History Commons^™

Vanguards Of Liberation: Progressive Catholicism, The Student Movement, And Political Culture In Latin America, 1960-1973, Sandra M. Londono-Ardila

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Over the 1960s, a particular form of living the Christian faith bolstered student mobilization in Latin America. The Catholic episcopate supported the expansion of Catholic student organizations to strengthen the youth’s evangelization and form a Catholic intelligentsia that might inform social change and counter the elites’ de-Christianization. Significantly, dominant conservative views saw in these organizations the opportunity to halt Marxism in universities and society. Student organizations did not follow the latter path uncritically. They had their own agendas. Students built on multiple social theory developments, progressive theology—that reached momentum at Vatican II, and a shared apostolic method—the Review of Life. …

Imagining Costumbrismo: Connecting Image And Text In Nineteenth-Century Colombian Cuadros De Costumbres, María Sol Echarren

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by nineteenth-century scientific trends, Costumbrismo was a literary and artistic genre combining aspects of Romanticism and Realism and presenting traditional customs of autochthonous daily life. Nineteenth-century cuadros de costumbres, or “sketches of manners,” often used local color to depict national scenes, regional types, and cultural traditions. The cuadros, comprised of short but illustrative writings published as periodical pamphlets, contained visually charged descriptive language infused with a didactic objective in order to shape readers’ perspectives about the nation and present specific sociopolitical philosophies.

This dissertation analyzes the connections between literature and art through the written cuadros de costumbres …

Beyond Honor: Historicizing Sexual Coercion In Late Colonial Lima, 1750-1821, Morgan C. Gray

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sexual assault and sexual coercion are intensely emotional crimes that have been the focus of many recent public discussions around the world, including protests and reforms in Latin America. As such, the history of these crimes in countries like Peru provides vital context for reformers and scholars alike. This research aims to incorporate women’s emotional experiences of sexual coercion into the legal and cultural context of Peru’s capital city between 1750 and 1821, and thus to illustrate that social and political changes also affected individual women’s pursuit of justice. Using dozens of court cases from the ecclesiastical and royal secular …

The Politics Of The Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, And Subjectivity In The Anthropocene, Joshua Falcon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how psychedelic substances become drawn into particular sociohistorical and political arrangements, and how psychedelic experiences with psilocybin ‘magic mushrooms’ are used as tools of subjectivation. Guided by literatures in philosophy, critical theory, and the social sciences that focus on subjectivity, assemblage theory, and critical posthumanism, I argue that psychedelics are drawn into variegated assemblages, each of which conceptualizes the nature of psychedelics in highly specific ways that reflect implicit conceptions of the world and the self. In developing the concept of psychedelic assemblages, this research provides a window onto the politics of the self in the Anthropocene. …

The Unusual Suspects: The Bourbon Reforms And The Inter- And Intracolonial Mobility Of Africans And Their Descendants In The Spanish Caribbean, Trevor E. Bryant

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This social history examines the trans-imperial mobility of people of African descent in the eighteenth-century Spanish Caribbean in the context of Atlantic enslavement and fugitivity and Spanish imperial policy. Spanish officials knew how often Africans and their descendants traveled throughout the circum-Caribbean. They implemented policies to use this movement for their own gain, either by harnessing that movement for imperial rivalry or commandeering it for security. A close analysis of Catholic parish records, Spanish governors’ correspondence, drafts of Black codes, and smuggling investigations reveals a tension between free and enslaved people’s multi- faceted mobility and Spanish officials’ attempts to use …

Homoerotic Medievalism: Looking At Queer Desire In The Homosocial Relationships Of Chaucer’S “The Knight’S Tale” And Fletcher And Shakespeare’S The Two Noble Kinsmen, Juan P. Espinosa

