Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Haunting Aesthetics Of Empire: Filipinx America, Us Empire, And Cultural Production, Alana J. Bock

American Studies ETDs

Throughout this dissertation, I argue that US imperial knowledge production affirms US exceptionalism by disavowing the imperial violence wrought on the Philippines and its people. This disavowal not only renders the Philippines and Filipinx bodies illegible, but also haunts the Filipinx American diaspora. I argue that the haunted logics of empire are a set of relations, rather than specters of specific times and places, in which knowledge and power work together to continually produce and reproduce a specific and limiting reality and sensorium through which to view the world. In my interrogation of empire’s haunted logics, I not only look …

Technologies Of Territoriality: Indigeneity, Surveillance, And The State, Elspeth Iralu

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the global spatial surveillance of Indigenous peoples, nations, and territories in the twenty-first century through a multi-site relational analysis of colonial surveillance and Indigenous cartography in the United States, India, and Palestine. Analyzing Indigenous graphic novels, video games, virtual reality, performance protests, and visual art, I demonstrate how air and the aerial perspective actively shape what happens on and below the ground. I argue that Indigenous experiences of and responses to colonial and counterinsurgent surveillance are not limited by the geographic and legal bounds of nation-states but are rather linked through global histories of militarization and colonialism. …

Subject Disintegration: Identity And Alterity In The Age Of The Hyperreal, Sophie Ell

American Studies ETDs

What do the signs “identity” and “alterity” point to within the economy of representation and the logic of simulation that govern the present era? How does the visual saturation of a screen-mediated life affect the study of identity? Where does the information overload within which we operate leave the production of knowledge about otherness? My goal in this project is not to resolve these questions, but rather to linger in them. Focusing on various portrayals of categorical identities in film, photography, and digital media, I utilize a semiotic analysis to examine the formulaic, repetitive maneuvers of signification practices that reproduce …

Health And Revolution: Anarchist Biopolitics In The Borderlands, Benjamin H. Abbott

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines classical anarchist discourse on gender, race, and sexuality via the lenses of disability justice, reproductive justice, and queer Indigenous feminism. I argue that eugenics was key to how anarchists in the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and their comrades conceived of political collectivity. Popular notions of scarcity and survival of the fittest, imbued with scientific authority, structured thought at the time. Anarchists, like other anticapitalist radicals, advocated for their cause within this framework, frequently asserting how revolution would lead to a stronger society and denigrating those imagined as weak. I attend especially to the contrast between how PLM …

Imperial Myths, Abject Devotion: Mapping Affect In New Mexican Visual Culture And Discourse, N. C. Lira-Pérez

American Studies ETDs

New Mexican visual art and culture, as molded by state-sanctioned endeavors, is often casted in order to conceal the tension, conflict, and violence of settler colonialism and imperialism. Widely known myths of empire, such as the Tricultural myth, create a visualizing enterprise through which settler colonial logics transit and create political material reality. This thesis explores the following questions: How do New Mexican Hispanos and queer Chicanxs position themselves in relation to the logics of settler colonialism and empire? How are they positioned in relation to settler colonialism and empire? On the one hand, I argue that the state of …

Danzantes Aztecas Y Promotoras Tradicionales: The Ritual Performances And Identity Politics Of A Mexican American Danzantes Aztecas Y Promotoras Tradicionales: The Ritual Performances And Identity Politics Of A Mexican American Ceremonial Community, Dina K. Barajas

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation is an ethnographic study which examined the ritual performances of an interconnected Mexican American and Mexican immigrant danza Azteca and curanderismo ceremonial community located in central and northern New Mexico, and central México. This project also explored if and how these rituals recognize the practitioners’ indigeneity. As a Mexican American and Native scholar and ceremonial participant of this community, I provided an “insider’s” understanding of the epistemologies and ontologies that inform these ceremonies. My positionality and methodology acted as a lens to critically examine danzantes’ and promotoras tradicionales’ claims of indigeneity. Importantly, this work provides a fluid conceptualization …

