American Studies Commons^™

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'É: Transforming Diné 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 Montañez

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 …

From Sand Creek To Somalia: Black Bodies In Denver’S Post-Industrial Urban Cultural Re-Imagination, Webster Matjaka

American Studies ETDs

In this research project I situate black experience in the mid-sized post-industrial city of Denver, Colorado within the city’s colonial history in order to highlight some broader historical, global as well as local and national developments that, although seemingly unconnected, have a significant impact on urban social life today, in the case at hand, black urban experience. As people who have been displaced by the main axis of modern European global capitalist expansion: colonialism and slave trade, Native Americans, African Americans and recent African immigrants in Denver occupy a globalized socio-historical space of Euro-American socio-political domination that, in complex ways, …

"Revealing Reality": Four Asian Filmmakers Visualize The Transnational Imaginary, Stephen Edward Spence

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation posits that four Asian filmmakers engage in “revealing reality” in unique but interconnected ways that employ innovative narrative and cinematic/visual techniques, including a direct address to the senses and an augmenting of their vision with fantasy or surrealism. My study argues that Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand) mobilize this visual and narrative strategy to participate in debates about globalization and to comment on the state of their respective nations, the concept of the nation, and the transnational. The films of each artist are examined in detail; I investigate their stylistic …

African Dreams Of America: Diaspora Experience In The Writing Of Aidoo, Adichie And Cole, Gbenga Frederick Olorunsiwa

American Studies ETDs

This study explores four African diasporic texts against a backdrop of the African dream of America, diasporic experience, post-colonialism and racism in the U.S. as portrayed in the writings of Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1971), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2014), and Teju Cole’s Open City (2012) and Every Day Is for the Thief (2014). I argue that the African dream of America is different but also exemplary of the American experience and therefore a privileged lens for understanding “America.” During the course of this research project, I found that while the writings of Adichie and Aidoo are …

Settler Social Order: The Violence Of Policing In New Mexico, Elisabeth Rose Ehlert Perkal

American Studies ETDs

This thesis argues that in order to understand how and why police violence happens in the U.S., it is necessary to situate these interactions within a framework of settler colonialism. The police exist to maintain social order and, in the case of the U.S., this social order is defined by hegemonic structures of power including settler colonialism. Thus, the police fabricate and enforce settler social order that requires subjugating and eliminating Native people in order to preserve settler sovereignty. This thesis intervenes into monolithic critiques of policing in the U.S. and argues that critiques of police violence are most productive …

Contesting Liberalism, Refusing Death: A Biopolitical Critique Of Navajo History, Melanie K. Yazzie

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation considers the pivotal role that liberalism, particularly as it is expressed and enforced through post-livestock reduction era logics of tribal economic development, plays in advancing a relentless and violent form of U.S. settler colonialism bent on the elimination of Navajo life. I use Michel Foucault’s framework of biopolitics as a theory of history to unlock, identify, and interpret what brought Navajo life into the realm of explicit calculation in Navajo political formations. I use the terms ‘experimental liberalism’ and ‘extractive liberalism’ to frame the two primary biopolitical formations I see at work in this period of Navajo history. …

Place, Imaginary, Identity: Place Ethnography In Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico, Tita Berger

American Studies ETDs

"Place for me is the locus of desire," writes Lucy Lippard in the opening to Lure of the Local (1997). This research project is about place. Two distinct sets of scholarship on place emerged in the 1970s and the 1990s. A third wave of place scholarship is evident today. Coming initially from geography and anthropology, the study of place is now ubiquitous across fields in history, cultural studies, architecture, planning, health sciences, art and other disciplines. Despite the sustained interest in the study of place, one of the hallmarks of place is the ranging and contested contours of what place …

Femmage And The Diy Movement: Feminism, Crafty Women, And The Politics Of Gender Performance, Rosemary L. Sallee

American Studies ETDs

Through a variety of lenses, contemporary crafting is examined as a complex and contradictory gender and class performance that serves as a form of communication among women that both enables and contains oppositional and gender role explorations. Crafting is created through myriad texts which transform into an individual form of expression, a societal spectacle, a fashion trend, a subculture, an addiction, a coping mechanism, an oppositional act, and a means of healing both physically and emotionally. This study investigates how the objects women make and collect reflect and define crafters' negotiations between personal desires and public personas, help them voice …

Reclaiming The Land: Indigenous Articulations Of Environmentalism At Bears Ears, Caroline K. Goodman