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore queer interiority within the heteronormative social constructions of late medieval England. Queer interiority is not an occurrence of modernity, but rather a response to social constructions that date back to the Middle Ages. It is essential to account for queerness in the Middle Ages because authors like Chaucer promote the successive resurfacing of queer characters within heteronormative social constructions. Writing during the queer reign of Richard II, Chaucer constructs the interior identities of Palamon and Arcite as a reflection of the king and the political norms of England. Inspired by Chaucer, authors …

A Non-Normative Paradigm: Disability And Gender In Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature, Malena Sol Pendola Biondi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within nineteenth century society, normalcy is presented through unfeasible means of appearance and identity, leading to a rejection of the self. By exploring characters in Victorian gothic literature, who are marginalized by society, and invoking the work of Gail Weiss, Kim Hall, and others, this essay investigates the way these norms are immortalized through published representations and how they expose the lingering presence of rejection of disabled, queer, and gender-fluid bodies. Through the analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I look at the contextualization of marginalized existence compared to able-bodiedness and normalized …

Semi-Presidential Executive Branch Institutionalization And Personalization Under Cuba's 1940 Constitution, Daniel Pedreira

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ratification of Cuba’s Constitution of 1940 ushered hopes for democratic stability, most notably through the implementation of a semi-presidential system. Innovative for its time, semi-presidentialism sought to reduce the “perils of presidentialism” that plagued the early decades of the Cuban Republic. Yet, over the next two decades, the Cuban Republic declined and fell as it devolved into authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

This study analyzes the extent to which Cuba’s executive branch was institutionalized or personalized under the 1940 Constitution. Taking a close look at the presidential administrations of Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar (1940-1944, 1952-1954, and 1954-1959), Ramón Grau San Martín (1944-1948), …

Son For Everybody: Exploring Afro Cuban And African American Relations Through Langston Hughes’ Translations Of Nicolas Guillén’S Poetry, Hayley R. Fernandez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the translation decisions made in Cuba Libre, Translated from the Spanish By Langston Hughes and Ben Frederic Carruthers, and to explore the contemporary image of Nicolás Guillén as expressed in recent projects regarding his work and legacy. Particular attention was paid to the historical and social frameworks Guillén employed in his own work and the same frameworks he and his poetry have been associated with in recent years. The larger importance of this piece was to take a look at how international Blackness existed and was worked with in literature at the …

Atlantic Legacies: Free Women Of Color And The Changing Notions Of Womanhood In The Long Nineteenth Century, Marie Stephanie Chancy

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on three free-born African-descended women who defied expectations and prejudices to live previously unthinkable lives in the nineteenth century. The project uses their biographies to illustrate how, as black and mixed-ancestry émigrés from the Americas living in Europe, they adopted and adapted the evolving notions of ideal womanhood. As a result they expanded who could be identified as a true, redemptive or new woman. The project shows how they used the tenets of these ideals to live life on their terms. The dissertation is set in an era dominated by white males, and defined by the enslavement …

Our Representative On This Island: Local Belonging And Transnational Citizenship Among Syrian And Lebanese Cubans, 1880-1980, John T. Ermer Jr

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Émigrés from Ottoman Syria and Cuba who, beginning in the late-nineteenth century, traveled not unidirectionally, from one nation to another, but between and within multiethnic, polycentric empires. Tracing their history opens a route to better understanding global legal regimes of citizenship. Weaving government records from Cuba, France, and the United States with associational records and oral history interviews, this dissertation reveals how vernacular understandings of citizenship in Cuba and the Levant, based on locally derived conceptions of belonging, but over time contended with liberalizing legal reforms meant to redefine citizenship as a state-focused and legible status. As a mobile population …

We Have The Land Titles: Indigenous Litigants And Privatization Of Resguardos In Colombia, 1870s-1940s, Gloria Lopera

