Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Le Bâillonnement De La Révolution Haïtienne Dans L’Imaginaire Occidental À Travers Des Textes Fictionnels Des Dix-Neuvième Et Vingtième Siècles, Claudy Delné

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Inspired by the study of Western historiography and the processes by which silence enters into history in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s seminal work, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, this dissertation demonstrates that fiction can be used both for silencing the past and for rewriting it. This study focuses on seven novels, one short story and two plays published between 1798 to 2007: Adonis ou le Bon Nègre by Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, L’Habitation de Saint-Domingue ou L’Insurrection by Charles de Rémusat, Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, Les Nuits chaudes du Cap-Français by Hugues Rebell, Drums at Dusk by Arna …

Eating Soviet: Food And Culture In The Ussr, 1917–1991, Anton Masterovoy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the best way to understand the nature of Soviet history is through the prism of food. Soviet citizens were encouraged to see the availability of food as the main measure of success for the construction of a new, Soviet civilization. The disappointment with the inability of the Soviet government to provide the quantity, quality and variety of food that the Soviet consumers expected was one of the major causes for the collapse of the USSR. The first chapter addresses the reasons why and how so unlikely a food as sausage became and remains the primary Russian …

The 'Silent Arrival': The Second Wave Of The Great Migration And Its Affects On Black New York, 1940-1950, Carla J. Dubose-Simons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores black New York in the 1940s with an emphasis on the demographic, economic, and social effects of the World War II migration of blacks to the city. Using census data this study examines the basic characteristics of the migrants moving to New York during the war years; characteristics such as state of origin, age, and sex. It also maps where these migrants settled in the city revealing new areas of black settlement outside of Harlem, the largest black neighborhood in the city.

Black New Yorkers, looking to escape the high rents, dilapidated living conditions, and increasing crime …

Refugees And Resistance: International Activism For Grassroots Democracy And Human Rights In New York, Miami, And Haiti, 1957 To 1994, Carl Lindskoog

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the evolution of political activism among Haitians in the United States from the formation of Haitian New York in the late 1950s to the return of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti in 1994. It traces the efforts of Haitian activists to build bridges connecting New York and Miami to the grassroots organizations in Haiti, finding a considerable degree of success in their efforts to construct a transnational movement that had a substantial impact both in Haiti and in the United States. Shedding additional light on the interconnected history of Haiti and the United States, this dissertation …

Twelve-Tone Cartography: Space, Chains, And Intimations Of "Tonal" Form In Anton Webern’S Twelve-Tone Music, Brian Christopher Moseley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a theory and methodology for creating musical spaces, or maps, to model form in Webern's twelve-tone compositions. These spaces are intended to function as "musical grammars," in the sense proposed by Robert Morris. And therefore, significant time is spent discussing the primary syntactic component of Webern's music, the transformation chain, and its interaction with a variety of associational features, including segmental invariance and pitch(-class) symmetry. Throughout the dissertation, these spaces function as an analytical tools in an exploration of this music's deep engagement with classical formal concepts and designs. This study includes analytical discussions of the Piano …

Triadic Music In Twentieth-Century Russia, Christopher Mark Segall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Twentieth-century Russian music exhibits a diversity of approaches to triadic composition. Triads appear in harmonic contexts that range from tonal to atonal, as well as in referential contexts where triadic music evokes historical styles. Theorists in Russia have approached this repertoire from perspectives that differ from those of their English-speaking counterparts, but because little Russian theory has been reliably translated into English, the work remains largely unknown. This dissertation explores three case studies dealing with the treatment of triads in contrapuntal, functionally harmonic, and atonal contexts respectively, drawing on untranslated (or in one case, poorly translated) writings from twentieth-century Russian …

The New York Chamber Music Society, 1915-1937: A Contribution To Wind Chamber Music And A Reflection Of Concert Life In New York City In The Early 20th Century, Lisa Kozenko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The New York Chamber Music Society, founded in 1915, was one of New York City's prominent cultural institutions in the early twentieth century. A vital piece of the classical music landscape, the Society played an important role in the city's development as one of the major artistic capitals of the world. The contributions that the organization made to wind chamber music repertoire and its mission to further the performance of chamber music in New York City are remarkable. The legacy of the New York Chamber Music Society is the works that were premiered or played for the first time in …

Contact-Induced Changes In Word Order And Intonation In The Spanish Of New York City Bilinguals, Carolina Barrera-Tobón

