Digital Commons Network^™

Without Us There Is No Britain: Black British Photography And Film Networks, 1950-1989, Maria T. Quinata

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tracks three moments from 1950 to 1989, when images were put to work by Black photographers and filmmakers to stake individual and communal claims to Britain and Britishness: first, through the emergence of photographic portraiture taken in domestic living spaces during the 1950s to 1970s; second, through the Black Panther Movement and their use of photography in the late 1960s to mid 1970s, and last, with the efflorescence of Black film and video collectives in the 1980s. At each of these moments, I attend to the simultaneous production, negotiation, and co-mingling of new social identities that were diasporic, …

Consciousness, Culture, And Comradeship: Narratives Of South African Exile And Anti-Apartheid Activism In West Berlin, Claudia R. Crowie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exile is still an emotionally and politically charged topic and experience in South African history. It evokes emotional and contrasting responses in relation to its role in the struggle for liberation of the Black majority, and reveals tensions along organizational lines in relation to the contributions, influences, and outcomes of the ANC, PAC and the BCM. In this dissertation, I focus on a small group of exiles of various political persuasions in the 1980s, who arrived in West Berlin as exiles in the late 1970s and 1980s, most remaining until the ANC came to power in the first democratic election …

Cultivation, Conflict, And Consumption: Food Systems In Syria, 1920–1946, Sara Pekow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Syria during the French Mandate using food as a primary unit of analysis. The exploration of food pushes this project beyond the boundaries of political and diplomatic histories of Syria during the French Mandate, bringing forward the hidden voices of the nonelite. Nonelites are often not visible in archives, but their absence in most written sources permits us to ascertain their experiences in studying the materials that comprised their everyday lives. The sources consulted for this work include memoirs, print media, and state archives, to name a few.

Each chapter of this dissertation follows a different link …

Indian Classical Music In The New York Metropolitan Area: The Development Of A Transnational Ecosystem, Andre Fludd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the development of North and South Indian classical music communities in the New York metropolitan area from the mid-20^th century to the present. In this investigation, I primarily focus on local musicians from diverse backgrounds and communities rather than internationally recognized stars. In the instances where I discuss famous musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain, I focus on how they impacted New York metropolitan area communities particularly and what their success can teach about international Indian classical music careers. The dissertation is organized chronologically, and I highlight vital people, non-profit organizations, historical moments, and …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

How Black Lives Matter Has Influenced And Interacted With Global Social Movements, Arelle A. Binning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a chapter-based and member-led organization created out of grief by three queer black women. This thesis examines the international impact of BLM. I conducted telephone interviews with activists and advocacy organizations who have organized activist networks and/or won struggles against institutional racism outside of the United States. These activists are located in Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, India, Spain, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Paris. I conclude that BLM has inspired the creation and supported the continued development of organizations advocating for national and transnational social and racial justice on a global scale. BLM in spite …

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging And Kinships In African American Men’S Literature, 1953-1971, Debarati Biswas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Brother Outsider: Queered Belonging and Kinships in African American Men’s Literature, 1953-1971 builds on the work of women-of-color feminists since the late 1960s and queer-of-color critique in the works of José Esteban Muñoz, Robert Reid-Pharr, Roderic Ferguson, and Nadia Ellis, in order to chronicle the emergence of a queer tradition in mid twentieth century African American men’s literature. Through literary analysis and archival research on marginal figures of African American culture during this period, this dissertation proposes that the black pulp novels of Chester Himes, Robert Deane Pharr, Clarence Cooper Jr., and Iceberg Slim perform a queer critique of and …

Cruising Borders, Unsettling Identities: Toward A Queer Diasporic Asian America, Wen Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I challenge the dominant conceptualization of Asian Americanness as a biological and cultural population and a cohesive racial category. Instead, I consider it as a form of flexible subjectivity and an affective emergence that occurs and materializes due to the multiple sites of convergence in the neoliberal assemblage of model minority ideology, imperialist geopolitical history, racialized queer politics, and criminal (in)justices. I examine the spatial and temporal configurations of Asian American subjectivity through a queer and postcolonial lens, first by conducting a critical historical review of the category of Asian American in the geopolitical history of psychological …

A Eurafrican Future: France, Algeria, And The Treaty Of Rome (1951-1975), Megan Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Before the Treaty of Rome (1957) established the European Economic Community (EEC), French officials made it clear that France’s signature on the Treaty was contingent on its partners’ acceptance of Eurafrican policy. Because Algeria held a unique legal status among France’s overseas holdings, the way in which French officials advocated its insertion within EEC regulation merits particular attention. This status stood distinct from that of the associated territories and, when applied to the Treaty, would theoretically extend to Algeria and its residents the guarantees of free labor circulation, development aid, and tariff preferences open to metropolitan citizens through EEC membership. …

