Oregon Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 14 No. 1 (2019)
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Cover art by Elexus Greene
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Item Open Access “Bannabees,” Bananas, and Sweet Potatoes: Claude McKay’s Songs of Jamaica and Traditional Jamaican Foodways as a Nationalist Expression(University of Oregon, 2019) Hovet, SarahJamaican poet Claude McKay is largely anthologized for a handful of poems he contributed to the Harlem Renaissance, but his early work authored in Jamaica has long been dismissed for a variety of racist and xenophobic reasons. This overlooked material includes his first two poetry collections, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, both authored in Jamaica before he moved to New York. His friend, benefactor, and mentor Walter Jekyll even characterized these early collections as “naive.” However, these two collections, which mix traditional English forms with Jamaican peasant dialect, constitute vital parts of McKay’s oeuvre. Songs of Jamaica in particular exhibits a mastery of Jamaican peasant dialect in combination with extensive allusions to traditional folkways in order to make an anti-colonialist, nationalist assertion about Jamaica, the country McKay so loved. I will analyze the role of Jamaican peasant dialect and foodways in making this nationalist assertion in order to advance my claim that McKay’s early poetry is at least as sophisticated and versatile as his subsequent collections authored in the States. By turns, McKay praises native Jamaican crops such as the banana, sweet potato, and Bonavist bean for their gustatory, nutritional, and economic superiority to crops imported by colonialism.Item Open Access Before the Spectacle: Shaping Gender and Class in Beirut’s Beauty Salons(University of Oregon, 2019) Lollini, Eugenia“Beirut, in the words of one designer, is like a third world city that’s put on some makeup” writes Rima Suqi in the New York Times (2016). Indeed, scholars worldwide have coined Beirut the trendsetting beauty city and nightlife capital of the Middle East. My ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut in July and August 2016 examined the construction of women’s beauty work in salons and how it affected gender and class performances in nightlife venues. Contemporary discourses on the popularity of beauty work and nightlife consumption in Beirut are often explained by the reaction to the Lebanese Civil War, and by postmodern, individualistic attitudes celebrating life, glamour, and living in the moment. However, such assumptions overlook the extent to which social and familial networks constitute women’s bodies in Beirut’s small, interconnected and highly visual upper-middle and upper class society. In my research, I ask: Why are so many young Lebanese women willing to undergo extensive beauty work and engage in opulent nightlife agendas? How do social and familial pressures motivate women’s desire for beauty work? How do women envision and construct gender and class as an outcome of beauty work? How and why do women further class distinctions using beauty work? How do women foster solidarity in the salon space? How do men and women display and perform gender and class in nightlife venues? How do preparation rituals in beauty salons influence women’s performances in nightlife venues and vice versa?Item Open Access Cover Art — “Ancestry”(University of Oregon, 2019) Greene, ElexusAncestry is a representation of being torn between wisdom and desire, where her youth screams for her to be hip, urban, and carefree while her inheritance keeps her grounded and resilient. Her vision has been replaced by the strength of her ancestors, and she is hypnotized by their ancient tongues guiding her through her wrapped hair. This highlights the role heritage, unconsciously, plays in our everyday lives. The uniqueness of the fabriced background and her attire unveils the beauty found within cultural inheritance on all scales. Her inherited wisdom helps her prevail, and make sure she never fails.Item Open Access Guest Editorial — “Obstacles and Opportunities in Undergraduate Research”(University of Oregon, 2019) Keller, VeraA week and a half ago, I turned in a six-hundred-page manuscript to a press for peer review. It began its journey seventeen years ago as my undergraduate thesis. In fact, it is the second book to grow out of my thesis. Who knows how many more will come out of it? I will never be done with my undergraduate research.Item Open Access The Impacts of Increased Heat and Precipitation on Plant Phenology and Demography in Pacific Northwest Prairies(University of Oregon, 2019) Avis, Ben; Ludden, Allie; Mackin, Hunter; Martinez, Andreas; Petitt, Sean; Porter, Elizabeth; Rasmussen, Emma; Steele, MilesThis study seeks to understand the implications that projected climate change will have on the phenology of seven prairie grass and forb species, such as disruptions in species interactions and native biodiversity loss. Data were collected at Willow Creek, an upland prairie in the city of Eugene. To assess the possible effects of climate change on plant survival rate and vigor, the experiment was