Honors Projects
Showing 1 - 5 of 5 Items
A Comparative Perspective on Colonial Influence in the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid in South Korea and Algeria
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Viv Daniel
Access: Open access
- South Korea and Algeria are both formerly colonized nations with a history of dependence on foreign aid. Their former colonizers, Japan and France respectively, collaborated closely throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, despite colonial linkages and similarities in early developmental trajectories, South Korea has grown into a donating member of the OECD and one of the world’s largest economies, while Algeria continues to struggle both economically and politically. This paper engages existing literature on postcolonial development and foreign aid by arguing that the attitudes towards colonization and the motivations for undertaking it on the part of colonial powers can have as large an impact on the success of foreign aid as the endogenous circumstances of the states receiving such aid.
Performing Sor Juana: Reimagining a Mexican Literary Figure in the 21st Century
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Uriel López-Serrano
Access: Open access
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (c. 1648-1695) was a Mexican nun, poet, playwright, and scholar from the colonial era. She has become an icon for various global, social, and political movements. This project looks at four dramatic works created by Sorjuanistas who reimagine Sor Juana’s story for contemporary audiences living in the United States. The works included in this essay are Estela Portillo-Trambley’s Sor Juana (1986), Karen Zacarías’s The Sins of Sor Juana (2001), and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s “Interview with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (1998/2014) and her newest work, Juana: An Opera in Two Acts (2019), libretto by Carla Lucero. In addition to reimagining Sor Juana’s story, these dramatic works expose the sexism, racism, and xenophobia perpetuated by U.S institutions of power that discriminate against Latin@ and Chican@ individuals. By shedding light on the social injustices that existed during the colonial era, an embodied Sor Juana teaches audiences how to resist and mobilize against such oppressive powers. Sor Juana’s narrative on stage is necessary because she is a role model for Latin@s/Chican@s. Sorjuanistas remind us that the body can be used to retell the narratives of the silenced individuals who are victims of oppression. By developing heritage performances, Sorjuanistas challenge histories that silence and overlook social injustices. Witnessing Sor Juana on stage triggers emotional responses to the past which allow historical actors to obtain intellectual, emotional, and political agency in an effort to affirm and remember particular contemporary and future commitments to fighting social injustices.
Radical and Liberal Approaches to Gay Rights Organizing from Stonewall to AIDS This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-16
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Sophia Blaha
Access: Embargoed
Who We Are: Incarcerated Students and the New Prison Literature, 1995-2010
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Reilly Hannah N Lorastein
Access: Open access
- This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring poetry, essays, fiction, and visual art created by incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program at San Quentin State Prison. By engaging the first person perspective of the incarcerated subject, this project will reveal how incarcerated individuals describe themselves, how they maintain and create intimate relationships from behind bars, and their critiques of the criminal justice system. From these readings, the project outlines conventions of “the incarcerated experience” as a subject position, with an eye toward further research analyzing the intersection of one's “incarcerated status” with one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Prescriptions of Identity: Jewish identities defined, questioned, and remembered in Early Modern Spain and early colonial America This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2029-05-16
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Juliana Keyes Vandermark
Access: Embargoed