• North American Studies

“With Sight and Sound” is a case study of early twentieth-century black photography and music in rural Fayette County, Alabama. At the time, rural black southerners engaged in myriad forms of creative expression and contributed to a number of national aesthetic and cultural movements. Yet, prevailing historical narratives still fail to accurately portray the breadth and diversity of black cultural production in the southern countryside. This dissertation addresses this shortcoming by examining four understudied types of cultural production—photography, pre-jazz brass band music, Dr. Watts singing, and shape-note singing. In doing so, “With Sight and Sound” argues that African Americans in Fayette County used these creative forms to craft local cultures, enhance community life, and critique the dominant ideologies that bolstered the region’s racial oppression. By addressing both photography and music, this project unpacks the intermedial nature of these expressive modes, exploring how pictures and songs were used in concert to reiterate particular themes and convey pointed counterhegemonic and race-conscious messages. This study draws insight from sources that include photographs, songbooks, interviews, and written archival records. Its primary visual archive is a collection of over 800 photographs produced by the family of Mitch and Geneva Shackelford, who were black landholding farmers and commercial portrait photographers living in Fayette County. A range of interdisciplinary methods are used to analyze this project’s myriad sources, including archival research, textual analysis, and ethnography.

This dissertation explores the textual, contextual, and conceptual convergences of two pioneers of the Black radical tradition: Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Their generic experimentation in biography, autobiography, and speculative fiction reveals their near-simultaneous development of an analysis of race as a social category rooted in ideology, not biology. Although they never directly collaborated in their work as historians, fiction-writers, or public intellectuals, I make my own speculative leap, situating Hopkins and Du Bois as partners in a shared revisionist project aimed at countering racial ideology and white supremacist propaganda. During Hopkins’s tenure as literary editor for the Colored American Magazine from 1900-1904, she drew on her early experiences as an actress and playwright to appeal to a popular readership. Under her own name and various pseudonyms, Hopkins contributed biographies, polemical essays, and magazine novels aimed at radicalizing her multi-racial audience and promoting a materialist analysis of racial ideologies. Despite her profound impact within the Black radical milieux, especially through her writings on John Brown, she remained a relatively marginal figure for much of the twentieth century. This same period coincided with a radicalization of Du Bois, a shift away from his academic project as a social scientist and toward a public intellectual role. In tandem with Hopkins, Du Bois developed his own materialist approach to questions of race and political economy, first proposed in his 1905 essay, “Sociology Hesitant,” and worked through in his biography of John Brown (1909). Both writers later mine the vein of materialist historiography via their own speculative and revisionist fiction. This is a study best characterized as the biography of two race leaders, a race man and race woman, working toward parallel race concepts.

This dissertation traces U.S. higher education’s contemporary ‘diversity problem’ to 1865 and the racialized and gendered notions of the public good, social mobility, citizenship, and self-determination that rose in the aftermath of Emancipation. It brings together theoretical and methodological tools from ethnic studies, cultural studies, critical gender studies, and feminist geography to examine higher education as a site of contest in the black freedom struggle, arguing that the modern landscape of U.S. higher education is fundamentally shaped by white ‘architects’ responding to the pedagogical and geographic innovations of black radical traditions. In the opening chapter I study the history of a vocational institute for black Southerners and demonstrate that education had been a crucial element of the ‘rival geographies’ created by the enslaved, but after 1865 became a technology of enclosure, tying socially mobile black workers to underdeveloped rural areas and respectably gendered occupations. The second chapter looks at the history of a 100-year old community college in Chicago. By tracking changes in the demographics of the neighborhood it serves and relating these to changes in the college’s form and function, I demonstrate how modern U.S. notions of the public good are always-already racialized, while arguing for a defense of the community service pedagogy championed by black neighborhood organizers. In chapter 3 I examine the institutionalization of a student-created ‘Third Worldist’ college in California to illuminate how universities can mold students’ thinking about race and racism away from global political and economic structures to personal identities and individual trauma. The final chapter considers the emergence of an ostensibly color-blind, progressive-minded neoliberalism in the rise of ‘leadership development programs’ like Teach For America. I demonstrate that despite the best intentions of participants, such programs further the criminalization of urban spaces while using the language of civil rights to insinuate the privatization of public services. Throughout I demonstrate how higher education has articulated academic and common sense notions of race, space, and belonging in what I call racial-spatial pedagogies, descriptive and prescriptive theories describing racial difference and how that difference fits in the larger body politic.