“Pre-Packaged Sovereignty”: The Fallacy Of Indian Self-Determination In The Bureau Of Indian Affairs (Bia) Tribal Social Services Programs, April K. Chavez

American Studies ETDs

This thesis examines the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) tribal social services programs in New Mexico Native reservation communities. I rely on interviews with current/former BIA social workers and administrators to contextualize my analysis, while revealing the limits of existing social work scholarship and offering recommendations for future scholarship and community work. Using critical Indigenous studies and feminisms along with critical social work, I advance two primary arguments. The first is, despite the so-called self-determination era, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) functions as a settler colonial administration that diminishes tribal sovereignty and perpetuates racist and gendered violence. The capacity …

Contesting Historical Enchantment: Militarized Settler Colonialism And Refugee Resettlement In New Mexico, Christina Juhasz-Wood

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary critical study of refugee resettlement to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I argue that refugee resettlement to the United States cannot be understood separately from the ongoing structure of settler colonialism. I analyze Albuquerque’s post-WWII militarized settlement as a settler colonial process of extraction and suburbanization that depended on Native labor and resources to fuel the growing nuclear weapons program. Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base played a role not only in displacing and thus producing refugees during the Vietnam War but also in marking Albuquerque as a distinctly militarized geography to which they were resettled. Thousands of …

Nubians Of Plutonia: Black Women In Modern Post-Apocalyptic And Dystopian Graphic Literature, Marthia D. Fuller

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation explores the deployment of race and gender in comic books and graphic novels, paying close attention to how Black womanhood and girlhood operates in the speculative future. This project suggests that the framing of black womanhood and girlhood in post-apocalyptic/dystopian spaces provide a counter to the normative notions of both while simultaneously using normative tropes of Black womanhood and girlhood to produce new ways of understanding Black femininity in the future. Nubians of Plutonia use Black feminist cultural criticisms, Black popular culture, and visual culture to ask: does graphic literature present new, more dynamic understandings of race and …

(SīˈTĭng) Detroit: Vision And Dispossession In A Midwest Bordertown, Matthew J. Irwin

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the relationality of dispossession, racialization, and migration in Detroit, connecting the neoliberal rationality of (re)development to its foundations in Indigenous dispossession and racialized labor. “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit” understands Detroit as a bordertown, where “the border” is the organizing structure and condition for the operation of settler colonialism in Detroit. From the international boundary to the county line, the border is the on-the-ground, everyday method for controlling space, disciplining populations, and limiting mobility for racialized subjects. To examine possession and belonging in a Black city on an international border, this dissertation introduces a “(sīˈtĭng)” — a methodology for locating …

No Longer Fenced Out: Outlaw Media Discourse And Resistance To Gentrification In Greenwich Village, Joseph Francis Gallegos

American Studies ETDs

Greenwich Village is a so-called “gayborhood” that accepts and welcomes LGBT people. However, Greenwich Village has been undergoing gentrification for the past few decades, and this process exists due to a police-created order of violence that subjugates and displaces queer people and people of color. This order seeks to create a space that is friendly to capital and wealth.

Resistance to these strategies requires tactics that do not necessarily hew to mainstream methods of getting a message out, such as using mainstream media to make a case against gentrification. These often fail, as they will fall on deaf ears of …

#Abolishice: An Anti-Capitalist And Anti-Colonial Approach To Black, Indigenous, And Migrant Solidarity Building, Cecilia Frescas-Ortiz

American Studies ETDs

This thesis project interrogates possible sites of alignment and solidarity building between the migrant justice movement, Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization. By first looking at the use of tear gas in Ferguson, Standing Rock and at the U.S.-Mexico border, I argue that a solidarity between Black, Indigenous and migrant communities rooted in an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial desire is absolutely necessary. Moreover, by focusing primarily on the migrant justice movement, I argue that the current iterations centered on inclusion and recognition reinforce the State’s dominion over bodies of color and exacerbate Black death and Indigenous genocide. As such, this thesis proposes …

