narrative into eight scenes and within each scene, I conduct close readings to identify and analyze subtle lexical choices and rhetorical devices. Bridging various methodological approaches of biblical criticism, this study highlights the narrator’s inventiveness in producing emotional intensity and character complexity within the constraints of biblical narrative traditions