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pressures for the privatization of indigenous lands accompanied the making of nation-states in post-colonial Latin America and boosted the natives' quest for colonial legal documents suitable to prove their rights over indigenous communal landholdings (known in Colombia as "resguardos"). This dissertation compares the experiences of two communities - San Lorenzo and Cañamomo-Lomaprieta - engaging with the law and producing legal and historical evidence to respond to the privatization of their resguardos. These communities inhabit the municipalities of Riosucio and Supía (Caldas) in the Western Colombian Andes. While the study explores the genesis of San Lorenzo's and Cañamomo-Lomaprieta's …

Canadian Banks And Imperialism In The English-Speaking Caribbean, Tamanisha J. John

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Canadian banks have been important components of an imperialist system since at least the 19^th century. However, their long and rich history of operating as purely exploitative entities in the English-speaking Caribbean region is often overlooked— leading to many incomplete and conflicting narratives about Canada’s role within the global system. I argue that Canada is an imperial actor that exerts agency in supporting a Canadian banking oligopoly both within Canada and in the English-speaking Caribbean. Insufficient attention is given to these Canadian banks, especially considering the power they have wielded in the Caribbean over the centuries. By analyzing the …

The Nomad Selves: The American Women Of The Spanish Civil War And Exile, Maria Labbato

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As witnesses to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its ensuing streams of exile Americans Muriel Rukeyser and Janet Riesenfeld understood the conflict as symptomatic of larger European and antifascist struggle. Weaving biography, intellectual history, and cultural studies this dissertation reveals how the art and activism of these two North American women in the Spanish Civil War can expose an overlooked element in the antifascist movement and its fate with the rise of Cold War anti-Communism. Their experiences—one a writer and poet, and the other a dancer and screenwriter—with the Spanish conflict and exile informed their lives and creative works. …

The Pedagogy Of The Youth Teachers Of The Cuban Literacy Campaign, Yuleisy Mena

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961 turned teenagers into teachers. This study interviewed three former youth teachers and recorded their experiences through the oral history lens and method. The study focused on the pedagogical components of their lived experience, often overlooked by scholars who have mainly focused on the campaign’s political and economic history from the top down. In turn, issues of identity surfaced that helped explain the personal motivations for participating in the campaign and produced counter-narratives in the process. The interviews compiled allowed a bottom-up history to be archived, highlighting the stories of people omitted from the …

Representations Of A Good Citizen: A Genealogy Of Power And Critical Investigation Of Pictographs, 1937-1942, Joselyn Naranjo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study traced selected knowledge that influenced pictographs in social studies textbooks in the United States from 1937 through 1942. The qualitative study analyzed the messages in pictographs produced by Rudolf Modley’s business - Pictorial Statistics, Incorporated. The study interpreted the underlying ideological management within pictographs to present a method of analysis for future research on other visual educational material. Foucault’s (1980; 2003; Shiner, 1982) genealogy of power method addressed the different shifts in power and meaning making involved in communicating sociopolitical messages to the reader through pictographs while ideological management and governmentality informed Hsieh & Shannon’s (2005) directed content …

Intermedialidad En El Documental Cubano Contemporáneo, Esteban Alfonso Lopez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cuban documentaries, which have experienced dramatic changes in the last two decades, are now more in tune with the most recent global trends in cinema. However, the scarce implementation within the documentary genre of other perspectives and modes of analysis, outside those that are purely cinematographic, has stalled investigations in the field, thus creating a disengagement with the structural and thematic renovation that has been taking place within the discourse of contemporary Cuban documentaries.

My dissertation “Intermedialidad en el documental cubano contemporáneo” examines a select sample of representative texts and Cuban documentaries, with a view to adapting and/or developing an …

The Cuban Revolution's Emotive Regime: A Decade To Remember, 1968-1978, Maite Morales

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While emotions were central for the victory of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, a decade later, feelings became an obstacle for the consolidation of the revolutionary government. During the second decade, growing disillusionment and dissatisfaction challenged the state's emotive regime. Within the first five years, Cubans engaged in one of the largest mass mobilization projects in the nation’s history and failed to achieve a ten-million-ton sugar harvest. The revolutionary government reacted to the failure in various ways, but all dealt with emotions: from a major carnival revival in 1970 to the establishment of new tactics to satisfy consumer demand.

