Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2014-2015: Color

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 11
  • Publication
    Ornamenting Fingernails and Roads: Beautification and the Embodiment of Authenticity in Post-War Eastern Sri Lanka
    (2015-05-01) Kolor, Kimberly
    In post-conflict Sri Lanka, communal tensions continue to be negotiated, contested, and remade. Color codes virtually every aspect of daily life in salient local idioms. Scholars rarely focus on the lived visual semiotics of local, everyday exchanges from how women ornament their nails to how communities beautify their open—and sometimes contested—spaces. I draw on my ethnographic data from Eastern Sri Lanka and explore ‘color’ as negotiated through personal and public ornaments and notions of beauty with a material culture focus. I argue for a broad view of ‘public,’ which includes often marginalized and feminized public modalities. This view also explores how beauty and ornament are salient technologies of community and cultural authenticity that build on histories of ethnic imaginaries.
  • Publication
    Finding God in Oneself & For Colored Girls: A Revolutionary Performance of Language, Naming, & Spacing
    (2015-05-01) Hyatt, Abrina
    This project analyzes the powerful implications of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf in terms of the language of “choreopoetry,” the identity politics present in the experiences of Black women, and the elements of spirituality that move Shange’s work forward. I argue that For Colored Girlsoffers Black women a space to celebrate the fullness and diversity of themselves, regardless of where they fall within the spectrum of characters represented. Shange’s work is groundbreaking in its usage of dance and poetry as joint storytelling language, and with Black women as the titular characters and target audience for this piece. For Colored Girls reshapes how we can continue to enjoy creative processes in theater, writing, poetry, dance, literature, and so much more. This piece has and continues to breathe life and beauty into stories that often go ignored.
  • Publication
    Documenting Disremembrance: Histories of Loss in Contemporary Chinese Representation
    (2015-05-01) Schreiber, Kimberly
    In places like contemporary China, where legal adjudication for past wrongdoings is impossible, an aesthetic engagement with the experience of loss has become essential to activating these historical remains and undermining violent narratives of progress. Tracing several generations’ aesthetic responses to the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the present day influx of global capital, I advocate for a specific type of aesthetic practice that elides the distinction between the documentary method and abstract practice. By deliberately conflating these categories I argue that these works are united in their quest to dismantle dominant ideologies, and undermine authoritative narratives by making visible their flaws and contradictions with everyday reality. Moreover, my research illuminates an evolving relationship to the documentary method – one that expands and challenges existing definitions of realism. Ultimately, my research is based on an ethical framework which demands a reorientation of our historical perspective, and a new understanding of history that is not couched in teleological notions of progress.
  • Publication
    A Taste of Brown: Alimentary Anthropology Between Michoacan and Washington
    (2015-05-01) Romero, Jose
    Growing demands for alternative diets are filtered from the perspective of nation- building and agro-food employees in Washington State. Refusing food as the antithesis of death, brownness emerges as a conceptual frame that foregrounds multiple bodies and actors (human animals, nonhuman animals, and matter) simultaneously as it holds onto ways of being-in-common within scarcity and disavowal. “Sensing Inhumanity” inhabits the limits of nationalist political mobilization for brown bodies by exploring labor embodiment (pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and the sun) and the criminalization of food and color itself (illegalized food trucks and police brutality). Multimedia (video, images, and geographic information systems) and ethnographic writing invite a collective witnessing to our own obligations to the violence constitutive of food production in the U.S. today. Ultimately, how would it feel to embrace a synaesthetic politics of brown alimentary obligation?
  • Publication
    "The Implacable Surge of History": Investigating Jewish Activism in Atlanta During the Civil Rights Movement
    (2015-05-01) Kerker, Danielle Rose
    Existing works on southern Jewry illustrate how most southern Jews were concerned with self-preservation during the Civil Rights Movement. Many historians have untangled perceptions of southern Jewish detachment from civil rights issues to explain how individuals and communities were torn between their sympathy towards the African- American plight and Jewish vulnerability during a period of heightened racial tension. This project draws connections among the American Civil Rights Movement, the southern Jewish experience, and Atlanta race relations in order to identify instances of southern Jewish involvement in the fight for racial equality. What were the forms of activism Jews chose, the circumstances that shaped those decisions, and the underlying goals behind them? Studying Atlanta’s Jewish communities during the 1950s and 1960s helps broaden the conversation on Jewish activism, raise questions of southern Jewish identity, and uncover distinctive avenues for change. Analysis suggests that, although their story is less known, Jewish organizations and individuals in Atlanta found ways to contribute to the fight for civil rights equality within the context of the Jim Crow South.