American Studies ETDs

This thesis explores how an inter-tribal coalition in Southern Utah is strategically mobilizing environmental ethics in order to guarantee access to tribal homelands. Facing serious threat from Anglo communities in Utah who use race and religion to produce themselves as the authentic local population, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition forges new kinds of alliances with environmental groups and appropriates conservation and preservation ethics in order to reclaim the land. Indigenous articulations of environmentalism at Bears Ears disrupt the colonial temporal and spatial logics that undergird dominant American imaginaries of wilderness and antiquity, reattaching Native peoples to the land by centering …

Decolonizing The Body: Breast Cancer And The Environment In Toxic Times, Cynthia L. Martin

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation explores cultural narratives regarding the relationship between environmental toxins and breast cancer causation. It is not an analysis of current scientific research; grounded in Foucault’s theory of genealogy and archaeology, it evaluates cultural narratives on breast cancer causation that may be subsumed by the mainstream focus upon a cure for breast cancer, overlooking how people with breast cancer perceive illness causation, particularly as it relates to toxic exposure. Theories of place, space, and the neoliberal politics behind biotechnology support understanding the toxification of the human body as neocolonialism, and invite decolonizing methodologies as a means of understanding and …

The Scientific Conquest Of New Mexico: Local Legacies Of The Manhattan Project 1942-2015, Lucie Anne Genay

American Studies ETDs

In the initial scoping phase of this research project, the main question I used for guidance was "to what extent and how did the Manhattan Project impact New Mexico and New Mexicans?" My first objective was to assess the magnitude of the state's transformation before addressing the other questions that soon ensued from this original reflection. A brief historical review of the state's transformation will introduce these questions, and comparing pre-World War II and post-Cold War New Mexico will justify the term "revolutionized" I used above. This dissertation retraces the story of this scientific colonization from the point of view …

Complicating Transgender: White Privilege And The Politics Of Rurality, Jordon Johnson

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation argues a dominant transgender narrative manifested through a focus on transgender bodies and prioritizing access to medical procedures when personal stories began to be publicly shared. With limited public conversations about the influence of a dominant transgender narrative, public understandings about the community have become isolated to one facet of some peoples lived experiences. Focusing on the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico, I examine the ways in which white privilege and presumptions about rural life as in certain respects antithetical to a transgender community have shaped the predominant representation of transgender in ways that often obscure the …

Obama As Visual Icon: Blackness, Post-Raciality, And Multiculturalism In The Neoliberal Age, Jadira Gurulé

American Studies ETDs

This thesis examines the body of artwork produced in support of President Barack Obama during the 2008 United States' presidential election. It situates the artistic production from this election as both a product of and tool for furthering discourses of neoliberalism, multiculturalism, post-raciality, and American exceptionalism. A critical focus is trained on the ways in which Obama as a symbol and icon indexes and organizes knowledge about race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging in the United States and examines Obama as a form of visual archive. Visual culture studies, black cultural studies, and critical mixed-race scholarship are central to this …

The Critical Traveler At Palestine/Israel International Border Crossings: Settler Colonialism, Postcolonial Critique, And The United States As A Third State, Farah Nousheen

American Studies ETDs

I use the lens of the "critical traveler" to argue that the international border crossing of Palestine/Israel is both a settler colonial technology for the State of Israel, and a site of resistance for the transnational Palestinian solidarity movement. Israel deems certain travelers as critical to its settler colonial project. Israel marks Palestinian and Muslim travelers as racially critical to Israel that aims to be a Jewish majority state. Israel also marks travelers as critical because it suspects that these travelers espouse critical views of Israel's settler colonialist ideology and practice. As such, Israel has established a border security system …

Transnational Perspectives On Authenticity, Representation, And Expressions Of Visual Memory In Jewish Women And Childrens Holocaust Narratives, Tania Paloma García

American Studies ETDs

This Master's Thesis explores the Jewish Holocaust (1939-1945) from within a Transnational American Studies framework by emphasizing the importance of learning about multiple genocides within a global or transnational context. An examination into the link between postcolonialism and the Holocaust contributes to broadening global dialogues on Holocaust remembrance and genocide prevention. Through the interdisciplinary vantage points of history, memory, and literature, this thesis invokes a transnational methodology to engage in an academic conversation about the United States government's lack of involvement in adequately addressing the Holocaust. This thesis highlights Jewish Holocaust Literature as a means to understand the unique perspectives …

Revisioning Reality: Normative Resistance In The Cultural Works Of The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Nella Larsen, And Allan Rohan Crite, 1915-1945, Andrea Louise Mays

American Studies ETDs

Despite the fact that nineteenth and twentieth century biologist and Social Darwinists theories of race have been dispelled, the social residue of white supremacist ideologies continue to have social and political implications throughout American society. America's racial hierarchy, and whiteness as a social and racial construct instantiated within it, against which every other group of people has been relationally situated, has helped not only to define non-white racial subjects in inferior terms, it has also guaranteed a perpetuation of race-based structural and social inequalities in United States of America. African American Studies, Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, and most recently …