designed to manipulate temperature and precipitation with four treatments (control, drought, heat, heat plus precipitation), and to measure the phenological and reproductive variables of the planted focal species. Experimental parameters were consistent with average predictions for changes in temperature and precipitation for the area. Phenological, demographic, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data were collected over an eight-week period. This study found warming treatments advance phenology for the forb species Plectritis congesta and Sidalcea malviflora. In addition, the grass species Festuca roemeri was found to have higher spikelet abundance in drought and control treatments, but no significant change to phenology. These results indicate that as temperatures rise with climate change, plant phenologies may shift, potentially reducing the reproductive fitness of certain plants.Item Open Access Letter from the Editor(University of Oregon, 2019) Pearman, Joshua J.Our inspiration to conduct research can come from anywhere. For some, it might be an interesting idea from a lecture, or a unique detail from a research article. For others, it could be an observation of the world around us, whether it is of the behavior of people or the inner workings of nature. Each day we are all struck by this inspiration, as our surroundings are rich with the potential to draw out our latent curiosity. One of the rewarding qualities of research is when we become curious enough to pursue this inspiration, wherever it might take us. The OURJ exists to celebrate this curiosity, as each of these works reflect their author's passion to follow their questions to a logical end.Item Open Access A Monstrous Philosophy of Emotions(University of Oregon, 2019) Currie, LukeThrough an analysis of Søren Kierkegaard’s Diapsalmata from the first volume of Either/Or, a work which exhibits strikingly contemporary ways of thinking, this paper seeks to uncover the complex and paradoxical ways in which emotions inhabit a person. The urge to explicate the complexity of emotions arose from the author’s dissatisfaction with the rudimentary schematic used in daily life wherein emotions are categorized and hastily rationalized, misconstruing their greater complexity. Emotions are often irrational, contradictory, etc., and must be considered on those terms. Thus, concession of paradox is vital in order to think through contradictory states of emotions. An aphorism from Pascal states that we are nothing but “lies, duplicity, and contradiction.” With this idea in mind, the essay proceeds to argue that the use of pseudonyms to create contradictions within Kierkegaard’s Diapsalmata show the Diapsalmata functioning as a “monstrous” philosophy of emotions. What is meant by “monstrous” differs from the colloquial use of the term and the essay’s particular usage is discussed with reference to Socrates and Typhon in Plato’s Phaedrus. The paper claims that Kierkegaard's thought as a whole is “monstrous” in the dissonance of the religious, comedic, ethical, ironic, and aesthetic stages he constructs in his broader philosophy. The monstrous philosophy of emotions developed from the Diapsalmata is argued to have a “prefatory weight” on the question of Being, i.e. “why are there beings instead of nothing?” The way in which different emotions preface this question is briefly discussed. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexity of emotions philosophically.Item Open Access Reconceptualizing Feminist Utopias: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone(University of Oregon, 2019) Tyler, BethanTheories of feminist utopia tend to focus on its presence within science/speculative fiction, upholding works like Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time as exemplars of the genre. Literary critics typically designate this novel’s vision of the future, the community of Mattapoisett, as a source of radical, mobilizing inspiration for feminists. I will argue against this reading by attesting that Mattapoisett presents a regressive model of feminism in its failure to permit women the choice of (traditional) maternity and, moreover, does not sufficiently distance itself from that which is condemned in the novel’s dystopian present – the stripping of women’s reproductive agency. Mattapoisett thus fails to fulfill half of Sally Miller Gearhart’s essential criteria for the identification of feminist utopia. By contrast, I argue that Margaret Drabble’s 1965 novel, The Millstone, presents a radical vision of maternity, as divorced from patriarchy, that aligns with threads of the feminist movement yet to come at the time of its publication, and that this, under Gearhart’s framework, strongly suggests the presence of a feminist utopia. This is striking in that the novel is categorized as a work of realism, rather than science fiction. By revealing the vision of feminism within a speculative fiction novel to be retrograde in comparison with that of a realistic novel, I argue that feminism unyokes realism from the present, thus collapsing boundaries between genres, and making a case for the study of the feminist utopia in realms beyond science fiction.