Unsettling Indian Health Services: Secularism, Modern Medicine, & The Reproduction Of The U.S. Settler State Through The 1954 Transfer Act, Jillian Elizabeth Grisel

American Studies ETDs

This thesis takes up the role of secularism in modern medicine as a political doctrine that works in service of settler colonialism. I argue the Declaration of Human Rights and the World Health Organization (WHO) globally institutionalized secular ideologies in the post-World War II environment. This thesis links how this global reordering came to inform U.S. health policy by examining how government officials and medical experts drew from the WHO and framed infectious diseases as a security issue to impose a biomedical order in Indian country. By contextualizing modern medicine within a settler political economy and secular political doctrine, I …

Cartographies Of Precarity: The Cultural Politics Of Filipina And Mexican Migrant Domestic Workers, Maria Eugenia Lopez-Garcia

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of migrant domestic work in the 2000s within popular culture, mass media, contemporary art, and grassroots national organizing. While scholars and activists have identified that migrant domestic workers are the hidden backbone of the U.S. economy, dominant cultural and social narratives reinforce the racialized and gendered logics of capitalism that work to devalue domestic work as informal, disposable and precarious. It was not until after the struggle of domestic workers achieved recognition through the ratification of the International Labor Office of Convention 189 in July 2011 that this labor sector gained more intense media …

More Than A Fiesta: Cinco De Mayo Celebrations And The Transboundary Link In Ambos Nogales, Kristen S. Valencia

American Studies ETDs

In a contemporary context, the United States-Mexico border raises concerns regarding undocumented migration, drug and human trafficking, and cartel or gang violence. While these are material realities that come, at times, with grave consequences and outcomes, they are not the only characteristics or facets of the border region. The intention of the border is to delineate and separate, however, this ignores the stationary communities along the territorial demarcation which interact with and demonstrate the fluidity of life at the line. Transboundariness, as defined by Lawrence A. Herzog, provides the framework with which to examine cross-boundary connections that result from economic …

Immigration/Migration And Settler Colonialism: Doing Critical Ethnic Studies On The U.S. - Mexico Border, Raquel A. Madrigal

American Studies ETDs

My dissertation argues that the U.S.-Mexico border, and the militarized operations of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security via Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement along the border, including state and federal anti-immigration law, are historically ongoing settler colonial structures of U.S. imperialism, and empire, which are asserted upon, and over Indigenous people and their land. I claim that these anti-immigrant, and anti-migrant structures and operations perpetuate Native dispossession, and removal, as well as deny Native presence and sovereignty. I also contend that undocumented immigrant and migrant justice must be accountable and responsible to Indigenous peoples, their land, and …

Living The Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, And Culture, Trisha Venisa Martinez

American Studies ETDs

Living the Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, and Culture is an ethnographic interdisciplinary study that draws upon the voices of Manitos, or Hispanic New Mexicans, and experiences of migration from Northern New Mexico into Wyoming from late 19th century to the present. This project exemplifies how consciousness or a heightened sense of awareness derives from the value system of querencia or how one establishes a sense of self and community through place. I argue the cultural landscape of a person’s place of origin injects a set of values and distinct qualities that create a strong sense of identity, enable community, …

(Re)Insurgent Ecologies: Dwelling Together Between Queasy Worlds, Kirsten E. Mundt

American Studies ETDs

Discourses that construct the “self” as something to be fixed, or made whole, chart a retreat from relational ecosystems back to the individual, reinforcing colonial politics rooted in bounded individualism. This project animates an ontological, relational framework that, in detaching from liberal humanist discourses of healing and “self,” makes affective links from autopoietic frameworks for healing and survival to de-colonial, sympoieitic concerns for expanded kinship. New meanings and attachments are forged within queasy border zones of incommensurability, toggling between the particular and the universal, between desires for solidarity and recognition that colonial violences continue to be unequally distributed and borne. …

