education - Page 3

Kittens in the Oven: Race Relations, Traumatic Memory, and the Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

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Natalie Carter

George Washington University, USA

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.10

Abstract

The search for an ever-elusive home is a thread that runs throughout much literature by authors who have immigrated to the United States.  Dominican authors are particularly susceptible to this search for a home because “for many Dominicans, home is synonymous with political and/or economic repression and is all too often a point of departure on a journey of survival” (Bonilla 200).  This “journey of survival” is a direct reference to the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The pain and trauma that Trujillo inflicted upon virtually everyone associated with the Dominican Republic during this era is still heartbreakingly apparent, and perhaps nowhere is that trauma more thoroughly illustrated than in the literature of Julia Alvarez.  Alvarez is a prime example of an author who utilizes narrative in a clear attempt to come to grips with lingering traumatic memories.  After her father’s role in an attempt to overthrow the dictator is revealed, Alvarez’s family is forced to flee the Dominican Republic as political exiles, and a sense of displacement has haunted her since.  Because both the Dominican Republic and the United States are extraordinary racially charged, concepts of home and identity are inextricably bound to race relations in much of Alvarez’s art.  Using theoretical concepts drawn from the fields of trauma studies and Black cultural studies, this essay examines Alvarez’s debut novel in order to illustrate the myriad ways in which culture, politics, and race converge and speak through each other, largely in the form of traumas that can irreparably alter one’s sense of home, voice, and identity. Keep Reading

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Thinking about the Mexican Revolution: Philosophy, Culture and Politics in Mexico: 1910-1934

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Aureliano Ortega Esquivel

University of Guanajuato, Mexico

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010 I Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.03

 Abstract

The commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of the War of Independence and the centenary of the Mexican Revolution make this a good moment for some analysis and reflection on the influence that both events have had on the form and the meaning that Mexican intellectual production and cultural institutions have conserved throughout that time.  The aim of this essay, is to examine in how, and by what cultural and institutional means, a process of historical transformation as violent, convulsive, complex and radical as the Revolution ended up producing a remarkably favourable set of conditions for literature, music, the visual arts, education and, in particular, philosophy, whose earliest developments and contributions came between 1910 and 1934. Keep Reading

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Teaching Literature in the Age of E-Literacy

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Anne Mabry, New Jersey City University Abstract

In this piece of writing the writer deals with the issue of teaching literature and with the use of technology for the purpose of human resource development in the age of internet.

Students in urban high schools across the United States have been struggling to accomplish one milestone that most other students in suburban U.S. high schools take as a rite of passage—graduating from high school.  In the recent report titled “Closing the Graduation Gap,” commissioned by the American’s Promise Alliance, a non-profit group that works to reduce America’s high school dropout rates, the average high school graduation rate in the U.S.’s 50 largest cities was 53 percent, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs.  And the magnitude of the problem doesn’t stop there.  As reported by Sara Rimer of the New York Times just a few months ago, of the 68 percent of high school students nationwide who go to college each year, about one-third begin their freshmen year with skills deficient in writing, reading, and basic computational skills. Keep Reading

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