IN APRIL 1975 AT THE BICENTENNIAL WORLD REGIONAL CONFERENCE held in Salzburg, Austria an incident happened that startled all those present and underscored the political nature of American Studies. Scholars had gathered from most European countries, the United States, and Israel to discuss the impact of the United States and Europe on each other. The meetings were held at the Schloss Leopoldskron, an elegant eighteeenth-century rococo palace, home of the Salzburg Seminar, but perhaps more famous for its role in the movie version of The Sound of Music. After the opening banquet, Gordon Wood of Brown University was in the middle of reading a carefully crafted paper on republicanism and the American place in the world, when Andrew Sinclair of Great Britain rose noisily from his chair to denounce Wood's "sad and terrible words" and to attack the American presence in Southeast Asia and in Europe. Then he stomped out of the hall. After a few moments of embarrassed and stunned silence, Wood finished his address. Sinclair's outburst (for which he apologized the next day) was related to the particular world situation in 1975 that found the United States at perhaps its lowest reputation at any point in the twentieth century, even among American Studies scholars.' At another conference in Washington the next year, Eqbal Ahmad of Pakistan denounced Henry Kissinger as a war criminal who ought to be tried for his crimes

У статті розглядається політологічний дискурс української американістики. Автор здійснює аналіз наукових визначень американістики, аналізує еволюцію української американістики, виявляє основні напрямки політологічних досліджень українських американістів та робить висновок, що входження України в глобалізаційний простір потребує не лише теоретичної рефлексії, але й підвищення впливу політологічного дискурсу на когнітивну сферу громадськості та його входження в свідомість української громадськості. The article considers the discourse of political science Ukrainian American Studies. The author analyzes the definitions of American Studies, analyzes the evolution of Ukrainian American studies, identifies the main directions of Ukrainian Political Studies, American Studies, and concludes that Ukraine's entry into the space of globalization requires not only theoretical reflection, but also increase the influence of political science discourse on cognition and his public entry into the consciousness of Ukrainian public Тихомирова Євгенія Борисівна - доктор політичних наук, професор, завідувач кафедри міжнародної інформації Волинського національного університету імені Лесі Українки

My dissertation project has as its focus the doubled problem of darkness: i.e., as the darkness of sin and the darkness of the skin. In it, I introduce a descriptive concept: the Dark Mask, inspired by my readings of Frantz Fanon (white masks), W. E. B. Du Bois (double consciousness), and Emilie Townes (fantastic hegemonic imagination), which intends to solve for the problem of the inescapability of material darkness and the ill treatment that attends it. The dissertation is an exploration over three centuries of the problem of a skin that functions, not only, as Fanon's titular phrase suggests, as a black skin one ironically seeks to cover, but also as a mask in its own right-a dark mask that can never be removed. Using the concept of the Dark Mask, I challenge the division between material darkness - e.g., the darkness embodied by black Americans - and conceptions of darkness, which, I argue, inform our treatment of those who provide material reference for its negative conceptions, i.e., darkness as bad, evil, wrong, terrifying, etc. In short, black lives do matter. And it is their mattering so deeply as black to the sustenance of our moral consciousness as a nation that prevents them from mattering as they ought to, as human lives of infinite value. In examining this moral commodification of blackness, I write about the ways that the Dark Mask works to create and sustain its valuable counterpart, the White Mask, which is perhaps the main aim (however subconscious) of the stereotyped identity demanded from darker-skinned Americans. In order to get a closer look at the trajectory of this association in America, I have chosen primary cultural artifacts from select moments in US history. I begin my exploration of the use of dark, darkness, and black in Mather's 17th century text The Wonders of the Invisible World, written at the height of the Salem witchcraft scare of 1692. My second chapter treats Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, with an emphasis on Stowe's use of the demonic child Topsy, and introduces the problems of a salvation that is dependent on the perceived cultural and physical trappings of whiteness. I am now working on my third and final body chapter, which considers the theological and social significance of lynching: ritualized violence and the dark scapegoat. My chosen texts for this section include Thomas Dixon's The Clansman and D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1911). The central aim of this section is to show the ways in which the ritual of lynching, and its representation are facilitated by and even demanded by our dark/black=demonic, light/white=angelic dichotomy. I believe that a focused exploration of the history of associations of darkness with sinfulness, wretchedness, and evil in America may produce one of the keys to the mysteries attending the unjust and vile treatment of darker-skinned peoples well beyond any fault of their own, and the abject fear and madness that often characterizes violent, abusive, and otherwise exploitative actions taken against those with dark skin-who, as a result, wear Dark Masks. Finally, I hope this line of inquiry might provide another approach to the puzzle of why adherence to the codes demanded by respectability politics has not and never will be enough to earn the safety and life chances of millions of human beings.

