Browsing by Subject "1970s"
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Item Activist friendships in the time of burnout : Marilyn Buck and Mariann Wizard, 1966-2010(2016-05) Kramer, Lauren Nicole; Mickenberg, Julia L.; Strong, PaulineDuring the 1960s and 1970s, Marilyn Buck, a white antiracist activist, engaged in activism outside the confines of feminist organizations largely dominated by upper middle-class white women. Marilyn worked in solidarity with both the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA) in the Bay Area, operating almost entirely behind the scenes. Following her arrest in 1973 for allegedly purchasing ammunition and weapons for the Black Liberation Army under a false name, she spent nearly the rest of her life in prison, eventually becoming a well-known prison activist and developing a vast network of friends and supporters from all over the world. For the duration of her long and sometimes grueling activist journey, Marilyn completely evaded burnout. Activist burnout poses a serious threat to the survival of social movements, striking even the most seasoned activists. In this thesis, I argue that Marilyn’s talent for creating and maintaining strong relationships played a major role in facilitating her ability to avoid burnout and keep her activist commitments strong. Many have celebrated Marilyn’s activist work and literary achievements, yet her interpersonal strengths must be acknowledged: she managed to build an immense international support network while living behind prison walls. In this multilayered study, I not only analyze Marilyn Buck’s significance as an activist who built an extensive friendship network and maintained an unwavering, lifelong commitment to her beliefs, but I also attempt to understand her life through the double lens of the perspective of her close friend, Mariann Wizard, and my own scholar/activist positionality. I combine the personal with the archival to demonstrate the value of Marilyn and Mariann’s friendship—both for the two of them and for modern-day scholars and activists looking to gain insight on the importance of activist friendships.Item The Austin music scene in the 1970s : songs and songwriters(2011-08) Hillis, Craig Dwight; Smith, Mark C.; Meikle, Jeffrey L.; Stott, William M.; Miller, Karl H.; Foley, Douglas E.; Mooney, KevinIn the early 1970s a collection of singer-songwriters, musicians, and music business operatives captured the imagination of a national audience and launched Austin's reputation as a powerful and prolific international music scene. At the beginning of this seminal decade, the songs, the sounds, and the identities that took shape in Austin's music venues, studios, and back rooms gained traction in the national marketplace by cultivating a cross-cultural, cross-generational musical hybrid that came to be known as "progressive country." This dissertation tells the story of this music scene and explains why it's a story worth recounting in the course of American popular culture. The story begins by focusing on the meaning and utility of a music scene. To this end, I review a series of scholarly scene studies in an attempt to identify common currents of "sceneness" that I contrast with my findings as a participant observer in the Austin musical scene from 1967 to the present. The study then surveys the extant sources on Austin's music history, a commonly accepted history that I'm calling the "creation myth." This "myth" is expanded by introducing new voices, new interpretations, and new developments that have been under emphasized or overlooked in previous accounts. This analysis establishes the foundation for the unifying theme of this study, a theme based on the seminal significance, power, and durability of the song in the Austin music scene. The song was the driving force behind Austin's remarkable climate of musical creativity. The study then focuses on the local scene of the late 1960s as a precursor to the decade of the singer-songwriters. This was a highly productive era in Austin's creative history and although overshadowed by the popular splash of the 1970s, this period provided the underpinnings for music making in Austin for years to come. In the next section, the song is revisited by examining its history and its role in Western culture. Stated simply, songs are important—songs matter. They may mean different things to different people and play different roles in different societies, but they are an essential component of civilization. The discussion then expands from the efficacy of the popular song to the essence of their creators by examining the early professional careers of three prominent Austin-based songwriters—Steven Fromholz, Michael Martin Murphey and Jerry Jeff Walker. Weighing the differences in their respective styles and considering their commonalities help illuminate the process by which the song permeated the creative fabric of the period. The dissertation then explores the creative output of the Austin music scene by focusing on what I'm calling "cultural products." Certainly the songs of the era are prime examples of cultural products and are addressed throughout the dissertation. In this final segment however, I single out four examples of cultural products that are rooted in the 1970s that have either played a notable role in the historical current of Austin music or that continue to contribute to American popular culture in the 21st century.Item The collective El Sindicato, 1976-1979 : intervening in conceptualism in Latin America(2011-05) Rodríguez, María Teresa, 1983-; Giunta, Andrea; Tarver, Gina M.Conceptual practices developed in Colombia towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Even a cursory look at surveys of Colombian conceptual art shows that the collective El Sindicato, active between 1976 and 1979, secured its space in these accounts with its 1978 work Alacena con zapatos, which won the top prize at the XXVII Salón Nacional. However, Alacena con zapatos was neither the only, nor the most significant, contribution of El Sindicato to the development of conceptual practices. The collective’s rich oeuvre, while concise, was nonetheless remarkable in its interventions on public spaces as a means for social change. A number of factors have