Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Green Berets And Gay Deceivers: The New Left, The Vietnam Draft And American Masculinity, Anna L. Zuschlag

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

When masculinity is predicated on violence and military service is a man’s civic duty, then draft resistance becomes a doubly radical act. Men who refuse to take up arms for their nation threaten, at least potentially, both its political and gender order. This dissertation explores American masculinity during and after the Vietnam War, by analyzing cultural representations of, and responses to, the U.S. Selective Service System. At a time when mainstream Hollywood would not touch the Vietnam War, a generation of independent filmmakers, artists and agitators produced a number of remarkable films and documents dealing with the war, the draft …

Dishonoured Americans: Loyalist Manhood And Political Death In Revolutionary America, Timothy J. Compeau

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation offers a new reading of the loyalist experience by drawing on the insights and methodologies of cultural history and the anthropological study of honour, as well as the history of masculinity, to contextualize the class and gender-based concerns embedded in patriot and loyalist written records. American revolutionaries attacked loyalist men using deeply gendered language and symbols, and succeeded in dishonouring loyalism in general, while also driving individual loyalists from their communities. Male loyalists relied on the same culture of honour to rationalize their experiences, justify their continued allegiance to the Crown, and transform injuries intended as marks of …

Evangelizing The ‘Gallery Of The Future’: A Critical Analysis Of The Google Art Project Narrative And Its Political, Cultural And Technological Stakes, Alanna Bayer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis explores the digitization initiative Google Art Project and the ways in which the Project negotiates its place between rapidly developing Web technologies and the often-contradictory fine art tradition. Through the Project’s marketing and website design, Google constructs a narrative that emphasizes the democratization of culture, universal accessibility and a new progressive future for the art world while obscuring more complex political, social and cultural questions. Bringing together scholarship from various disciplines including library studies, digital studies, art history, and cultural studies this thesis highlights how the Project might open up a space to talk about art publics and …

Covers Uncovered: A History Of The "Cover Version," From Bing Crosby To The Flaming Lips, Sean Dineley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis engages with the “cover version” as it has developed since the mid-1940s. This single term has survived across historical eras “so that it now indiscriminately designates any occasion of rerecording” (Coyle 2002, 134). This thesis views changing cover trends as aspects of broader cultural changes. In order to effectively illustrate the wide scope of practices to which this term has referred, the history of cover versions is separated into three broad periods: pre-rock, rock, and post-rock. This thesis explores the shifting attitudes toward, and motivations for, cover recording across these periods. It argues that it is more useful …

The Vancouver Asahi Baseball Team And Cultural Acceptance 1920-1941, Christopher M. Pellerin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis analyzed how the Vancouver Asahis, through excellence in baseball, gained acceptance within the newspaper media and community from 1920 to 1941. An examination of Vancouver’s history and culture determined the importance of baseball to the city, especially upon Bob Brown’s, Vancouver’s greatest builder of the game, immigration. A history of the Asahis was also examined to help frame baseball’s importance to the Japanese and why they wished to engage in this specific sport. Through a content analysis within the Vancouver Sun and Daily Province newspapers, this thesis examined how the Asahis were represented in each of the two …

Talking Nonsense: Spiritual Mediums And Female Subjectivity In Victorian And Edwardian Canada, Claudie Massicotte

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study traces the development of mediumship in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially popular among women, this practice offered them an important space of expression. Concealing their own identities under spiritual possession, mediums ubiquitously invoked well-known historical figures in séances to transmit their opinions on current issues. As such, they were able to promote new ideas to interested audiences without claiming responsibility for their potentially controversial words.

While many studies have been conducted in the United States, Britain, and France regarding the significant role of mediumship in the emergence of women on the political scene, …

Mobilizing Insurgent Pasts Toward Decolonial Futures, Patrick Crowley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project is an inquiry into modes of decolonial resistance that mobilize alternative relationships to the past against the modern/colonial writing of history from a Eurocentric perspective taken as universal. I contend that knowledges and memories rooted in non-Western cultural traditions have formed the epistemological basis for ongoing opposition to the hegemonic conception of history as the unfolding of global structural transformations on a single, homogenous timescale. I examine works by Frantz Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Zapatista videomakers that expressly reject a Eurocentric, monotopic perspective of history. My objective is to demonstrate the decolonial efforts of intellectuals and ordinary people …

From Marriage Revolution To Revolutionary Marriage: Marriage Practice Of The Chinese Communist Party In Modern Era, 1910s-1950s, Wei Xu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation focuses on exploring the myth of ―revolutionary marriage‖, a popular and lasting marriage tradition of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The concept of ―revolutionary marriage‖ came out of a marriage revolution initiated by the May Fourth radicals in order to challenge the traditional marriage system. This term was then borrowed by the early Chinese Communists who used it to describe their socialist marriage ideal. However, regarding the CCP‘s marriage policy, there was always a gap between the progressive ideals and the conservative realities. In every piece of propaganda the CCP swore to completely overthrow the feudal arranged marriage …

"Ça Devient Une Question D’Être Maîtres Chez Nous”: The Canadiens, Nordiques, And The Politics Of Québécois Nationalism, 1979-1984, Terry Gitersos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation analyzes the discourses produced by the selected newspaper coverage of the Montréal Canadiens and Québec Nordiques, two professional hockey clubs based in the province of Québec, from 1979 to 1984. Sport has long provided a medium for national identification, and constitutes one the most effective institutions through which the nation is imagined. This is especially true of Canada, where ice hockey has been celebrated as the country’s national game and a window into the Canadian soul. However, sport is a malleable institution; in Québec, hockey has long served as a symbol, speaking to French Canadian national identity, imbued …

Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company And The Construction Of British India, 1757-1857, Nida Sajid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis investigates the discursive strategies employed by the East India Company during the early colonial period to legitimize mercantile imperialism as an act of preservation for the fast-disintegrating political order that was the Mughal empire in India. By arguing that the interrelationship of myth, history and archive was essential to networks of trade and the establishment of political domination, my thesis offers a new reading of the representations of the political debates surrounding the Company’s scandals and imperial ambitions in the English public sphere. It further demonstrates the centrality of the India question in defining the contours of some …

Asbestos, Quebec: The Town, The Mineral, And The Local-Global Balance Between The Two, Jessica J. Van Horssen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

From the late 19th to the late 20th century, the cities and industries of the world became increasingly reliant on fireproof materials made from asbestos. As asbestos was used more and more in building materials and household appliances, its harmful effect on human health, such as asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma, became apparent. The dangers surrounding the mineral led to the collapse of the industry in the 1980s. While the market demand and medical rejection of asbestos were international, they were also experienced in the mining and processing communities at the core of the global industry. In the town of …