Intimate Gestures: Race, Photography, And Spectatorship In Tijuanas Dumps And Irregular Settlements, George Luna-Peña

American Studies ETDs

Through a sustained engagement with the theoretical work of Roland Barthes and Frantz Fanon, this thesis traces the complicated lines of connection linking photography, racial difference, spectatorship, and self-making in Tijuana's dumps and irregular settlements. Understanding photography as a space and form of life and social death, this thesis explores the photographic work of two photographers in Tijuana that pictures the lives of those living in poverty: John Leuders-Booth and Ingrid Hernandez. Of these photographic projects, the thesis asks: How does the spectatorial relationship that is triggered by a photograph also initiate a relationship of value, where one side of …

Material Embodiments, Queer Visualities: Presenting Disability In American Public History, Andrew B. Marcum

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the presentation of disability at three of the most popular sites for the consumption of public history in the United States including the U.S. Capitol, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. I de-construct the cultural and historical narratives and discourses of disability circulating at these sites and offer a visual culture analysis of the images, artifacts, and statuary found at each of them. My study is informed principally by the theories and methods of queer disability studies, visual culture studies, and cultural studies critiques of neoliberalism. I consider how …

Eva'lution In Fandangos, Fiestas, And Flamenco: Adding To The Repertoire Of Chicano Expressive Arts, Trisha Venisa Martinez

American Studies ETDs

This study seeks to explain this curious and unknown connection of Albuquerque flamenco to Eva Encinias-Sandoval and the dance traditions of Nuevomexicanos. I seek to identify the history and social impact of this rich and distinct New Mexico flamenco tradition by tracing the development of Encinias-Sandoval's career and the establishment of her now world-class flamenco arts program, offered through the University of New Mexico's Dance and Theatre Department, as well as thorough affiliates and organizations of the National Institute of Flamenco. More specifically, my thesis describes how Eva Encinias-Sandoval built and continues to anchor this inspiring expressive art form in …

Counter Culture Youth: Immigrant Rights Activism And The Undocumented Youth Vanguard, Rafael A. Martinez

American Studies ETDs

This thesis offers a social, historical, and political analysis of the Undocumented Youth Movement from 1986 to 2012 for the purposes of understanding how the movement carved out spaces of social belonging that problematized punitive immigration legislation and traditional understandings of citizenship. In particular, I argue that undocumented youth challenge the social binary of deserving and underserving citizenry by positing a counter cultural critique of U.S. immigration policies and the organizations that support or challenge these policies. By counter culture I mean the ways in which undocumented youth combat normative cultural integrations into the broader society and therefore do not …

The Un-Exceptional Bomb: Settler Nuclearism, Feminism, And Atomic Tourism In New Mexico, Eileen Clare Shaughnessy

American Studies ETDs

New Mexico's atomic tourism acts to render the atomic bomb simultaneously so exceptional that it is viewed as the pinnacle of Western intelligence, and yet also so un-exceptional that it is banal, as typified by kitschy atomic souvenirs. A primary way in which New Mexico's atomic tourist sites accomplish this paradoxical narrative is through gendered and racialized discourses in exhibits, gift shops, and on-site narratives. The racialized trope of the "vanishing Native" functions in these spaces to shore up the colonialist progress narrative in which white Western science and Manifest Destiny inevitably result in the creation of the "exceptional" bomb …

Reproducing Prevention: Teen Pregnancy And Intimate Citizenship In The Post-Welfare Era, Clare M. Daniel

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the politics of teen pregnancy prevention in the 1990s and early 2000s within public policy, popular culture, and local and national nonprofit advocacy. Widely viewed as a distressing social problem, teenage reproduction has provoked decades of prevention and regulation that pervade across public and private sectors. Teen pregnancy has been associated with, if not fully blamed for, a host of other so-called social problems throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the beginning of the twenty-first century. As scholars such as Kristen Luker and Lisa Arai have labored to illustrate, causal connections between adolescent reproduction and the social ills …

No Admission Required: Sovereignty, Slots And Native American Art, Jane Sinclair

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native American art is displayed in Indian casinos in the Southwest. Exhibition strategies, employed by traditional art and natural history museums offer points of comparison. An overview of legal battles leading up to and following the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) in 1988 is provided. While New Mexico is the primary focus of this discussion, the state of Arizona is also mentioned. The evolution of gaming compacts in New Mexico is detailed at length. Local attitudes both for and against the legalization of Indian gaming is documented through media sources, such as newspaper …