A Case Against Constitutional Interpretation: Expanding Upon Sontagian Theory
Though living document theorists allow for some “revamping” of the Constitution through interpretation, the core document still remains an authoritative and sometimes oppressive force through interpretative devotion to content. Both the originalist and living constitutionalist interpretative lenses hinder progress and uphold a document that may no longer be fully relevant in its current state. Instead of a new method of interpretation, following the logic proposed by Sontag, the form of the Constitution should be considered. Thus, when issues of this strange new world arise that could not have been envisioned by the founding fathers, we need not guess what their stance would be or twist ancient texts to fit modern needs.
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Italian Modernism: A Fascist Trauma Response
Italian artists Alberto Burri and Umberto Boccioni were artists that created modernist art that reflected the overall sentiment of Italian society during their respective times. Although their art was made in two different time periods, as Boccioni created Futurist art under Mussolini’s Fascist regime and Burri created art as a response to the traumas left behind by it, their art represents changes made to Italian society as a result of a political ideology. It is through the complete study of the primary sources from this time that one can understand the integral nature of these works in the overall understanding of the way in which Italy both coped and lived as a result of Mussolini.
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Transphobia in the Media: Crossdressing as a Point of Fear and Comedy
Film as a visual medium has been established as one of the most accessible displays of the human condition, nuanced philosophical discussion, and societal examination since its invention at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite its adolescence as a vehicle for narrative, film was, for a time, the most popular storytelling form, surpassing theatrical performances, stage plays, and technical innovations such as FM radio. However, due to the invention of television and its emergence as a separate genre, film has now emerged as one of many alternatives to experiencing moving, visual art. Artists began to utilize this art form to examine the human psyche and the environment from which it was constructed to more complex examinations such as the desire for self-discovery. Gender and sexuality when expressed in this fashion is often[i] used as a foil for this desire and can be utilized to grapple with one’s identity being either outside the norm or accepted at any capacity, the most contentious being identities under the trans hypernym (transsexuality, crossdressing, etc.)
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Never Have We Ever Missed The Point: The Compound Effect of the Male Glance on Women of Color
Critical reception has failed Mindy Kaling, the writer and creator of several popular TV shows including The Mindy Project (2012–2017), Champions (2018), and Never Have I Ever (2020–now). Though her most recent venture, Never Have I Ever received plenty of praise when it first aired on Netflix in April 2020, critical reception also quickly revealed the viewer’s assumptions that make complex messages written by women of color difficult for audiences to notice.
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"The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers”: From Basile to the Brothers Grimm
The European fairy tale tradition began with oral folktales from different regions throughout the continent. Writers like Giambattista Basile (1566 – 1632) of Naples and the German brothers Jacob (1785 – 1863) and Wilhelm (1786 – 1859) Grimm were some of the first to compile stories from Western Europe into anthologies, spreading these folk and fairy tales to a wider audience and bolstering widespread interest in them over the next several centuries.
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Dirck Jacobsz's Artistic Family Lineage and Identity In "Jacob Cornelisz Painting His Wife Anna"
The Rijksmuseum identifies Dirck’s Jacob Cornelisz Painting his Wife Anna as a commemorative family portrait, which has been the most common interpretation of Dirck’s painting in recent scholarships of the past two decades. In fact, the Renaissance experienced increasing social and cultural practices to commemorate family identity and lineage through various means, including the commemoration of the dead through art production such as portraiture and bust sculpture.
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Examining Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith as a Case Study: Notes of Religious and Mystical Experience
While the philosophy of religion project requires an outsider perspective, the African American student—as a cultural insider whose religious background lies in the Black Church—examining gospel music cannot always separate personal memories and experiences from their inclination to interpret Mother Ford’s experience as religious or mystical. Having witnessed the frenzied behaviors of individuals singing gospel makes an outsider perspective difficult to attain for those individuals. In this article, I blur the lines of the Durkheimian perspective on the sacred/profane dichotomy to underscore the nuances of reading gospel as religious material.
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Void and Construction: The Historicization of Anti-Utopian and Dystopian Social Criticism in Early Soviet Literature
Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920–1921) was the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1929–1930) met a similar fate just nine years later, and both writers suffered extreme marginalization afterward. Given this, one wonders why and how they and so many other authors of the period criticized the regime indirectly at all.
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Seventeenth-Century Dutch Animal Imagery Challenging Anthropocentrism: Paulus Potter’s Punishment of a Hunter
In the painting Punishment of a Hunter, the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Paulus Potter depicted animals putting a hunter on trial and enacting a death sentence. In this artwork, the animal court and hunter’s execution by burning appear in two central scenes, surrounded by smaller allegorical and hunting vignettes that show animals and humans. Compared to other works of seventeenth-century Dutch art, the content and format of this painting stand out as being rather peculiar.