This dissertation examines the way in which funk music, in the context of twentieth century African American literature, operates as a means of stimulating the sensorium. Funk, narrowly defined as a musical form, once carried negative connotations. Whether understood as depression, a genre of popular music, an odor, or as a euphemism for sex, the genre is concerned with attitude and visible emotions. Much work has been done in the field of African American literature regarding jazz and blues, and studies of hip-hop are gaining traction. Funk, however, has not fulfilled its potential for investigating its affect of musical performance or its connection to narratives. This project is an examination of the aesthetics of this musical form, which will generate more nuanced readings of musical and literary narratives of the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of sound and its sensorial variants. I examine the function of music in a literary text as opposed to how it is described.Funk operates as a link between the jazz- and blues-inspired poetry and novels of the early twentieth century on the one hand and the emergence of "urban," "street," or "hip-hop" narratives on the other. Its artistic intervention in social relationships brings the aesthetic and political into conversation. I argue against the binary differentiating "serious" and "popular" musical forms; funk bridges the gap between these two designations in an important context, which creates a sonic and social space to examine the idea of difference both in terms of the general and the specific. A misconception of "sameness" is the site of theoretical and ontological difference or disruption. Funk's ability to disrupt resides in its paradoxical nature. Rhythmically, the musical genre departs from soul of the 1960s and is fundamental to the development of hip-hop in the late-1970s and early 1980s. Though rooted in distinct rhythmic patterns, Funk seeks to dismantle conceptions of rhythmic expectation and production common in popular music by pushing back against previously popular forms. Prior to Funk's popularity, most musical forms ranging from jazz to rock and roll emphasized the second and fourth beats in a measure. Funk compositions typically emphasize the first and third beats, which changes the momentum of the music. Though it is a genre geared towards dance and therefore rooted in the body and movement, Funk gravitates towards transcending the physical limits of the body by addressing discourses of sensorial perception. Funk (both as a musical genre and an aesthetic) is something of sensory ensemble--each sense a part of the whole, complex experience. The five senses are brought together in an all-out attack on what hegemony comes to represent. Each chapter presents a different mode of assault on the body's ability to process the sensorium. I demonstrate the way Funk disrupts through a fusion of ethnomusicology, socio-cultural analysis, and literary criticism in the act of reading, hearing, watching, smelling, and tasting musical performances, cultural events, and works of literature.

This dissertation traces U.S. higher education’s contemporary ‘diversity problem’ to 1865 and the racialized and gendered notions of the public good, social mobility, citizenship, and self-determination that rose in the aftermath of Emancipation. It brings together theoretical and methodological tools from ethnic studies, cultural studies, critical gender studies, and feminist geography to examine higher education as a site of contest in the black freedom struggle, arguing that the modern landscape of U.S. higher education is fundamentally shaped by white ‘architects’ responding to the pedagogical and geographic innovations of black radical traditions. In the opening chapter I study the history of a vocational institute for black Southerners and demonstrate that education had been a crucial element of the ‘rival geographies’ created by the enslaved, but after 1865 became a technology of enclosure, tying socially mobile black workers to underdeveloped rural areas and respectably gendered occupations. The second chapter looks at the history of a 100-year old community college in Chicago. By tracking changes in the demographics of the neighborhood it serves and relating these to changes in the college’s form and function, I demonstrate how modern U.S. notions of the public good are always-already racialized, while arguing for a defense of the community service pedagogy championed by black neighborhood organizers. In chapter 3 I examine the institutionalization of a student-created ‘Third Worldist’ college in California to illuminate how universities can mold students’ thinking about race and racism away from global political and economic structures to personal identities and individual trauma. The final chapter considers the emergence of an ostensibly color-blind, progressive-minded neoliberalism in the rise of ‘leadership development programs’ like Teach For America. I demonstrate that despite the best intentions of participants, such programs further the criminalization of urban spaces while using the language of civil rights to insinuate the privatization of public services. Throughout I demonstrate how higher education has articulated academic and common sense notions of race, space, and belonging in what I call racial-spatial pedagogies, descriptive and prescriptive theories describing racial difference and how that difference fits in the larger body politic.

