Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Ph.D.

Research

Race & Religion

...a chapter written for The Oxford Handbook of Religion & News

Narratives of race and religion have been intertwined in the ideals of “a chosen people” and “a chosen nation.” These ideals, of various social groups and countries believing themselves to be selected uniquely by God to prosper, proselytize and lead, generate important questions for news media. Some of these questions are philosophical: How is religion practiced along racial and ethnic lines? Is religion used to justify racism and/or racial privilege? Does religion inherently resist racism? Others are practical: Is it the case that the more devout the religious practitioner, the more extreme the racial pride and/or racism?


Mixed Race in the Age of Mrs. O

...written with Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D.
...pics borrowed from Mrs.O and New York Times websites

This study is designed to examine how mixed race identity is formulated and discussed by young adults in the United States. An intensely interdisciplinary project, we begin by discussing racial mixedness and identity “with a twist” as they pertain, not to President Obama but, to First Lady Michelle Obama. Self-identified as and accepted as “Black,” her mixed race ancestry is the subject of recent scrutiny.



Book Review: Mixed Race Hollywood

In the wake of “Obama-mania,” conventional wisdom about racial identity is facing a set of new and unique challenges. It is therefore imperative for scholars and industry professionals to reflect upon multiracial identification, representation, past and post-racial politics as they pertain to art and to life.



How It's Done: Using "Hitch" to Reduce Uncertainty

I developed an original classroom activity to apply Uncertainty Reduction Theory to initial relationship development using "Hitch." Using my "Uncertainty Reduction Strategies" worksheet to screen a scene between the film's protagonists (played by Eva Mendez and Will Smith), students discover that initiating interpersonal relationships is both rule-governed and imaginative. Some students report that they had not “looked at "'Hitch' this way” or even thought seriously about representations of initial relationship development in the media. They often claim to see film, especially romantic comedy, as entertainment and devoid of theoretical foundation. This activity challenges students to identify core concepts and to apply those concepts to mediated and real world situations. Beyond conceptual thinking, students draw correlations between URT and other theories of relationship development, discuss interracial romance, and enhance self-awareness.


Mixed Messenger: Barack Obama & Post-Racial Politics

The election of President Barack Hussein Obama marks an important milestone in United States racial politics. Many cultural critics and opinion leaders argue that Obama’s popularity and position represent post-racial accomplishments for the nation.


Dissertation: Impurely Raced // Purely Erased

This dissertation won NCA's 2009 Outstanding Dissertation Award.

This dissertation, Impurely Raced // Purely Erased: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing, develops a theory about the interrelations between mixed race identification and passing as they pertain to the field of rhetoric and to United States slavery and segregation settings. I introduce the concept of (bi)racial passing to argue that passing is a form of rhetoric that identifies and represents passers intersectionally via synecdoche.


A Different Kind of Professor

In this chapter I discuss the ways in which I experience my multiracial and gendered identity on a day-to-day basis in the academy—as an historical, rhetorical, institutional, intersectional, and personal set of communication relations that requires some working through. Using Standpoint Theory, I explain the development and expression of my own standpoint along with some blatant and latent forms of discrimination that I have encountered. I then address ways in which we can fight extinction by questioning our environments. I continue by focusing on change, the power of changing demographics, and ways in which my own creative spark thrives by transforming today’s discrimination into tomorrow’s opportunity. In so doing I conclude by expressing my standpoint of what it means to be a different kind of professor.


Close to the Edge: The Representational Tactics of Eminem

This manuscript examines Marshall Bruce Mathers III, known both as Eminem and Slim Shady, as he employs pedestrian speech acts to walk the edge between “here and there.” Walking is the discursive process through which a subject is constituted by the relationship it creates with the Other. de Certeau outlines three stages through which this process occurs: (1) appropriation, in which the speaker acquires the language of a given culture to bear the burden of his/her own experience; (2) a “spatial acting-out of the place,” through which the speaker airs his/her position with relation to the language; and (3) allocution, through which the speaker posits the Other as the reference point for the speaker’s own subjectivity and negotiates the relationship between the two positions (97-98). Eminem’s commercial success is examined in terms of these three stages as a method for understanding his representative strategy and his continued commercial success in a popular music as a transracial medium.


Have a Little Faith: Religious Visions in Prison Break

In this chapter I use Fantasy Theme Criticism to look at Prison Break in order to uncover the ways in which its mantra, “have a little faith,” is both encoded and translated into Christian spiritual and religious visions for the characters’ lives.



A Rhetorical Response to Hurricane Katrina

In this piece I look at Hurricane Katrina through the lens of rhetoric. I explore how, in press coverage, interviews and resident testimonials, symbols can be used to state and to counter-state, to create suspense and surprise, to reveal more than one or even two sides to any story. Key questions asked include: How do catastrophic and ineffable events, whether considered acts of God or acts of man...


In Search of a "Singular I:" A Structurational Analysis of Passing

This article explores the cultural, social, and communicative challenges inherent in the phenomenon of black-to-white racial passing in the United States among upwardly mobile, heterosexual, bi-racial men in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it applies Giddens’s Theory of Structuration to legal precedent and literature in order to describe why and explain how passers severed social relations with black American communities in general and, in many instances, with their black families in particular. This analysis of passing on macro, meso, and micro levels ultimately calls the ideological and epistemological foundations of race itself into question.


Voices Underground: Hip Hop as Black Rhetoric

Based on research from my undergraduate thesis at Villanova, in this article I use metaphoric criticism as a framework for a content analysis of underground hip hop lyrics. Findings suggest that finds that form equals argument: that meaning and identity reside in no one place, but reappear often on the surface of quotidian experience.