  • Publication
    As Long as You’re a Black Wo/Man You’re an African: Creole Diasporic Politics in the Age of Mestizo Nationalism
    (2015-05-01) White, Melanie
    Nicaragua, along with most—if not all—Central American nations, is seldom considered to have a Black or Afro-Latino population. Despite the legacies of colonial Black erasure that bleed into the present day, however, Nicaragua’s Southern Atlantic Coast in particular has been home to Afro-descendants since the early 17th century. Part of Nicaragua’s historical narrative of Black erasure has to do with the white supremacist mestizo nationalism that has plagued the nation since before independence in 1821. Through an exploration of Atlantic Coast history, Creole ethno-genesis, and the racist mestizo nationalist practices of the Nicaraguan state, this project highlights the emerging social movement of Creole Black diasporic politics and argues that Creoles are not solely operating under Gramscian “common sense,” as has been previously theorized. Instead, they are also imagining what a “larger freedom” might look like outside national, legal, and political boundaries.
  • Publication
    ‘He too has the Right to be Educated’: Inclusion and Identity in Ecuador’s Indigenous Movement, 1927-2009’
    (2015-05-01) Koffler, Abigail
    In Ecuador, a nation with a large Indigenous population, the question of education is at once political and revolutionary. In the 1930s, Indigenous activists learned tactics from communist and socialist unions and set up many schools in regional groups. A generation of activists, led by Dolores Cacuengo made tremendous strides. In 1988, the Ministry of Education officially assumed responsibility for Indigenous education under coalition pressure, but it has since failed to capture the nuances of the nation’s Indigenous communities and their expectations for education. Meanwhile, the Indigenous groups have mobilized into a political party that hopes to redefine Ecuadorian nationality against centuries of structural oppression. They are waging vital fights for resources and respect.
  • Publication
    (De)Colonizing Representations: Influence of 20th Century Indigenous/Indigenist Art in Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico
    (2015-05-01) Cabrera, Juan
    How has 20th century Indigenous/Indigenist art influenced the ways in which Indigenous peoples of Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico were viewed? By comparing painting’s representative qualities and photography’s manipulation of reality, we can begin to understand what the art evoked in the public sphere, and how it functioned to change the public’s perceptions of Indigenous peoples in these areas. Shifting representations and the concept of (de)colonizing representations will illuminate the ways in which people have viewed varying degrees of indigeneity.
  • Publication
    The Last Jihad: How Language Trumped Religion in the Late Ottoman Empire
    (2015-05-01) Akrouk, Anwar Ziyad
    Color has been a unique way to distinguish different nations. When a nation emerges, its most prominent symbol is its flag, with each color meant to represent a different ideal. A group of people forms a nation to distinguish themselves from “others.” These “others” could be ethnically, linguistically, religiously, or culturally separate – they are distinguished as different. What is the relation between the nascent Arab nationalist movement and those not represented by the colors of the flag? In particular, how did this affect other ethnic minorities within Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire and others who were represented by the colors of the flag by virtue of their Arab ethnicity, but who came from religiously distinct backgrounds such as Christians, Druze, and Shi’ites?
  • Publication
    Environmental Art: A Study of Psychology and Activism
    (2015-05-01) Davidson, Leah
    Environmental art can reinterpret natural processes, generate awareness about environmental problems, restore damaged ecosystems, and convey the power and beauty of nature and wildlife. The purpose of this project is to investigate the symbolism of color in environmental art and photography and its relationship to human psychology. To survey the field of environmental art, I visited galleries and interviewed artists in the field, with the purpose of analyzing 50 significant pieces of art that represent a variety of genres, colors, and cultural heritages. The final project will analyze the future potential of art as a tool for social change and lead to the creation of a digital platform at Penn to showcase interdisciplinary student projects.