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The Taboos of Family Romances: In Search of the Distorted Feminine Image
The feminine image is a broad conceptualization of feminine identity and behavior and is thus based in archetypical femininity. Archetypical femininity includes the nurturing quality associated with maternity, the chaotic element of nature and transformation, and the display of physical beauty and sexual appeal. Archetypal femininity, though expansive and necessary to the substance of life, becomes an oppressive tool when rigid expectations for gendered behavior arise from it.
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Emerald Atlantic: Motivations in Irish-American Diasporic Violence
Civil wars and emigration are closely related concepts; wars force relocation, while refugee populations beyond a state’s borders can influence a conflict within its original borders. As Idean Salehyan writes in his “Rebels without Borders: State Boundaries, Transnational Opposition, and Civil Conflict,” from Sikhs in Pakistan to Contras in Costa Rica, “modern insurgencies are not limited to the geographic area of the state.”
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The Martial and Marital Entwined: Femininity and the Military World in Shakespeare’s Othello
Shakespeare’s Othello is familiar to literary scholars and high school students alike: the eponymous Venetian general, falsely led to believe his wife is an adulteress, kills her and, upon realizing his error, himself. Some scholars analyze Othello’s fall by adopting a military lens.
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The Power We Speak: Language, Anti-Black Racism & Black Resistance
Whatever the modality, whether verbal, written, body-language, or even the release of various chemicals and pheromones, communication is universal between all living things. Humans naturally congregate and gravitate towards one another for more than just survival, rather for companionship and celebration, primarily through language. It is from these congregations, each with their distinct methods of communication, language, that cultures are born.
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Stones that Speak
Made in the 18th century, Water Dropper: Poet Li Bai Sleeping Near Pine, Plum and Bamboo is a small fluorite sculpture with a cavity and opening so it could be used as a water dropper in ink making. The piece reinforces the well-known fact that calligraphy and ink were vital to Chinese culture and were considered one of the highest forms of art. This piece shows a sensitivity to material and color that is indicative of a culture deeply in tune with the natural world, Daoist principles, and its ancient past.
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Simone de Beauvoir and the Other Woman
Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex asks: “What is a woman?” Equally, however, the question might be: Who is de Beauvoir’s “woman”? For de Beauvoir, woman, the titular “second sex,” is “second” to man insofar as she is understood in relation to man, is dependent on man, and serves man.
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Smoke and Mirrors: Reading the Rhetoric of Ted Cruz
It is well-known that on January 6, 2021, while the electoral votes were being certified, an insurrection was unfolding at the U.S. Capitol. The event was born of a concerted effort to overturn the results of the presidential election. Probably the most important aspect of this event was the barrage of misinformation doubting the security and results of the election. So, to understand this piece of history that is still unfolding, it is important to understand the rhetoric, or the verbal tactics, attached to it. In other words, how can a lie about election fraud be crafted so effectively?
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Bread, Banquets, and Capons: The Cosmopolitan Culinary Condition of Rome
At its peak, Rome was an urban city very much like cosmopolitan cities of today, featuring a rich intermingling of various cultures and religions that thrived on economic strength and growth. Scholars agree that the city contained approximately a million urban residents, with the city having an estimated consumption of more than 150,000 tons of grain per annum. This, however, begs a following question. What was the quality of food for everyday Romans actually like?
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Call of the Distant Mountains
In 1279, the last lingering hope of Southern Song was annihilated as the Mongolian warmongers triumphed in the naval battle of Yamen. Kublai Khan declared the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, and China, for the first time, fell to foreign rulership. It is a subject that still puzzles the scholars today as to how one of the most epochal periods of Chinese culture prospered under the reign of “barbarous” alien nomads. The artistic creativity of the Yuan scholar-artists was not strictly circumscribed by the already well-established pictorial conventions.
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Rooms of Their Own: The Spatialized Consciousness of Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs Dalloway
The feminist critique on the politics of space was central to Virginia Woolf’s conception of the private space in many of her works. Scholars have discussed at length Woolf’s interrogation of the private space as “the site of middle-class female domestic confinement” and its duality as “the site of dynamic female potential” in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and her later works The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). Beyond Woolf’s preoccupation with gendered spaces, what is perhaps less widely addressed is her portrayal of “the imbrication of space and individual consciousness” and the complex relationship between physical space and the identity one manifests within it.
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The Black Janus
I am a man of two faces. A question that we as humans all ask ourselves throughout the course of our lives is “Who am I?” The answer to that query is never concrete, but rather dynamic as it is always developing and changing as we navigate our way through the tempestuous hurricane that is life. For each person the answer will have its metaphysical variations based on the many intricate components that (make up who they are) or delineate their being. As I’ve journeyed through my four-year liberal arts education here at a predominantly white University, very sparingly I have been presented with the academic tools to introspectively examine myself within the framework of that question.
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