Exploration, Disruption, Diaspora: Movement Of Nuevomexicanos To Utah, 1776-1850, Linda C. Eleshuk Roybal

American Studies ETDs

ABSTRACT

Nuevomexicano villages of northern New Mexico have experienced disruptions throughout their existence. This dissertation is a study of what occurred in early disruptions leading to the great departure of the 1940s, during World War II and immediately following, known as the New Mexico diaspora, where a number of villagers moved out of New Mexico to other states, including Utah, most expecting to settle for a time with hopes of return to their home villages. The study asks what happened especially during the great disruption, discourses of disruption and movement, what Nuevomexicanos carried with them in movement, whether they returned …

Gifts Of Sovereignty: Settler Colonial Capitalism And The Kanaka ʻŌiwi Politics Of Ea, David UahikeaikaleiʻOhu Maile

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines Hawaiian sovereignty in history, law, and activism. The project tracks Indigenous claims, negotiations, and articulations of sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Using a critically Indigenous approach to Hawaiian studies, I advance two main theses. First, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) are discussed as a community divided on Hawaiian sovereignty. However, I contend that Kānaka Maoli exercise a diversity of strategies and tactics for Hawaiian sovereignty. I show how Kānaka Maoli practice multiple modalities of sovereignty that cumulatively produce the Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Indigenous Hawaiian) politics of ea (life and sovereignty). Second, the historical development of settler colonial capitalism operationalized the US …

Tangibility And Symbolism Along Historic Highway 66 In Albuquerque, Donatella Davanzo

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary exploration of Highway 66 heritage in order to understand what makes the historic American route distinctive in the contemporary capitalist scenario. Although deterioration of the road is evident, it continues to epitomize an historic American infrastructure as well as a fascinating conceptualization of the United States in the American imagination and in the international consciousness. Historical evidence indicates that the formation of Highway 66 largely depended on a conjuncture of political, cultural, and socio-economic factors under capitalism and institutional forces and ideological principles of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism. As an incarnation of these relationships …

The Territorial Politics Of The New York Botanical Garden, 1891-1912, Carolyn Mcsherry

American Studies ETDs

In 1891 fifty-four of New York’s wealthiest speculators came together to incorporate a new botanical garden for their city. This dissertation examines the political work of the New York Botanical Garden during its founding decades to extend the expansionist capacity of botanical science, while addressing political problems endemic in New York. The Garden served as a vehicle for transcribing landscape meaning steeped in European traditions of colonialism, into a new American context defined by plebiscitary rhetoric, territorial dispossession and instability of tenure in land, social rifts and oppressions. It tells the story of how a landed elite in New York …

Little Red Riding Hood In The Dialogic Tension Of Wolf Politics In The U.S. West, Kaisa T. Lappalainen

American Studies ETDs

The reintroduction of wolves opened a new chapter in the story of wolves in the U.S. West. But what the conservation community considers moral progress, welcoming the once violently eradicated wolves as an important part of a healthy ecosystem, those opposing wolf restoration consider their return a decivilizing, regressive move back to a by-gone era. In the contentious discourse over wolf politics, the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood is used as a common metaphor; its prevalence and persistence in this discourse indicates that more than an innocuous children’s bedtime story is in question.