Lucumi And The Children Of Cotton: Gender, Race, And Ethnicity In The Mapping Of A Black Atlantic Politics Of Religion, Akissi M. Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I have examined claims to religious authenticity, purity, legitimacy and authority through the lens of a Black and African American Orisa community in Brooklyn, New York. Through these claims, made both internally and to a broader Orisa community within the United States and throughout different locales in the Black Atlantic, I have articulated how they are more often than not linked to very non-religious aspects of social life. Members of this community, and the broader Orisa Atlantic of which they are a part, do not practice this tradition in a social, cultural, or political vacuum. In fact, …

This Species Of Property: Slavery And The Properties Of Subjecthood In Anglo-American Law And Politics, 1619-1783, John N. Blanton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This Species of Property examines the development of the law and practice of slavery in the 17^th and 18^th century Anglo-American empire through analysis of common law court decisions in England, Massachusetts, and Virginia. The dissertation argues that there was a long and vibrant debate over the legitimacy of the chattel principle – the definition of enslaved persons as a type of property – and that enslaved people and their allies pushed for the recognition of the legal humanity or subjecthood of the enslaved in colonial and metropolitan courts. This antislavery legal tradition culminated in the famous Somerset …

Black Migrant Literature, New African Diasporas, And The Phenomenology Of Movement, Christopher Ian Foster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black Migrant Literature, New African Diasporas, and the Phenomenology of Movement examines immigration, diaspora, and movement in late twentieth and twenty-first century African literature. "Migritude" describes the work of a disparate yet distinct group of contemporary African authors who critically focus on migration within the context of globalization, emphasizing that the "past" of immigration is irreducibly entangled with colonial processes. These writers often refashion the politics or discourses of earlier movements within the black radical tradition, such as Négritude or pan-Africanism, as a way to engage immigration in the present. I argue that although immigration as a system developed as …

Policy Advocacy And The Performance Of Muslim American Identity, Emily Cury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In much of the political science literature, lobbying is conceptualized as a strategic attempt to influence policy. Policy actors are seen as independent agents competing to achieve policy outcomes that closely resemble their preferences. This understanding of policymaking has acquired a taken-for-granted nature and is therefore seldom questioned. The discourse of policy advocacy as a bargaining process has becomes, in part, a constraining discourse, leading academic inquiry to focus on questions of tactics and policy outcomes and ignore questions of how the policy process itself shapes and influences actors' identities and behavior.

Understood in purely strategic terms, Muslim American foreign …

Redefining Diaspora Consciousness: Musical Practices Of Moroccan Jews In Brooklyn, Samuel Reuben Thomas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the role of musical practices in the synagogue life of Maroka'im (Moroccan Jews) in Brooklyn, New York. Living in an urban setting known for its diverse and robust Jewish life, community members utilize several different types of musical expression to emblematize three distinct diasporic ethnic identities: Jewish (of ancient Israel), Sephardi (Spanish), and Maroka'i (Moroccan). Based upon ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2008 and 2013, this study demonstrates how Maroka'im in Brooklyn use musical expressions to evoke more than one sense of diaspora consciousness--Jewish, Sephardi, and Maroka'i--to foster what I term a layered diaspora consciousness.

To illustrate …

Foreseeing Identity In Blank Interstices: New-Wave African Migration To The United States And A New Theory Of Diaspora, Bernard D. Lombardi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I explore the ways by which new-wave black African immigrants confront and negotiate American tropes of blackness for individual and collective identity formations. Specifically, I focus on the memory of slavery as it is used for black collectivity in the United States. I argue that, although new-wave black African immigrants do not share the same memory of slavery with the descendants of slaves, they experience the racism perpetuated from the period of slavery because of their phenotypical blackness. In addition, these immigrants bring to the United States new memories and understandings of Africa that transform the ways …

The Music And Multiple Identities Of Kurdish Alevis From Turkey In Germany, Ozan Aksoy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the experiences of Kurdish Alevis, currently living in Germany, who trace their background to locations within the boundaries of the Republic of Turkey. I argue that music has been a particularly important mode through which Kurdish Alevis in Germany have articulated collective histories and have fashioned narratives of belonging and multiple and sometimes contradictory identities. The subjects of my research are immigrants and refugees who are ethnically Kurdish and whose religion is Alevi, an Anatolian religion whose relations to both Sunni and Shi'a Islam are historically controversial. They speak Turkish along with Kurdish, in most cases are …

Becoming Transnational Citizens: The Liberian Diaspora's Civic Engagement In The United States And In Homeland Peacebuilding, Janet Elizabeth Reilly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the relationship between civic participation in homeland peacebuilding and immigrants' political incorporation and integration in their local communities in the United States. It explores the impact of state (U.S. and Liberia) policies and local context on individuals' civic participation locally and in transnational activities. The study demonstrates the mechanisms through which state policies and local context influence Liberians' political participation in the United States and their transnational citizenship, defined as full legal membership and civic participation. The relationship between civic engagement in the United States and in transnational activities is not an adversarial one. Engagement with the …