Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- All Subjects: Comparative
- All Subjects: Mexican American
- Language: Spanish
Description
This dissertation is a comparative study of three contemporary women filmmakers: Puerto Rican Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Chicana director Lourdes Portillo, and Brazilian director Helena Solberg. Informed by transnational theory, politics of location, feminism on the border, and approaches to documentary filmmaking, the study examines three filmic texts: Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994), The Devil Never Sleeps/El diablo nunca duerme (1994), and Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1994). Each film is narrated by a female voice who juxtaposes her personal and transnational identity with history to tell her migration story before and after returning to her country of origin. An objective of the study is to demonstrate how the film directors vis-á-vis their female protagonists, configure a United States Latina transnational imaginary to position their female protagonists and themselves as female directors and as active social agents. Further, the dissertation explores how the filmmakers construct, utilizing the cinematographic apparatus, specific forms of resistance to confront certain oppressive forms. The theoretical framework proposes that transnational documentary filmmaking offers specific contestatory representations and makes possible the opening of parallel spaces in order to allow for a transformation from multiple perspectives. Through the utilization of specific techniques such as archival footage, the three directors focus on historical biographies. Further, they make use of experimental filmmaking and, in particular, the transnational documentary to deconstruct hegemonic discourses. Lastly, transnational cinema is valued as a field for cultural renegotiating and as a result, the documentary filmmakers in this study are able to reconfigure a transnational imaginary and propose an alternative discourse about history, sexuality, family structures, and gender relations. In sum, my dissertation contributes to Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/o, American Literature, and other Ethnic Literatures by focusing on migration, acculturation, and multicultural dialogue.
ContributorsValenzuela Pulido, Norma A (Author) / Hernández-G, Manuel De Jesús (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W. (Committee member) / Mcelroy, Isis (Committee member) / Sanchez, Marta (Committee member) / Elenes, C. Alejandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The 1920s have played a key role in the formation of the Latin American consciousness of its own cultural identity. In approaching the selected three heterogeneous regions of Latin America, the Southern Cone, the Andean Zone and the Afroantillan Caribbean, this research focuses on Latin American identity issues as a literary avant-garde construct found in the poetics and in the programmatic texts of the leading avant-garde journals of each corresponding region: Martín Fierro (1924-1927) in Argentina; revista de avance (1927-1930) in Cuba, and Amauta (1926-1930) in Perú. To carry out this kind of analysis and to fully understand the historic implications characteristics of each region, one of the initial tasks of the study has been to contextualize the period in each country in which the journals were published. After that, an analysis of each region's avant-garde production has been performed in order to categorize and situate the underlying questions of identity expressed in corresponding journals. Each region has been studied separately, yet all in view of contributing to a comprehensive and comparative study of the regions selected. The final result has been an organization of diverse principal semantic and ideological fields overlapping in and cross-crossing different regions as represented by the selected literary journals. Starting from the very same literature, which was inspired by the spirit of its time, this research has aimed at reconstructing the notions of identity that were common within the intellectual circles of the avant-garde times as expressed in the journals Martín Fierro, revista de avance, and Amauta, and, in the end, played a signal role in the development of national and continental cultural identity consciousness throughout Latin America from the beginning of the 20th century until today.
ContributorsNaciff, Marcela (Author) / Volek, Emil (Thesis advisor) / García Fernández, Carlos J (Committee member) / Acereda, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Este trabajo examina la producción literaria y cultural chicana/méxicosudoesteña de las distintas épocas coloniales del sudoeste: la época colonial española (1521-1821), la época colonial angloamericana (1848-1965) y la época poscolonial (1965-presente) para ver hasta qué punto siguen vigentes los legados coloniales dentro de un contexto contemporáneo. Avanzamos la hipótesis que, de la larga residencia histórica y geográfica de las personas hispanomexicanas en el sudoeste, se han producidos textos simbólicos donde se registran dos o más discursos residuos cuyo origen es una ideología dominante. El capítulo 1 plantea y detalla la hipótesis, reseña los numerosos estudios existentes, describe el marco teórico y da la división en capítulos. En el capítulo 2, se da de manera detallada el método crítico: la definición del colonialismo clásico según la teoría de Mario Barrera, la relación colonizador/colonizado aportada por Albert Memmi y los conceptos del tercer espacio híbrido, el mestizaje y el imaginario decolonial asociados con la época poscolonial como ofrecidos respectivamente por Homi Bhabha, Rafael Pérez-Torres y Emma Pérez. El capítulo 3 ofrece un análisis de la época colonial española vía dos obras nuevomexicanas: el poema épico Historia de la Nueva México (1610) de Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá y el drama Los comanches (c.1779) de anónimo. El capítulo 4 trata la colonización angloamericana en las obras The Squatter and the Don (1885) de María Amparo Ruiz de Burton y Dew on the Thorn (escrita en los 1940; publicada en 1997) de Jovita González de Mireles. El capítulo 5 examina la época poscolonial vía la obra Los muertos también cuentan (1995) de Miguel Méndez. Una lectura de la literatura chicana/méxicosudoesteña revela la presencia de varios personajes típicos asociados cada uno a una diferente época histórica desde el conquistador español hasta un mexicano recién inmigrado, quienes no han podido evadir la correspondiente presencia de un grupo dominante u colonizador. Con base en una investigación de las cinco obras seleccionadas, se muestra cómo las relaciones coloniales se forman y se transforman y luego se manifiestan en un contexto contemporáneo, desplazando por ende nuestro entendimiento de las relaciones coloniales como un simple proyecto binario de dominación y subordinación.
ContributorsFonseca, Vanessa (Author) / Hernández-G., Manuel De Jesús (Thesis advisor) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / García-Fernández, Carlos Javier (Committee member) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Horan, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Race is a complex system founded on social ideologies that categorize and evaluate human beings into different groups based on their visible characteristics (e.g., skin color) that, according to this notion of race, indicate a person's personal traits (e.g., intelligence). The concept of race has been an integral part of American society since the ratification of the United States Constitution in the late 18th century. Early on, the practice of race within American society established one particular group as the norm: the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the distinctions among racial groups essentially came down to "white" and "nonwhite." Consequently, certain social inequalities were bestowed upon those groups that did not fit the model of the dominant "white" group. Autobiographies, especially those from marginalized groups, can serve as an important source of these social disparities since the author is able to recount their own social experiences vis-à-vis racial practices within society. With this in mind, this thesis analyses the concept of race in relation to the personal experiences of two authors through their respective autobiographies: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) by Richard Rodriguez and How Did You Get to Be Mexican?: A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity (1999) by Kevin R. Johnson. The critical work of Paula M. L. Moya, Linda Martín Alcoff, Hazel Rose Markus, George M. Fredrickson, Genaro M. Padilla and others are used as the theoretical framework in the literary analysis of these authors' texts. In summary, the results of this study demonstrate the concept of race as a salient aspect in regards to the ideological formation of each respective author.
ContributorsMancillas, Jorge E (Author) / Rosales, Jesus (Thesis advisor) / Hernández-Gutierrez, Manuel J (Thesis advisor) / Garcia-Fernandez, Carlos J (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014