Columbia Undergraduate Research Journal

Letter from the Editor 2022

2022-05-02T23:32:20+00:00

Letter from the Editor 2022

"Playing Back the Dissonances": The Battle of Manassas in Context

2022-02-24T15:28:44+00:00

Before every performance, enslaved pianist-composer Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins would introduce his Battle of Manassas as a programmatic depiction of the titular Confederate victory. With sharply juxtaposed fragments of Northern and Southern tunes, along with drum motifs, bugle calls, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and vocal enactments of trains and whistles—all continually interrupted by sudden “cannon fire” in the left hand—Wiggins would finish the piece shouting “Retreat! Retreat! Retreat!” at the top of his lungs before leaving two irreverent slams of the keys to reverberate throughout the hall. Famous for his lifelong ability to perfectly imitate any music, noise, or speech he heard, Wiggins amazed his audiences for decades claiming to represent Manassas’s events exactly as he heard them described to him. But over 150 years after its premiere, scholars have tended to detect a sense of irony, if not total subversion, in the enslaved pianist’s chaotic Confederate homage. My research considers recent interpretations of the piece with an eye toward its compositional circumstances, including its supposed timeline, its printed foreword’s odd reversal of an anthem’s Southern affiliation, and its likely response to a contemporaneous battle piece by Northern pianist-composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

“Besides the Bread, Everyone Speaks Tibetan”: A Portrait of the Tibetan Occupational Link to Farmers Markets in New York City

2022-02-23T22:34:11+00:00

This paper explores farmers markets as significant sites of employment, language use, and cultural expression for Tibetan speakers living in New York City. Farmers markets serve as a labor niche for the large Tibetan speaking migrant community in the city, yet this niche has been largely unnamed in discussions of Himalayan New York and in discussions of immigrant labor patterns in general. Guided by ethnographic research and first-hand interviews, this paper seeks to investigate the occupational link between farmers markets and Tibetan speakers in NYC – how this niche developed and is sustained, how employee values and the employment environment inform and aid this connection, and how Tibetan language and tradition manifest within the farmers market sphere. Ultimately, this paper conceptualizes farmers markets as spaces of community beyond labor. A seemingly simple employment pattern is in fact an extensive microcosm of Tibetan community spanning five boroughs and over fifty farmers markets, aiding linguistic and cultural preservation as well as exchange for Tibetan speakers across New York City.

“What stands out to you at first glance?”

2022-03-17T23:10:33+00:00

During the Fall of 2021, I conducted seven structured interviews with Barnard College students to explore patterns of reception of selections of the work of Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, Elia Alba, and Ana Mendieta. This paper analyzes how the comments made by participants expanded, limited, or did not impact the “imagination” of boundaries of identification. The work of Pierre Bourdieu and David Halle and their perspectives on reception as a means for understanding the production of culture is relevant to my findings. While developing this study and my analysis, the work of Bettina Love, Sarah Lawerence-Lightfoot, and bell hooks has been particularly inspiring. Ultimately my conclusion is that the method and findings serve as grounds for arguing that “isolation, identification and imagination” could serve as a pedagogical tool for teaching and working through the “social” nature of systems of power and oppression that exist in the USA with youth of various ages and backgrounds.

A History of Menstrual Injustice

2022-02-08T21:30:52+00:00

Abstract

This research paper lies at the intersection of criminal justice, human rights, public health, and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Written for the 2021 Barnard major track History of the Present, this paper details the contemporary history of American mass incarceration as well as exposes the blatant human rights injustices and health concerns of the experience of carceral menstruation. As women's incarceration, and Black women's incarceration in particular, has increased more than any other demographic in recent years, menstruation behind bars has become a pertinent and absolutely necessary experience to discuss and improve. Abhorrent policies in jails and prisons have forced upon prisoners with periods highly unsanitary and unjust menstruation experiences, an example of the prison industrial complex's blatant and inhumane disregard for bodily autonomy.