To …

Spiritual Activism And Political Solidarity In So Far From God And Mother Tongue: Two Views By Two Authors, Jean Paul Russo

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM AND POLITICAL SOLIDARITY IN SO FAR FROM GOD AND MOTHER TONGUE: TWO VIEWS BY TWO AUTHORS

by

Jean Paul Russo

Florida International University, 2020

Miami, Florida

Professor Anne Castro, Major Professor

This thesis focuses on the intersection between spirituality and political action in the works of two Latinx authors, Demetria Martinez and Ana Castillo. Building on Gloria Anzaldua’s theories of trauma, narrative, and what she terms ‘conocimiento,’ I contend that the novels So Far From God, and Mother Tongue, present an alternative approach to political action that is derived from a common experience of suffering and trauma as …

Between Harlem And Paris: Haitian Internationalism In The Interwar Period, 1919-1937, Felix Jean-Louis Iii

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project locates the transnational contributions of elite Haitians to the efforts to remake blackness and mitigate the racial subjugation of people of African descent between 1919 and 1937. The arguments forwarded here are founded on archival materials such as letters, newspapers, personal documents, and the reports of government agents. Through my engagements with these documents, at times reading against the grain, I explore the ways in which my actors directed the course of events and shaped the discourses of major organizations that sought to affect Pan-African solidarity and promote anti-colonialism. It locates their participation two major sites interwar black …

Well Calculated And Intended To Deceive: Counterfeiting And Policing Along The Ohio And Mississippi Rivers During The Mid-Nineteenth Century, Joseph Carlos Marin

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States lacked a national currency and individual states chartered banks that issued much needed and sought after paper currency into their local economies. Counterfeiters, men and women who created and passed fake currency, exploited the bewildering array of paper money and the chaotic financial world of the nineteenth century United States to obtain goods through illegitimate means. Historians have already explored the presence of counterfeiting in the colonial United States and in the New England States, including its existence along the nation’s border with Canada during the nineteenth century. This …

Historical Geopolitics Of Kashmir: A Discourse Analysis Of Civilizational Framings, Thomas J. Liguori

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to locate the intractable issue of Kashmir within a global context. The global setting utilized here is constituted and shaped by multiple levels, none of which is purely discrete, and which act upon each other with differing degrees of salience. Taking a discourse analytic approach, political positions can be seen as activating (acting upon, mobilizing, or challenging) existing discursive material in a given political context and then deploying it. This dissertation aims to show how the Kashmir problem has: 1) come about; that is, how it has been constituted and the (discursive) contexts which shaped the available …

Shipbuilding, Forest Resource Exploitation, And Environmental Change In Cuba In The Early Eighteenth Century, 1700-1763, Jason M. Daniel

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the construction of Spanish naval warships in Havana, Cuba, between the accession of the Bourbon family to Spain’s throne in 1700 and the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. The rapid increase in timber consumption after the Royal Havana Company gained the obligation for shipbuilding in 1741 led to significant changes in the social and environmental landscape. This dissertation concludes that Cuba’s maritime industries under royal authorities and the Royal Havana Company were the product of deliberate and centralized Spanish reforms that had demonstrable and measurable consequences on the island.

This period of shipbuilding consumed …

Charles A. Dana, The Civil War Era, And American Republicanism, Eric X. Rivas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When Charles A. Dana bought the New York Sun in 1868, he used it to support the presidential candidacy of Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Party ticket to unify the post-Civil War nation. After a victory for the Civil War general and Republican Party, though, the first fifteen months of the new administration turned the editor against the president and his party. Dana’s Sun criticized Grant and his allies as corrupt, of using the military for political ends, and of growing the size and power of government beyond traditional American practice. Against the backdrop of Reconstruction, Dana also decried …