led to the critical misunderstanding and, ultimately, the historiographical neglect of these interventions. This thesis problematizes these factors in order to reframe and expand El Sindicato’s role within the narrative of Colombian art. To elucidate El Sindicato’s contributions, and taking into account that much of Colombian conceptual art remains unknown in the United States, this thesis also registers Colombia’s artistic field as it stood in the 1970s. In all, my project situates El Sindicato’s practices within the broader narrative of Conceptualism as a means to both enrich our understanding of contemporary art in Colombia and help expand the familiar boundaries of the map of conceptual art.Item Cosmic cowboys, armadillos and outlaws: the cultural politics of Texan identity in the 1970s(2009-05) Mellard, Jason Dean; Davis, Janet M.This dissertation investigates the figure of “the Texan” during the 1970s across local, regional, and national contexts to unpack how the “national” discourse of Texanness by turns furthered and foreclosed visions of a more inclusive American polity in the late twentieth century. The project began in oral history work surrounding the cultural politics of Austin’s progressive country music scene in the decade, but quickly expanded to encompass the larger transformations roiling the state and the nation in the 1970s. As civil rights and feminist movements redefined hegemonic notions of the representative Texan, icons of Anglo-Texan masculinity—the cowboy, the oilman, the wheeler-dealer—came in for a dizzying round of celebration and critique, satire and ritual performance. Such Seventies performances of “the Texan” as took place in Austin’s “cosmic cowboy” subculture provided an imaginative space to refigure Anglo-Texan identity in ways that responded to and internalized the decade’s identity politics. From the death of Lyndon Johnson to Willie Nelson’s picnics, from the United Farm Workers’ marches on Austin to the spectacle of Texas Chic on the streets of New York City, Texas mattered in these years not simply as a place, but as a repository of longstanding American myths and symbols at a historical moment in which that mythology was being deeply contested. This dissertation maps the messy ground of the 1970s in Texas along several paths. It begins some years prior with the Centennial Exposition of 1936 and the regionalism of J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek before proceeding to the challenges to their vision of “the Texan” on the part of the African American civil rights, Chicano, and women’s movements. The dissertation’s central chapters then address the melding of countercultural forms and the state’s traditional Anglo-Texan iconography and music in spaces like Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters. Popular music, art, film, journalism, and literature evoke this attempted revisioning of Anglo-Texan masculinity in dialogue with the decade’s identity politics.Item "From below and to the left" : re-imagining the Chicano movement through the circulation of Third World struggles, 1970-1979(2006-08) Gómez, Alan Eladio; Zamora, EmilioActivists, artists, journalists, and intellectuals in the United States, from the 1950s to the present, have supported national liberation movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, arguing that anti-colonial struggles abroad were related to human and civil rights struggles in the United States. This dissertation builds on these foundations by tracing multi-racial and transnational connections among people and organizations in the United States, and between the United States and Latin America during the 1970s. Uncovering these connections that linked the Third World “within” to the Third World “without” across the Américas reconfigures the narrative of what happened to social movements in the 1970s, and helps us re-imagine the Chicano movement through the lens of an anti-colonial politics. This project bridges the local, national, and international terrains of political struggle by tracing the lives of activists and organizations in the United States and Latin America who defined their politics in relation to the Third World. It interrogates four inter-related themes: the prison rebellions in the United States, third world political activity in major U.S. urban centers, guerrilla theatre on both sides of the U.S-Mexican (and by extension Latin American) international border, and social movement connections between Texas and Mexico. My primary focus is on localized strategies for grassroots mobilizations rooted in working class cultural practices, multi-ethnic solidarities, and transnational political formations that were comprised of Chicano, Black, Asian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, American Indian, and white activists and artists. I also emphasize the local elements involved in the political alliances, coalitions, and solidarity efforts across geopolitical borders and different political perspectives. Overall, this project explores connections across, underneath, and outside the political, economic, and cultural construction of the nation state, and the hemispheric construction of the Americas with the United States as the primary political, economic and cultural power. These intertwined perspectives simultaneously step back to interrogate the larger international connections while focusing in on local manifestations of national issues refracted through a hemispheric lens. It is in the 1970s - a decade characterized by a shift in the policies of the crisis-ridden political economy of the Keynesian welfare state in response to these very struggles - that we should locate the early elements of what is currently referred to the anti-globalization movements.Item Guatemalan Kairos : Catholic social thought, liberation, and the course of history, 1965-1976(2013-12) Chandler, Creighton; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-Guatemalan Kairos chronicles the rise of the discourse of liberation in Guatemala’s Catholic Church in the decade following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In these years, as this study reveals, faith and human history comprised a double helix, constituting two interdependent and mutually supporting sides