Journal:
Pathways: A Journal of Humanistic and Social Inquiry

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Chicana/o Studies
Comparative Literature
Creative Writing
English Language and Literature
Ethnic Studies
History
Indigenous Studies
Latina/o Studies
Philosophy
Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

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Pathways: A Journal of Humanistic and Social Inquiry is a peer-reviewed journal associated with the HSI Pathways to the Professoriate Program, which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. To learn more about the HSI Pathways to the Professoriate Program, visit our website: https://cmsi.gse.rutgers.edu/hsi-pathways/

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2019 - 201982020 - 202113
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 21
  • Publication
    The Shame Framework: Queer Faith in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God
    (2021-02-17) Montes, Isabella M
    This work focuses on queer faith and how queer persons who have struggled with traditional values, public opinion, and lingering violence due to their sexuality, can reclaim their space and voices within religious communities. By redefining purity, exploring an alternative belief system though hybrid spirituality, and understanding the connection between pride and shame, queer persons can establish a dynamic framework, that allows for queer faith to be employed as a method of agency. This is analyzed through a literary perspective, focusing on the work of Ana Castillo’s novel, So Far From God.
  • Publication
    Establishing a Fixed Home: The Attempt at Identity Completion in Alvarez’s "Antojos" and Menéndez’s "Her Mother's House"
    (2021-02-17) Molina, Anaridia R
    Immigrant experiences are often characterized by identity anxiety and a corresponding longing to identify a single place to call “home.” In Julia Alvarez’s "Antojos" and Ana Menéndez’s "Her Mother's House," the main characters return to their native or ancestral land in search of a space to claim as home, and relatedly, a permanent location for a fixed identity in the Caribbean. This paper examines how in these works, typically unbeknownst to the protagonists themselves, establishing a home regularly takes the form of securing what they perceive to be “wholeness” and “completion.” I argue that the texts reveal that the protagonists’ search for a fixed and static place to call home, derived from desires of identity completion, cannot be found, and rather their place of arrival can solely exist in the ambiguity of language and memory. As such, eventually, the reader is prompted to understand that not having a traditional essentialized notion of home to guide the protagonists frees them and allows them to embrace rather than reject their linguistic and spatial multiplicities.
  • Publication
    Symbol, Signification, and Hashtags as Violence Against Black Bodies; A Comparative Analysis of Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
    (2021-02-17) Edouard, Lynn S
    In Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American lyric the concept of Black subjectivity rendered as symbol is represented through the narratives of Harriet and Trayvon Martin. By using Harriet’s explanation of becoming symbolic in Cliff’s No Telephone To Heaven as a lens to examine Trayvon Martin’s life and death as narrated in Rankine’s Citizen, I expand the conversation of symbolic rendering. In Cliff’s work, symbolic rendering is achieved through sexual violence in the post-colonial Caribbean context. For Rankine, the post-colonial carceral state in U.S. society becomes the site for the symbolic rendering of policy brutality and racial profiling. Using Saussure’s General Linguistics, Foucault’s concept of the PanOpticon, and bell hooks’s Loving Blackness as Political Action, I argue that Cliff and Rankine’s works illuminate how symbolism becomes violence against Black bodies by rendering the lived experiences of the individual as an object.
  • Publication
    On Being as Passage and Plurality of Self: Postcolonial Caribbean Identity in Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey
    (2019-02-15) González Izquierdo, Amanda
    This essay examines questions of home and identity in a postcolonial Caribbean context. Situating itself in the dialogue between continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, this research explores how identity formations are processes which negotiate fragmentary demands of being as well as the various ruptures and dislocations that are resultants of colonization. This paper proposes that in thinking of postcolonial identities, we must explicitly and necessarily consider multiplicity, alterity, diaspora, and interstitial spaces. Focusing on Merle Hodge's novel Crick Crack, Monkey, this essay thinks through protagonist Tee's process of becoming, a process which is fluid, dynamic, and never complete. In doing so, this research explores questions about race, enslavement, bearing witness, language, space and place, and (literal and metaphoric) diasporic movements.
  • Publication
    Internet Memes and Desensitization
    (2020-01-13) Sanchez, Barbara C
    Internet memes (IMs) have been used as a visual form of online rhetoric since the early 2000s. With hundreds of thousands now in circulation, IMs have become a prominent method of communication across the Internet. In this essay, I analyze the characteristics that have made IMs a mainstay in online communication. Understanding the definitions and structures of IMs aid in explaining their online success, especially on social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. I use these understandings as a basis from which to theorize how both the creative process in making IMs and the prominence of IMs that utilize images of originally violent or sensitive contexts may relate to existing research correlating violent media and desensitization. The use of these images often involves a disconnection from their original contexts in order to create a new and distinct— in many cases irrelevant— message and meaning. These IMs, in turn, exemplify the belittlement of distress depicted in such images—often for the sake of humor. This essay’s main goal is to propose a new theoretical lens from which to analyze the social and cultural influences on IMs.