Black And White Notes: Segregation, Integration, And Urban Renewal Through Pittsburgh's Locals 60 And 471, Nathan Seeley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores Pittsburgh’s Locals 60, 471, and 60-471 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1960s. Local 60 was founded in 1896 for white musicians and Local 471 in 1908 for black musicians. While other studies of the AFM take a “top-down” approach, this study examines these Locals from the “bottom-up.” In doing so, it re-examines the causal relationship between music/musicians and the social, political, and economic conditions intersecting with them. This dissertation is built upon seventy-two interviews conducted between former Local 471 members in the 1990s, photographs from Teenie Harris Collection …

Manufacturing Sin On The Frontier Of Heresy. Bishops, Franciscans And The Inquisition In Cuba During The Long Sixteenth Century, 1511 - 1611., Leonardo Falcon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the history of the Inquisition in the Diocese of Santiago de Cuba paying special attention to its leadership amid the series of reformations undertaken by the Spanish empire on both sides of the Atlantic. Through the long sixteenth century (1511 – 1611) bishops, Franciscan friars, and other government officials employed or manipulated the Inquisition in Cuba to satisfy the needs of the Spanish Empire or their personal agendas, respectively. Some clergy rightfully used the inquisitorial practices as mandated to uphold the Christian morality of the colonial society. Others, conveniently, fabricated crimes against members of the community to …

Quiet River, Heavy Waters: Un-Silencing Narratives Of Social-Environmental Inequalities In The Cradle Of Soviet Plutonium, Rosibel Roman

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In December 1948, the Soviet Union’s first plutonium production facility, Mayak Production Association (PO Mayak), began operation in the Southern Urals region of Russia, at the western edges of Siberia, near the restricted city of Chelyabinsk-40, known in the present day as Ozyorsk. Since then, rural communities located downstream from PO Mayak have experienced health, economic, ecological and social impacts of contamination from high-level radioactive wastes released by the facility into the Techa River and its surrounding ecosystem. My research, drawing from archival research conducted in Russia and the United States, as well as secondary sources in English and Russian, …

Commemorative Bodies: (Un)Making Racial Order And Cuban White Supremacy In Little Havana's Heritage District, Corinna Jeanne Moebius

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation unearths memory- and place-making practices, processes and “racializing regimes of representation” in Little Havana’s heritage district, now a major tourism destination in Miami, Florida. It draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and consultations of various archives that span decades back to the 1960s and trace the origins of the district in plans for a “Latin Quarter.”

My analyses borrow from and combine various bodies of scholarly work to examine and deconstruct the use of always multi-vocal “commemorative bodies” for the production of racial narratives that are embedded in--and give shape to--acts of memorialization and commemoration.

By examining the …

The Border-Seas Of A New British Empire: Security And The British Atlantic Islands In The Age Of The American Revolution, Ross M. Nedervelt

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“The Border-seas of a New British Empire” explores the relationship between the rebellious thirteen colonies and the British Atlantic Islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas, and how the “on the ground” impact of the American Revolution explains not only why they did not join the rebellion—despite initial sympathy for the cause—but illustrates also the long-term political, cultural, commercial, and military transformation wrought by the war and its aftermath. To understand the British Atlantic islanders’ allegiances during the American Revolution and the impact of the islands’ loss on the United States, this dissertation employs Atlantic, borderlands and border-seas, and security interpretive …

The Notions Of The "Closet" And The "Secret" In Oscar Wilde's, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Jessica Maria Oliveira

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will discuss the notions of the “closet” and “secret” within Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as offer a clear and precise definition of queer theory to assist in elucidating many of the concepts being discussed. Close reading techniques will be utilized to further uncover the metaphoric, symbolic, and otherwise figurative importance of certain aspects of The Picture of Dorian Gray and supporting texts. Through Judith Butler’s conceptualization of sex and gender, as well as Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the “secret”, this paper will explicate the intricacies of Wilde’s work and unveil queered aspects …