of the same soteriological vision. Rooted in Vatican II’s call to read the “signs of the times,” this historically conscious theological framework not only propelled Guatemala’s burgeoning progressive Catholic Church to redirect its pastoral practices toward the poor and the marginalized, especially Guatemala’s indigenous majority through an indigenized Catholicism. That new approach also sought to reshape the nation’s history by redrawing its socioeconomic, epistemological, and cultural landscape, in part through the formation of socially engaged lay leaders (catechists). Scholarship on the liberationist church has largely focused on how, as Guatemala’s Cold War civil war (1960-1996) sunk to its nadir in the late 1970s, state repression targeted the church as “subversive.” This dissertation, by contrast, seeks to step back from this prevailing attention on later repression to reconstruct the social and cultural liberative imagination prior to this religious revolution and state counterrevolution. In so doing, it cautions against historical interpretations that have ineluctably connected liberationist praxis in the decade after Vatican II to the—often catechist-led—armed or covert revolutionary activity of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, intensified by the defeat of the Guatemalan Left, the post-Peace Accords (December 1996) entrenchment of neoliberalism has brought hard times for critical historical consciousness. Indeed, as this study’s concluding chapter outlines, how to read the signs of the current historically fragmented times and craft a narrative for liberation amid today’s deep structural injustice remains a formidable obstacle. Perhaps the most daunting hurdle in this endeavor is to raise awareness of the need itself, particularly given that Guatemala’s historical record remains confronted by the perils inherent in harnessing faith and history in order to shape contemporary circumstances.Item Heightened perception: Donald Judd, John Chamberlain, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell, 1960-1975(2009-05) Kohn, Adrian Michael; Shiff, RichardThis dissertation explains how and why some American artists investigated visual phenomena and heightened perception during the 1960s and 1970s. As an analytical account grounded in the perceptual experience of artworks and in archival research of the claims artists made for their creations, this study is centered around the themes of re-sensitizing one’s body and perceptual faculties, the process of empirical discovery, and the ultimate inability of language to satisfactorily describe sensory phenomena. In Chapter 1, I establish a brief intellectual history of research concerning the sensory faculties from fields in the humanities, including psychology, philosophy, and art history. In Chapter 2, I analyze Judd’s art-critical concept of optical phenomena and consider the art about which he wrote, including his own, on the basis of this tentative classification. In Chapter 3, I evaluate John Chamberlain’s lacquer paintings in terms of the visual phenomena generated by his innovative paint mixtures and application techniques, then consider his provisional separation of intuition and intellect. In Chapter 4, I examine Robert Irwin’s efforts to refine his visual attentiveness and, in the course of doing so, I also test the accompanying artworks he made that demand such unusually acute observation. In Chapter 5, I argue that distinguishing physical, pictorial, and reflected visual phenomena in Larry Bell’s pieces proves to be an exceptional challenge, a problem compounded by the inefficacy of trying to communicate visual discoveries using language. In the Conclusion, I demonstrate that by restoring the role of heightened perception and sensory discovery to the history of art of the 1960s and 1970s, this dissertation helps to preserve the complexity and variety of works made during that time.Item The rocket and the tarot : the Apollo moon landings and American culture at the dawn of the seventies(2010-08) Tribbe, Matthew David; Oshinsky, David M., 1944-; Lawrence, Mark A.; Hunt, Bruce J.; Pells, Richard H.; Meikle, Jeffrey L.Although the Apollo 11 moon landing was one of the most remarkable events of the twentieth century, it was also among the most abstruse—what did it mean, after all? With implications ranging from the everyday benefits of “spinoff” to the cosmic questions of existence, it seemed like it had to signify something important. But the United States was undergoing a profound cultural shift as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, a transformative moment when the rationalist, technological optimism of the high Space Age began losing traction to the more intuitive, relativistic, neo-romantic cultural aura of the 1970s. This turn left many Americans who reckoned that Apollo should be important—somehow, in some way—unable to adequately integrate the event into their worldviews, their American mythologies. This study examines how Americans attempted to make sense of Apollo in the 1960s and 1970s. This period saw a noticeable retreat from the faith in science and rationalism that had driven American thought and culture in the decades following World War II, and which formed the foundation of the successful space program. In its stead emerged a new understanding of “progress” that was divorced from its previous equation with technological advancement for its own sake and reconsidered in terms of its impact on sustainability and personal fulfillment. In this environment, Apollo—an endeavor that that ultimately seemed to offer no deeper meaning that itself—provided bold evidence that the crucial answers to life’s quandaries would not be discovered through technological journeys to the near planets; indeed, that the prolonged emphasis on these sorts of materialist endeavors had only obscured humanity’s quest for true meaning and its continued sustenance on what Apollo made abundantly clear was the only planet it would inhabit for a long time to come. This cultural turn spelled doom for a space program that for all its futuristic trappings was actually firmly rooted in the past, in a mindset that had flourished throughout the middle of the twentieth century but was now falling under wide suspicion.