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the variable word order and prosody of copular constructions (Nicolás es feliz versus Feliz es Nicolás, Es Nicolás feliz, Es feliz Nicolás, ‘Nicolas is happy’) in the Spanish of first- and second-generation Spanish-English bilinguals in New York City (henceforth NYC). The data used for the study come from a spoken corpus of Spanish in NYC based on 140 sociolinguistic interviews (details of the corpus will be presented in Chapter Three). This dissertation addresses the question of whether secondgeneration bilinguals have a less flexible word order in Spanish …

Two Sides To A Drum: Duality In Trinidad Orisha Music And Culture, Ryan J. Bazinet

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents an ethnographic and historical study of music and culture in the Yoruba-derived Trinidad Orisha religion in Trinidad and New York City. Its objectives are: (1) to provide description and documentation of Trinidad Orisha music, an understudied music genre in the African diaspora; (2) to shed light on the historical, cultural, and demographic factors contributing to the development of Trinidad Orisha music by its practitioners; and (3) to provide substance for meaningful comparisons between Trinidad Orisha music and other Yoruba-derived musics.

Based on four years of fieldwork (2008-2012) in Trinidad and in Brooklyn, NY, the study explores Trinidad …

Ladakhi Traditional Songs: A Cultural, Musical, And Literary Study, Noe Dinnerstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the place of traditional songs in the Tibetan Buddhist culture of the former Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh. I look at how Buddhism and pre-Buddhist religion informed the texts and performance contexts of traditional songs, and how Ladakhi songs represent cultural self-images through associated musical, textual, and visual tropes. Many songs of the past, both from the old royal house and the rural Buddhist populations, reflect the socio-political structure of Ladakhi society. Some songs reflect a pan-Tibetan identity, connecting the former Namgyal dynasty to both the legendary King Gesar and Nyatri Tsangpo, the historical founder of the Tibetan …

Blogging Chronic Illness And Negotiating Patient-Hood: Online Narratives Of Women With Ms, Collette Sosnowy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personal narratives about women's everyday lives with chronic illness are mapped onto the landscape of social media through blogging. Social media is facilitating an already-existing shift in patients' roles as they are increasingly enabled and expected to self-educate themselves about their illness, collaborate with providers, self-manage their care, and engage in health activism. The health care industry has seized on the widespread use of social media to bolster rhetoric that the accelerated knowledge development made possible through social media has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine. Critics, however, argue that responsibility and activism via digital technologies has become …

Free From Jazz: The Jazz And Improvised Music Scene In Vienna After Ossiach (1971-2011), Thomas Albert Zlabinger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing on a diverse and eclectic scene that is under-documented, this dissertation investigates the historical, social, and cultural aspects of jazz and improvised music in Vienna over the last four decades. Through fieldwork, I have observed various characteristics and trends regarding the jazz and improvised music scene in Vienna and have subsequently organized the musicians and their recordings into seven fluid "fields": Traditional-U.S. Performance, Post-Tradition, DJ/Hip-Hop, Volk/Ethnic, Cabaret, Unclassified, and Abroad. One of the most striking aspects of the entire scene is the near-absence of a racialized discourse among musicians and critics and of stereotypical markers of "blackness" in performance. …

Deflationism About Truth And Meaning, Onyoung Oh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of my thesis is to defend a deflationary view of truth and meaning. I characterize the view as a doctrine holding that truth is a purely logical notion, and truth-theoretic notions don't play a serious explanatory role in an account of meaning and content. We use truth-terms (e.g. `true') everywhere, from the discourse of ordinary conversation to those of the hard science and morality. The ubiquity of truth-terms gives rise to the impression that truth is a profound notion playing substantive explanatory roles. This impression, say deflationists, is unduly inflated--the ubiquity of truth-terms is not a sign of …

Metaphysical Dependence And Set Theory, John Wigglesworth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I articulate and defend a counterfactual analysis of metaphysical dependence. It is natural to think that one thing x depends on another thing y if had y not existed, then x wouldn't have existed either. But counterfactual analyses of metaphysical dependence are often rejected in the current literature. They are rejected because straightforward counterfactual analyses fail to accurately capture dependence relations between objects that exist necessarily, like mathematical objects. For example, it is taken as given that sets metaphysically depend on their members, while members do not metaphysically depend on the sets they belong to. The set …

The Wild Child: Children Are Freaks In Antebellum Novels, Heathe Bernadette Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the spectacle of antebellum freak shows and focuses on how Phineas Taylor Barnum's influence permeates five antebellum novels. The study concerns itself with wild children staged as freaks in Margaret by Sylvester Judd, City Crimes by George Thompson, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Our Nig by Harriet Wilson. Barnum's influence was pervasive. The novels I investigate span a period of fourteen years before the Civil War, and offer a view of the kid show presented by the freaks in each text. Touching into spectacle, authors construct narratives …