Honors Program
Midway Honors
Date of Award
5-2021
Thesis Professor(s)
Mark D. Baumgartner
Thesis Professor Department
Literature and Language
Abstract
This creative project’s ambition is to craft an original novel called The Dreams of Metanoia: The Advent Foreigner. The Dreams of Metanoia is initially influenced by The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a true narrative by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta and her family were subjected to Jim Crow scientific racism. Henrietta, a black woman with cervical cancer, had her cells removed and cultivated by John Hopkins doctors without any consent. The doctors discovered that Henrietta’s cells continued to divide relentlessly outside her body. They then sold them to other researchers without their knowledge. However, the gap in literature occurs within a mysterious hallucination that happened within the nonfiction narrative. Henrietta’s cousin, Hector Henry, had a hallucination that may be connected to the obscure Philippine-American War and Filipino Folklore. The Philippine-American War was a somber conflict of racism and white American imperialism from 1899-1902. It is a war shrouded from most American textbooks; it was a war that tested American soldier’s ethical morality and allegiance to a 20th century Jim Crow United States. It is a war where enemies found a common strife within their woes. Because of how unknown these narratives are in today’s racial and politically divided world, it is essential to review and learn from these tragedies that united races as humans rather than individual racial identities. This research aims to repurpose these narratives to craft an original story relevant to modern America’s racial strife. Thus, The Dreams of Metanoia: The Advent Foreigner is an original piece that seeks to find the intersectionality in the meaning of being human.
Publisher
East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Withheld
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Keith, Zackary, "The Dreams of Metanoia: The Advent Foreigner: A Creative Thesis Based on a True Narrative of the Forgotten American War of Racist Imperialism" (2021). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 630. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/630
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.