  • Publication
    No Estoy Sola (I Am Not Alone): Addressing Gender-Based Violence through Community-Based Theater
    (2021-02-17) Mena, Annel A
    In this article, I analyze how women at the border city of El Paso address the #MeToo movement and gender-based violence through community-based theatre. By using testimonios and performance ethnography, I analyze the power of storytelling to create awareness of gender-based violence on the border and ability to create solidarity. The theater has become an effective way of addressing such a stigmatized topic. The performance of the theater has inspired a workshop that is now used to help survivors heal their wounds by understanding that they are not alone.
  • Publication
    Fans in the Gutter: People of Color in Comics Fandom
    (2020-01-13) Espinoza-Zemlicka, Liam A
    Fandom and so called “geek culture” have often been characterized as a haven for the marginalized, a place where those who fit in nowhere else have been able to form communities around a shared appreciation of media. I am interested in understanding the experiences of people of color in comic book fandom and how they differ from the experiences of white comic fans. I did a pilot study in Los Angeles in the summer of 2018. I conducted five semi structured interviews of Los Angeles area comic book fans who identified as people of color. This data was augmented by data from an online survey of 31 self-identified comic fans over eighteen of any ethnicity which sought to identify how fans reacted to the idea of racial diversity among comic book characters, and in what contexts most fan interactions took place.
  • Publication
    Deconstructing Cultural Food Borders: The Creation of New Latinidades in Latina Literature through Consumption
    (2019-02-19) Vigil, Elizabeth
    This research explores contemporary Latinx literature to examine the way discourse about food is presented as a form of socio-cultural control through the demand for culturally regulated forms of consumption. Judgmental discourse in what is said about food, how it is said, and expected behaviors of consumption are tied to the creation of a collective Latinx cultural identity. This cultural identity and its expected authenticity revolve around eating foods that are considered static segments of Puerto Rican cultural tradition. It works to assess expectations of identity which are forced upon individuals. This investigation looks at how the refusal of cultural foods and the consumption of cross-cultural foods is linked to the crossing of cultural food borders and thereby physical borders. It examines the concept of cultural loyalty through food and the creation of new Latinidades through consumption in Esmeralda Santiago’s, When I Was Puerto Rican.
  • Publication
    Ritratto di un uomo con simboli: Lorenzo Lotto on Vice and Virtue
    (2019-02-15) Hurtado, Victor
    The art of Lorenzo de Tomasso Lotto (1480-1557) has until recently gained critical attention. Lotto, born in Venice to Tomasso Lotto, lived and traveled throughout Italy. The Portrait of Man with Allegorical Symbols on display at the El Paso Museum of Art is one of Lotto’s most elusive paintings. A man of about thirty years of age is portrayed on a neutral background and divides a set of six allegorical symbols in axially. He gestures toward a set of three symbols hanging from a festoon of laurel leaves: an armillary sphere, intertwined palm branches, and a full-blown bladder. A number of scholars have attempted to identify Lotto’s Ritratto as a self-portrait, a portrait of Marcello Framberti, or an Italian alchemist. These interpretations, however, are not supported by the available evidence. Confining the sitter to a particular identity limits interpretive possibilities and ignores historical and cultural contexts. Thus, this piece examines the portrait as a whole, situating it within its historical, cultural, and artistic contexts, and proposes that Lotto’s Ritratto alludes to a meaning that is philosophical, open-ended, and universal rather than specific and particular.
  • Publication
    Just War Theory: A Shift in Perspective
    (2019-02-15) Rocha, Hermes
    War is an extreme human activity—not only because of the horror of war, but because of the severe emotional, physical, psychological, and moral strain it has on its combatants. Understanding war from the combatant’s point of view is hard enough without personally experiencing war. Without the direct experience of combat, an epistemic gap lies between one who knows what it is like and those lucky enough not to experience it. Consequently, the theoretical propositions of just and unjust conduct in war become difficult to support. I argue that just war theory and its tenets such as jus in bello, or just conduct in war, needs a thorough examination of combat experiences to define the principle with the reality of war in mind. For example, as a precept of moral responsibility in war, jus in bello is an abstract principle which can be supported by concrete historical examples if and only if the epistemic gap between the experience of combat and abstraction is bridged by a consideration of the reality of war.

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