This dissertation seeks to expand our conception of what constitutes Native American letters by examining how the periodical became a prominent form in Native American literary production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its focus on the boarding school, Writing against Erasure provides insight into the context in which students first learned how to make complex and sophisticated choices in print. Within the contested disciplinary space of the boarding school, the periodical press functioned as a site for competing discourses on assimilation. Whereas school authorities used the white-run school newspapers to publicize their programs of cultural erasure, students used the student-run school newspapers to defend and preserve Native American identity and culture in the face of the assimilationist imperatives of the boarding schools and the dominant culture. Writing against Erasure highlights the formative impact of students' experiences with the boarding school press on the periodical practices and rhetorical strategies of two well-known Native American literary figures, Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman. By treating the periodical writings of these two prominent boarding school graduates alongside the periodical writings produced by boarding school students while they were still at school, Writing against Erasure provides a literary genealogy that reveals important continuities between these writers' strategic and political uses of the periodical press. Writing against Erasure argues that Native American boarding school students and graduates used the periodical press not to promote the interests of school authorities as some scholars have argued, but rather to preserve their cultural traditions, to speak out on behalf of indigenous interests, and to form a pan-Indian community at the turn of the twentieth century.

Reorienting Asian America: Racial Feeling in a Multicultural Era argues that the cultural contradictions of multiculturalism, colorblindness, and global capitalism have caused an unprecedented shift in the distribution of gendered racial privilege in the U.S. This shift has revealed the need for scholars to adapt how we conceptualize race and racial categories, which are always dynamic and in flux. I develop ���racial feeling��� as an affective method through which to read structures of racial formation emergent in the cultural productions of the present alongside those structures that have already crystallized into acknowledged fact. In particular, I argue that the core tropes and definitions of Asian American culture cohered by Asian American Studies only partially capture -- and sometimes actively obscure -- the complex meaning and meaning-making capacities of Asian America, both historically and in the present. ��� In the first section of the dissertation, I trace the historical emergence of Asian American Studies literary methods, arguing that they are embedded both in demographics that no longer reflect current Asian American populations, and a specific politics of revolt and difference that no longer translate in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. I do this in Chapter 1 by reading the history and development of Flower Drum Song -- from a 1958 novel to a 2002 Broadway revival -- in the context of Asian American Studies��� institutionalization. In the second part of the dissertation, I argue that contemporary political and economic catalysts -- including the War on Terror, the rise of state-sponsored capital in Asia, and the global spread of neoliberal multiculturalism -- have fundamentally shifted the meaning, and meaning-making capacities, of ���Asian America��� -- and therefore, the methods we use to capture and diagnose that meaning must also transform. The second and third chapters read Chang-rae Lee���s 2004 novel, Aloft, and Tao Lin���s 2013 novel, Taipei, in order to diagnose the ways in which contemporary Asian American literature simultaneously fulfills and exceeds the expectations and assumptions encoded in Asian American literary reading practices. Throughout these chapters, I argue that these novels generate multicultural and flexible visions of Asian American identity, which challenge settled assumptions built into the very language of Asian American racial formation and feeling. Finally, Chapter Four, ���Enemy Combatants,��� reads the ���Torture Memos,��� a series of legal memos written by Korean American lawyer John Yoo for George W. Bush���s cabinet to justify indefinite detention and torture at the start of the War on Terror, as intellectually parallel to Asian American Studies. That is, through archival research on Yoo���s education at Harvard and close readings of the memos, I argue that the memos share intellectual grounds with the field of Asian American Studies, and even deploy similar strategies of contradiction, nonresolution and difference to do their racial work. That Yoo does so to such radically different political aims than Asian American Studies unsettles programmatic assumptions in the field about its own key tropes. ��� Reading this diverse archive of Asian American cultural production -- including drama, literature, and legal discourse -- I argue that these cultural productions should not be disavowed; instead, they should be read as part of, or even central to, Asian American culture. Racial feeling, as a method, is one way that is one way Asian American Studies can reorient in order to better account for the meaning and function of Asian American culture as it transforms in the shadow of global capital and neoliberal multiculturalism. More broadly, racial feeling allows scholars to unearth the embryonic social cleavages and procedures we do not yet -- but might soon -- call ���race��� as it unfolds throughout the 21st century.