To examine the potential cultural …

Transgender Murder Memorials: A Call For Intersectionality And Trans Livability, Lazarus Nance Letcher

American Studies ETDs

The number of transgender folks in the United States lost to murder increases every year. These murders have recently gained more recognition, with the memorials moving from trans-run organizations and communities to mainstream LGBTQ groups. Using visual culture and discourse analysis of four transgender murder memorials, I argue there are problematic trends of centering a white and cisgender audience, and lack of acknowledging trans livability. Memorials like Transgender Day of Remembrance take place every year, and though the oldest memorial for trans death in the country and most well known, the event creates a spectacle of violence for cisgender consumption …

The Heart Of K'E: Transforming Dine Special Education And Unsettling The Colonial Logics Of Disability, Sandra Yellowhorse

American Studies ETDs

This paper takes up the roles of ideology and spatiality as they impact Diné students and learners in understanding conceptions of normativity, neuro-diversity and bodily variance. I am concerned with how the movement and creation of Indigenous schools and their praxis still maintain and often times produce settler colonial ideologies of being, personhood, difference and ability. I illustrate the challenges that Diné planners and educators face in entrenching cultural knowledge and language into their educational initiatives, while some of the problematic manifestations and expressions of normativity present themselves through state polices, federal law and mainstream curriculum.

I focus on the …

(Dis)Appearing Subjects: Managing Violence Through The Discourse Of Bullying, Rachel E. Levitt

American Studies ETDs

In the early 2000’s, “bullying” became the new center of LGBTQ justice organizing. As part of this development a bullied subject emerged. This bullied person on whose behalf liberation was being sought took various forms from the bullied school shooter, to the cyberbullying victim, to the bullied suicidal queer. As the subtitle of my dissertation suggests, I focus on “managing violence through the discourse of bullying.” This marks a two part process: how the discourse of bullying manages to do violence and how it manages populations biopolitically. This study tackles one of the core paradoxes that inform the formation of …

Our History Is The Future: Mni Wiconi And The Struggle For Native Liberation, Nick Estes

American Studies ETDs

From April 2016 to February 2017, Indigenous women and youth led a historic struggle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline from crossing Mni Sose, the Missouri River, and threatening the drinking water of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and millions downstream. Rallied under the banner Mni Wiconi, a Lakota assertion meaning “water is life,” centuries of history converged during the protests. It was about more than an oil pipeline. It was struggle over the meaning of history, the defense of land and water, and the rights of Indigenous peoples to determine their own future. When land and …

Arresting Narratives: Incommensurability, Policing, And Settler Security, Darcy H. Brazen

American Studies ETDs

Settler colonialism is interrogated through the practice of arrest. Case studies of arrests at Standing Rock validate the historical salience of settler colonialism as a structure enabling Indigenous elimination and settler replacement that is dependent upon arrest to maintain and enhance settler lives and the settler project through unfettered access to Native land and resources for capital accumulation. Arrest is analyzed in relationship to statehood initiatives, the procuring of settler security, frontier feminism, and road signage in the masculine zones of travel in 1930s North Dakota. Contemporaneous reports from Standing Rock, the memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman and newspaper articles …

Texas-Mexico Border Cultural Production: Ethnographic Aesthetics And Modernity In Folklore, Literature, And Film, Margie Montanez

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation develops the trope of an ethnographic aesthetic to dissect the cultural production of Jovita González, Américo Paredes, and more recent works by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Lourdes Portillo. The dissertation argues that Texas-Mexican cultural production actively produces knowledge. In other words, when understood within the framework of ethnographic aesthetics, Texas-Mexican border cultural anticipates and imagines local futures in a constant shifting colonial space. Texas-Mexico border cultural production is not passive or residual but is in fact active and emergent.

The dissertation situates Texas-Mexico border cultural production as responding to and within post-national American Studies discourse that “stresses …

Keres Language Loss In The Santo Domingo Pueblo Community, Christopher Chavez

American Studies ETDs

The purpose of this research is to consider the effect of the Keres language loss in the Santo Domingo Pueblo community and the need for language revitalization. The Keres-speaking community of Santo Domingo Pueblo has been adamantly opposed to instituting oral and written Keres language in the school system. The Santo Domingo people began to withhold information in response to the European intrusion into the Pueblo world. Isolating itself from the colonial powers served to maintain the unity of the Pueblo’s traditions and culture. However, a revitalization of the Keres language requires integration with the global society. Without the written …